The 10 Most Overrated Golf Experiences

Golf might be the most romanticized sport on earth.

Few other games come with their own mythology of misty dawn tee times, legendary courses and the idea that the next swing tip, the next new club or the next bucket-list trip will finally unlock the golfer you were always meant to be.

A dream is sold and golfers buy it enthusiastically, often at a steep price.

But, if we are honest with ourselves, a few of these dreams are better in theory than they are in reality.

Every golfer knows the feeling. You finally get to live the experience you’ve been anticipating for months and realize it isn’t quite what you imagined. Maybe it’s slower, harder or more expensive than expected. Maybe it’s perfectly fine but just not the transformative moment you were promised.

You smile for the photo anyway because admitting disappointment feels a little like admitting you don’t love the game enough.

This list is for everyone who has quietly had that thought.

It isn’t an argument that these experiences are inherently bad. Some are genuinely fun and a few can be great under the right circumstances. The point is that they’re overvalued.

The 10 experiences ranked here cover the full range of golf life. Each entry is ranked by how wide the gap is between expectation and reality, with cost as the tiebreaker.

At the end, I want to hear what golf experiences you believe are overrated. Comment below!

10. Getting the first tee time of the day

Often romanticized as the perfect time to play golf, getting the first tee time of the day is lauded for its relative peace and lack of any golfers ahead of you. It’s possible to play a full round in three hours if you want to do so. And you have the rest of the day to do whatever else you want.

However, there are a few key drawbacks that don’t get included in this rosy picture:

• You regularly encounter the grounds crew (and/or sprinklers) as they finish their work.
• You have to wake up at an ungodly hour to get to the course (where the pro shop may not be open yet).
• Your warmup will either not happen or be cut short (and your body may still be stiff since you just woke up).
• The ground can be soaking wet from the dew which greatly affects putting and shots from the rough.
• Frost delays are also a concern in many parts of the world.

The king of all tee times is mid-morning. You are not dealing with any of the above issues but you can also just wake up and go the course for the full experience.

Being first off? It’s fun to talk about but it’s very overrated.

9. Playing in a charity scramble outing

Well, you’ve heard me rant about this one before.

I’ll preface this by saying that raising money for charity through golf is awesome. Presumably, you are playing with people you know and are having fun.

However, the “golf tournament” itself is wildly overrated.

Everyone and their mom is cheating in these things. You are honestly just playing for the sport of it because you know a foursome of old dudes wearing cargo shorts will show up with a 47 on their scorecard.

Secondly, the rounds take an eternity. There are usually non-golfers or novice golfers involved. There are special promos (hey, shoot your golf ball out of a cannon and donate to our cause so your group gets an ace on this hole). There is the lengthy pre-game speech from the club’s head pro. There is the post-game raffle.

Thirdly, the scramble format, while inclusive, tends to be outrageously tedious. It’s hard to get into any rhythm. If you are the best player in your group, you have to watch people before you shank approach shots into the weeds and then awkwardly praise their efforts.

Charity scrambles are designed for people who are decidedly not avid golfers. Which is OK!

But if you are a capital ‘G’ Golfer, you would rather be playing a normal round of golf.

8. Buying a full matching set from one brand

The appeal is easy to understand.

A bag full of clubs from one company looks cohesive and intentional. Hey, I’m just like a pro who is signed with an OEM! Brands market their lineups as families designed to work together and there’s a comfort in brand loyalty once you’ve had a good experience with one manufacturer’s driver or irons. It can feel like the “complete” way to build a set.

The problem—which is made clear through our testing—is that different clubs do very different jobs and brands never excel equally at all of them.

One company might make an outstanding driver for your swing while its wedges don’t suit your bounce and grind needs. Another might have irons that fit your eye and ball flight perfectly while its putters feel wrong.

Putters in particular are so personal in terms of look, feel, weight and alignment that the odds of your ideal one coming from the same company as your ideal driver are pretty slim.

By committing to one brand, you’re limiting yourself to one company’s options in every category rather than picking the best fit in each.

It also puts the emphasis on the wrong thing. What makes a set “work together” isn’t the logo. What matters is the distance gapping between clubs, consistent shaft profiles through the irons, wedge lofts that fill the right yardages, etc. You can achieve all of that with a mixed bag and a good fitter will usually get you there faster when they aren’t locked into one catalog.

Tour players who aren’t bound to a full-bag equipment deal mix brands freely for exactly this reason.

The fair caveat is that consistency within a category does matter since a matched iron set keeps feel and gapping predictable. And for beginners, a one-brand box set can be great value. The overrated part is extending that logic to the whole bag.

7. Filming your own round like a YouTuber

I think we’re in a period where a lot of people want to be influencers.

There is almost a seductive quality of getting a camera, tripod and some editing software to film yourself playing golf so you can create content. The barrier to entry is seemingly non-existent and the potential payoff is high.

But like looking at a mountain from a distance and thinking it couldn’t take all that long to reach the top, the depth perception on creating YouTube golf content is heavily distorted.

Let’s start with the accounts that have made it big in this space like Grant Horvat, Bryson DeChambeau and Good Good (too soon?). These are companies with production teams. They make it look easy because they have the manpower to do it. And then they reinvest their profits back into the product to make it even better.

The reality of filming your own content? A one-man-band situation where you spend the day setting up shots, restarting the camera and potentially slowing down your group (or as we saw with U.S. Open qualifying, possibly disrupting competitors).

The footage mostly shows you walking to your ball and hitting average shots. The editing is arduous. And even in the absolute best-case scenario, you are left with the uphill battle of the century to crack into a very saturated market.

Ultimately, the work is grueling, the payoff is extremely unlikely and you have to really love making content to enjoy it.

6. Having a caddie or forecaddie at a resort

I wrote about this in our newsletter recently but getting a caddie can be such a crapshoot. Great ones improve the experience, poor ones can sour it.

Where this turns substantially more overrated is when we’re talking about resort golf specifically.

At many resorts, it’s a mandatory caddie fee plus a hefty expected tip. And, truthfully, the reads and yardages don’t help much if you can’t hit the shot anyway.

A great local caddie can make a round; a rushed one juggling multiple players as he angles for the best tip rarely does.

It sounds awesome to have someone carry your clubs and give advice but you are also being forced to be with a person who may or may not be a personality match with your group. And their technical skills may not be great, either.

In the past few years, I’ve had a few different resort caddies:

• The guy who got legitimately offended when I overestimated my 5-iron carry yardage.
• The guy who didn’t know his own course that well, offering clearly wrong advice on where to aim.
• The guy who wouldn’t stop talking, even when I was over the ball.

There is an art form to being a great caddie and it’s a coin toss whether you will find an additive caddie when you play resort golf. And, yes, I’ve had bad experiences at places like Bandon. No resort is immune.

Sometimes you would just rather skip the caddie and enjoy the day without them.

5. Attending the Ryder Cup

Perhaps a controversial pick here but I’ll stand by this one.

Look, the opening tee at a Ryder Cup is electric. The passion, the pageantry, the energy—it’s second to none within the golf world.

And there is a certain “football game mentality” where the Ryder Cup shines.

But if you take away that opening tee environment (which requires getting to the course in the wee hours of the morning), the Ryder Cup fan experience goes downhill in a hurry.

On Friday and Saturday, there are only four groups on the course at any given time. Forget trying to follow any of those groups because you are battling about 50,000 other fans who have the same idea. Forget trying to put a chair on a key hole late in the round because there’s no guarantee each match will get to that point. Even if each group comes through, it’s one hour of watching golf and the rest is viewed on a screen.

Actually watching golf at a Ryder Cup is a huge chore.

And then Sunday’s 12 singles matches are so action-packed that, regardless of where you are, it’s nearly impossible to follow everything without a TV.

Attending a Ryder Cup is conceding that you are there to be a part of the scene and not much else. It’s like golf’s version of being in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, only fans don’t need to wear a diaper (maybe some of the imbeciles throwing tantrums at Bethpage should have had one anyway).

Add in the fact that the Ryder Cup has the most expensive face-value tickets in golf (over $700 last year) and this experience is just not worth the pain. Maybe you do it once to check it off the bucket list but that’s as far as it goes.

4. Putting on lightning-fast greens

Golfers love to say that they putt better on fast greens or that they have more fun on fast greens.

The preference for fast greens is clearly there given how many courses go to great lengths to get their greens rolling at a 13 or beyond on the Stimpmeter. In many ways, green speeds are a way for clubs to puff out their chests and show superiority.

However, there is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to green speeds.

When you are “laying up” on a 10-footer because the green is faster than the clubhouse parking lot, that’s not a lot of fun.

Hitting a putt with a reasonable amount of pace and watching it roll off the green into a bunker? Not a lot of fun.

And, even more importantly, I would argue that it becomes less about testing skill at that point.

Green speeds can reach a certain stage where it doesn’t even feel like you are playing golf anymore. Great shots are not being rewarded and it seems like you are being punished for every shot.

I’m a big believer that greens should have more slope and less pace. The arms race to max out on green speeds is highly overrated and not good for the game.

3. Playing 36 holes on any given day of a golf trip

I will get some heavy pushback for this one but I’m standing by it.

The point of a golf trip is to enjoy it. I think that involves managing energy levels to where you are ready to play each day.

The top mistake I see when people go on golf trips is that they overload the schedule. They go with four rounds in three days or something along those lines. Hey, let’s play Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes in one day! We have to play all of these notable courses and there aren’t enough days to do it so we’ll cram them all in!

The better option, in my opinion, is to accept you won’t get to every big course. Instead, pair some of the days with a short course, putting course or another smaller golf activity that is different from the regulation course you just played. Or, better yet, enjoy an easy non-golf activity to keep everyone fresh.

You should save the most important courses for standalone tee times, preferably in the morning where you know you will have energy.

Remember, you are traveling (hard on the body) and probably not eating/drinking super healthy. The last thing you want to do is go too hard early in your trip.

The caveat here is if everyone involved routinely plays 36 holes per day, then I could understand scheduling the rounds that way. But the data is pretty clear that golfers rarely play back-to-back rounds so this would not apply to many groups.

2. The “Going In Blind To Buy A New Set” Club Fitting

My uncle works in high-school fundraising and has a saying he uses when working with schools: “We’ll throw you a life raft but you have to be an active participant in your own rescue.”

The saying applies perfectly to club fitting, an often misunderstood element of a golfer’s journey in our game.

There is an expectation that golfers can show up to a club fitting, sing “Jesus, take the wheel!” and go home with a new set of clubs that fit exactly how they want. It sounds great, right? I need to be fitted and want new clubs so let’s knock it out. Many golfers operate that way.

Sweet summer child, it’s a little more complex than that.

There is no one way to fit a golfer and there is no one certification to become a fitter. Some fitters are very knowledgeable and have your best interest at heart; others may be more motivated by upselling you an $800 shaft you absolutely don’t need.

And for one reason or another, who you are in a fitting may not be who you are on the course (where the game is played, you know). Your tendencies and patterns have to be understood by yourself and communicated (that fat 8-iron you regularly hit may not be showing up on artificial turf).

You also have to leave all preconceived notions at the door. If you are gung-ho on Titleist wedges but the fitting shows you are markedly better off with Kirkland wedges, you have to be open to accepting that.

The biggest thing? You have to find a trusted fitter (often through word of mouth) and then go in with a realistic plan about what you want to get out of it. Remember the Billy Beane-David Justice scene in Moneyball? “Let’s both be honest about what we want out of this …”

Going into a club fitting and letting the fitter take total control is like going to a therapist and saying “fix me” with the expectation your anxiety will be erased in 50 minutes. In fitting terms, you show up hoping to be told what you need and you leave having bought what felt best for an hour.

It doesn’t work that way. You have to be a participant in your own rescue.

1. Having a one-off lesson from a famous instructor

Ah, we end with some of golf’s most alluring fool’s gold.

There are few things in our game as naive and egotistical as the golfer who believes he can be immediately cured by the Midas touch of a name-brand instructor. You know the coaches. These are the guys and gals who work with tour pros. They have shows or infomercials on Golf Channel. They are sponsored by training aids.

This concept of getting the perfect advice from a known commodity is tempting but highly flawed.

For one, you are probably never going to see them again and one-off lessons are generally a bad idea. Few, if any, golfers can improve over the long term with one tip. True progress comes from repetition and continual adjustments.

Secondly, you are paying an arm and a leg for this. The thing is that the instruction is probably comparable to what you’d get from a significantly cheaper instructor in your area. There are levels to instruction, of course, but there are also thousands of terrific instructors out there—some just have more of a platform than others.

Thirdly, what a golfer needs from a lesson and what a golfer wants to feel after a lesson are two different things. A 10-handicap who gets a lesson from Butch Harmon may need to spend an hour hitting three-quarter wedge shots to learn how to control the clubface. But you spent hundreds of dollars to get there and take the lesson so that’s an underwhelming feeling for the golfer.

The opposite effect—an instructor trying to fit three months of coaching into a short time frame—is much worse.

Another possibility? The famous instructor provides advice that sticks with the golfer for ages. However, the golfer’s body, equipment and other factors may have changed, so that coaching may no longer be relevant.

To me, that makes getting a one-off lesson from a famous instructor the most unnecessarily glorified and overrated golf experience of them all.

Do you agree with the list? Love it or hate it? Let me know below in the comments.

Top Photo Caption: A packed crowd at the Ryder Cup. (GETTY IMAGES/Scott Halleran)