A polar vortex hovers over the Northeast. Snow covers the Midwest. This weekend, temperatures are expected to dip below freezing from Texas to Georgia.

Some of you may still be playing golf, but for the rest of us, winter has come.

So how about a golf story? And not about Tiger or Rory. This one is about playing golf, a lot of golf in a little amount of time. It’s about one guy who is obsessed about playing as much golf as he can, despite a career that both creates a chaotic work schedule and demands an intense workout regime. (Plus he has four kids.)

Mark Wahlberg is an actor and a producer. His life is about hit movies, Academy Award nominations and popular television series. He also loves to play golf.

“I’m obsessed,” he said

He’s 45 years old and the acting job requires him to maintain as close as possible the physique he had when he was staring shirtless in Calvin Klein ads when he was 22. This is nearly impossible, of course. It also requires him to be on set shooting scenes sometimes 14, 15 hours a day. That doesn’t lend itself to tons of time for the gym, let alone a sport not known for intense physical exertion.

“This job means I can never stop working out,” Wahlberg told Yahoo Sports. “If it was up to me I’d be eating and drinking beer, but the job makes me stay in shape. At my age, though, it gets harder.”

So consider last summer when he was in Detroit shooting the next Transformers movie. He kept noticing the beautiful Michigan weather and had to figure out a way to play. There was only one solution.

“The situation I was in, I was training for [an upcoming role] that requires me to be in really good shape,” Wahlberg said. “So I would wake up at 3:30 in the morning and work out for an hour and a half. Then I’d eat, say prayers and do a few things.”

Then, still pre-sunrise, he and two buddies would drive to a local private golf club – most often Knollwood Country Club or Plum Hollow in the suburbs, or Detroit Golf Club in the city. There, they’d have it arranged that they’d go out at the absolute crack of dawn and sometimes before that if they could see anything.





Each guy would have his own cart with his own caddie driving it. They’d wear shorts and running shoes. Call it cardio-golf.

“I would tee off at 6 in the morning and run the golf course,” Wahlberg said, laughing a bit at the absurdity of the concept. “We’d hit a drive and then just sprint to the ball and then the [caddies] would come with the carts. We’d grab a club, hit again and then sprint again.

“We’d play all 18 in about an hour fifteen, maybe 1:20. Depended on the putting.”

Wahlberg would shower, change and head back to downtown Detroit where the movie was being filmed. He’d be on set by 8 and start filming.

“We’d shoot for 12 hours, go to bed and do it again the next day. We did it almost every day last summer, sometimes seven days a week. The key was I’d get my cardio in while playing golf. It was my second workout of the day.”

Golf courses have varying distances, especially between holes. These courses in Detroit are about a century old. They were laid out before carts existed and thus designed to be walked. Still, Wahlberg was essentially interval sprinting about four to five miles.

“The Detroit area of Michigan has some of the greatest golf courses in the country,” Wahlberg said. “It’s incredible. It’s one great course after the other. I absolutely love it there. I love it in Detroit.”

Wahlberg says he is about a 13 handicap, but the daybreak golf runs weren’t much for good scores. They were rushed and almost ridiculous, but at least he was playing golf. When you love the game, you’ll do anything to play it. This was the best way he knew to remain sane during a long grind away from his family.

“Sometimes we were lucky,” he explained. “We’d have a short day or a half-day and then we could play normal golf. We’d play in three hours, 3½ hours, usually at Franklin Hills or Oakland Hills.”

Wahlberg is an unlikely golf enthusiast. He didn’t play at all growing up in Dorchester, a working-class section of Boston. It wasn’t until a few years back, when he was a producer on the HBO Series “Entourage,” which is loosely based on his career, that he first swung a club.

“Johnny Drama [actor Kevin Dillon] and Ari Emmanuel [the current head of William Morris Endeavor and the inspiration for character Ari Gold] took me golfing at Riviera [in Los Angeles],” Wahlberg said. “They were like, ‘You have to come out with us.’ I was like, ‘I don’t play golf.’ Then they said, ‘Just drive the cart, have a beer, just hang out with us.’

Story continues