I was fifteen years old. I started casually playing golf a few years back and was playing decent enough to get on my high school team. Which, back then, didn’t mean much. Our high school hardly had any golfers, and if you have a set of old hand-me-down clubs and could hit a ball decent and score in the low to mid-forties for a 9-hole round, you are on the team. The course I learned was right next to the airport, and it was a cheap, 9-hole  municipal course with lots of dirt patches and hackers yelling “fore” since the fairways were designed to cram all of them into a pretty small piece of land. It was a fun stomping ground for me and my friends.

My dad and I started golf around the same time. He encouraged it. He bought me a set of clubs and a set for himself, and we learned by hitting plastic balls in our backyard and eventually made it out to the course. I was always better than him. But it was never a competition; we were just happy to be out there and playing together.

I think that, as I started playing on the high school team, I started to develop some additional skills and shots that I didn’t have before. I was becoming a legit player, and my scores began showing it. I was creating some memorable shots around the green, and my short game started to blossom. I was playing more confidently to the point where I felt I passed my dad’s level by leaps and bounds.

Then, something very tragic happened. I will never forget this one Saturday when we were playing together. We were on the eighth hole. It was a pretty interesting hole. It was about 360 yards, and a big lake on the right side of the fairway crept into the fairway around 100 yards from the green. So, if you hit it in the middle of the fairway pretty decent, you have about a 125-yard shot over the water for your second shot. For some reason, I was struggling with my wedge shots that day. From hole number one all the way to hole number eight, even simple wedge shots were hit fat or pulled or bladed. No matter what I did, I just couldn’t hit it pure. I had a few previous shots that upset me, and after yelling out some profanities and smashing the wedge into the ground…I thought I was over it. So fricking frustrating. On my second shot of the eight-hole is when the tragedy struck. I chunked the ball into the lake right in front of me. That wasn’t the tragedy. How I reacted and what I did forever will define my worst moment in golf.

Maybe it was a built-up anger brewing in my soul from the previous mistakes; whatever it was, I blew up. I turned bright red, and veins popped out of my neck. I grabbed the bag; my right hand gripped the top of the bag, and my left gripped the bottom. I held the bag horizontally and started running forward. With all my strength and might, I threw it as far as I could towards the lake. I wish I could have seen myself at the time.

I remember the bag flowing in the air; some clubs stayed in, some were halfway out, and the rest flew out of the bag, creating their own flight path. I didn’t care where it landed and what happened to the clubs or the bag. I just walked past the bags and the scattered clubs on the ground. I walked past hole nine and directly to the clubhouse restaurant. I sat down on the table, fuming.

My dad arrived about 10 minutes later. You can see the disappointment in his eyes. He held his bag in one hand and mine in the other. He had picked them all up and carried them in. He didn’t say a word to me. We just walked silently to the car. I followed him from behind. Halfway home, he finally broke the silence. “Don’t do that again.” I nodded.

And I never did it again.