At some point in this process, I decided that if I were going to write a whole book about the sport and spend a year traveling with the P.G.A. Tour, I should probably learn to play. I found a good, inexpensive public course near my house, bought some clubs, took lessons and worked up the courage to attempt an actual round.

Even with the benefit of age, golf and I had not become soul mates. I grew obsessed with the game, but it was a toxic relationship. It didn’t take long to learn that golf required a serenity that was not my natural state and that to excel, I’d have to contain the nervous energy that had been my dubious gift since birth. A wise onlooker, watching me swing too hard or hearing me curse on the driving range and suffering a lecture from a pious old man — this happened twice — might conclude that the sport and I were fundamentally incompatible.

Nevertheless, I had my moments. There’s a kind of poetry to golf that becomes apparent when you divorce it from its larger American cultural niche, and there were days when I could feel my soul align with this quieter aspect. On the rare mornings when I maintained a Zenlike mind-set for an entire round, I’d leave the course with a sense of fulfillment and dignity, as opposed to the shame and humiliation that accompanied so many of my rounds. And I improved, too — I broke 100, then I broke 90, then I shot 85, and perhaps a round in the 70s wasn’t far off.

But even as I fell deeper under golf’s sway, it became harder to ignore the ugly political side of the game. A few events happened in tandem. First, I finished my book, and it caused a small stir among the conservative golf community. It was labeled “controversial,” though it would have been merely “interesting” by the standards of a normal sport. Among golf’s literati, though, the mere fact that it wasn’t a paean stuffed with quasi-spiritual hokum — that I was actually critical of certain players — meant it was treated (for a day or two, anyway) like the second coming of Martin Luther’s “95 Theses.”

The miniature uproar was good for sales, but the burnout I felt after a year of constant travel, coupled with the months spent giving interviews in defense of my “radical” approach, led me to conclude that I never wanted to cover golf again. This crisis of faith coincided with the dual rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, which pushed me further to the political left and cast the sport’s rigid conservatism in a new and unflattering light. The red flags I had been able to ignore — the endless evidence that American professional golfers are, with few exceptions, the entitled products of a selfish, insular and elitist culture of wealth — now struck me as offensive and enraging. I tried, but I could not reconcile my awakening with the values inherent in the professional game.

Politically and personally, the chasm widened. I deluded myself that I could separate the sport from its millionaires and that on a personal level I could achieve mastery over my mercurial disposition. In reality, it was only a matter of time before some new flame swept me off my feet.