Welcome to TR Pen Pals, a recurring (?) feature in which I correspond with luminaries from the world of arts and letters.
Across a decade in digital media, Drew Millard’s filed dispatches on subjects as diverse as tattoo vending machines, right-wing hip-hop, and the nobility of doomed political campaigns. His work as an editor included full-time roles at Vice and The Outline during their respective boom years. His next trick? Rinsing golf of its country-club stuffiness to reveal the proletarian pastime beneath. His memoir-in-essays How Golf Can Save Your Life, out now from Abrams Books, offers a pragmatic look at the sport’s history and hangups, with thoughtful asides on the decaying internet, exurban real estate grabs, and the Four Loko panic of 2010.
A dyed-in-the-wool gamer, Drew returned to golf in his late twenties under advice from a therapist. The pace and solitude, he found, soothed anxiety propagated during his years as a scrambling blogger. Golf was a way to develop new relationships and deepen existing ones, a serious hobby undertaken on his own terms. In the book, Drew avoids rose-tinted sermonizing, grappling with the golf industry’s problematic elements and reconciling his progressive ideals with the sport’s chuddish aesthetics. For the layman, How Golf Can Save Your Life puts forth an unpretentious course of self-improvement, enjoining the reader to play through and enjoy the scenery.
Drew’s podcast, Nersey, employs a similarly itinerant tempo, surveying culture-industry wreckage from the vantage of three former Vice staffers. Last month he released a compilation of experimental golf-inspired tracks titled Golfcore, Volume One, with contributions from Steel Tipped Dove and DJ Burn One. In this installment of TR Pen Pals, Drew and I discuss his book’s genesis, Vice’s legacy, and golf’s political potential.
Pete: I don't think I've ever gotten the official lowdown on how you landed the book deal — although I of course remember your Letter of Recommendation in the Times Magazine. Did that help grease the wheels? Was a book project enticing given the state of online media?
Drew: It's funny — the book came about thanks to a stroke of very good luck and a stroke of even worse luck occurring basically sequentially, and I think that, together, they sort of illustrate why being an internet-writer person was both packed with the potential energy of the zeitgeist, as well as an incredibly risky way to spend one's mid-to-late twenties. The good luck part was that I was working as the features editor of a publication called The Outline in the spring of 2020 and that I played golf basically every chance I could, which meant that as the first wave of the pandemic hit, I was able to witness and document the sudden, unexpected surge in popularity that the sport experienced, especially among email job-style millennials who could access email and Slack from their phones, during those early days.
There was also this vibe where the economic uncertainty had led to our editorial budget being cut to zero and we as a staff felt a sense of impending doom, but since we had a website to make we all just took turns writing about whatever we felt like. This led me to writing a piece about golf becoming this social-distanced phenomenon. An agent named Tina Pohlman read it, liked it, and subsequently got in touch with me asking if I was interested in putting together a proposal for a book of essays about golf, but, like, a cool book of essays about golf. Tina just so happens to be an incredibly kind and smart person who is a wonderful conversationalist, so I told her I was down to keep talking and would think about the possibility very seriously.
Tina and I talked on a Tuesday. That Friday morning, my Outline colleagues and I were informed that we were being laid off, effective immediately. I then became incredibly interested in putting together a proposal for a book about golf and proceeded to use both my severance and the period I received unemployment compensation to subsidize my writing of the proposal. It was also extremely a thing where I was writing a proposal about how golf helped me get over depression brought on by burnout from online media as a way to, in conjunction with playing golf itself, stave off a new round of depression brought on by a lack of employment in online media.
Pete: As I get older, what's terrifying about publishing online is how there's a public record of the writer I was (or, more damningly, the writer I wanted to be) at age 24. I still get angry DMs about years-old articles I'd half-forgotten about; encountering bylines of mine from even eighteen months ago makes me wince. I imagine a book project is daunting in its length, but also because of the slow-moving publishing cycle. Did you feel pressure to create a more lasting document? Do you prefer that experience to the quick turnaround of web publishing?
Drew: I think for me, the larger issue was that this was my first book and I was basically terrified of doing a bad job with it — sort of because I wanted it to be good, but more than that I really really really didn't want it to be bad. That also made me afraid to sit down and work on it at times, because if a book does not exist it cannot be bad. Procrastination, though, also had the fun side-effect of putting me into such a panic whenever I did sit down to write, I couldn't think about anything other than writing.
Pete: I like how the opening chapters frame golf as this unlikely salve for a set of deeply modern neuroses. In the coming years, I expect we'll see more memoirs in the How Web Virality Can Ruin Your Life lane, but I'm glad yours and Slava P's came first — you've both experienced the incentives and pitfalls of the attention economy, living to tell cautionary tales. Do you have any regrets about your days in the blog mines? What relationship would you like to have with the internet, knowing what you know?
Drew: Back when I was someone who young people solicited advice from, I would always tell said young people to not worry about writing for blogs or whatever but instead to write for their school or local newspaper, and to take whichever beat nobody else wanted. This seemed like good advice in that it's what I wish I'd done — when I was coming up, it had always seemed like the inexperienced writers were tasked with writing opinion pieces, and those with more expertise would do actual reporting.
That's an inversion of how the local newspaper operates, obviously, so I figured that if kids focused on getting real reporting experience, it'd fast-track them for more prestigious writing gigs in Blog World, as well as set them up to be actual editors. I, meanwhile, was hired as an editor at 23 despite having minimal experience, and had to learn the actual rules of reporting and editing on the job. I was able to fake my way through it initially and learn through rote repetition, but I really had no idea what the fuck I was doing when I first started.
To answer your question more directly, though, I really wish I'd understood that there is a fundamental misalignment in the incentives at an online media company, and that that misalignment contributes to the difficulty that these companies often end up having. Namely: The writers and editors are there to do good work, and the bean-counters are there to make money. The writers and editors want to help the bean-counters out by getting them traffic, in part because they're pretty frequently told that getting traffic is the name of the game, but — and this is the part I never really got back then — traffic does not pay the bills. The bills are paid through sales people promising some conglomerate that the editorial people will make a website or video series that will sell a shitload of [insert high-margin consumer good here] through magic and some sort of imagined thematic alignment, as well as things like "activations" and "partnerships" and whatever.
None of those things have anything to do with traffic! What the bean-counters are really asking for is some sort of identifiable brand and audience, but they insist on using traffic as a stand-in statistic for those things. Like, imagine if a golf course gauged the number of rounds people played there by looking at the number of golf balls it had sold. Not exactly the same thing but sort of enough, I guess.
My biggest regret, though, is that I could have posted more.
Pete: It feels rather poignant that your book coincided with Vice's implosion, and I know the collapse has been central to both your and Emilie's podcast projects. From the outside looking in, I'm most fascinated by the pivot-to-nothing trajectory — somewhere along the line, Vice decided name-recognition and licensing were their entire business, to the point that they stopped producing the content that gave them cachet in the first place. You've been contending with this at length, but as an architect of Vice's blockbuster era...what did Vice mean? What's your relationship with its legacy?
Drew: I can't call myself an architect of that era. I might have been, like, an unlicensed builder they brought in to construct an elaborate roof deck whose entire purpose was to help justify a higher listing price on Zillow.
As for a more serious answer, I think this is a great question, because it gets at the fact that you've got to separate the people who worked at Vice — the vast majority of whom were hardworking and genuinely fun individuals who all trauma-bonded together due to mismanagement, deprivation, and abuses ranging from slight to literally criminal — from the Vice brand, which I don't even know how to describe anymore.
Oh, also: Vice means two things. One, "Vertically Integrated Criminal Enterprise." (Not actually, but funny to think about.) Two, that Shane Smith made so much money that he bought Vinnie's mansion from Entourage. (It was also Marlon Brando's old mansion, but booooooooring.)
Pete: I enjoyed your chapter about Robert Hunter, and how his example rejects golf's more right-wing connotations. You mention that you tracked down a copy of Hunter's unpublished autobiography at the Indiana Historical Society. What's the deal with that book? Any thoughts as to why it wasn't published?
Drew: Sadly, it was never published because he never finished it, and if the digital copy I received is as far as he got, it's not reallllllly in a place where it could be cleaned up and sent out the door. But it's a fascinating read for what it is: He knew everybody and did wild stuff, and has a very funny perspective on it all because he went from being this proto-Go-On-Chapo style guy to a reactionary, so he's both proud of it all (it's his life!) yet sheepish (it was a different time!).
I think one thing that struck me about looking into his life, though, is that to radicals of Hunter's time, the things that today are basic societal standards — stuff like universal education for children, an eight-ish hour workday, women's suffrage etc — were like fringe-left positions. So it's not a super far stretch for a guy who attended the Communist International in the early 1900s to maintain his positions but to drift rightward on the political compass as society went through a rapid period of social and economic change.
Pete: You write about golf's appeal as a fulfilling solitary endeavor, as well as a way to make friends through a shared pursuit. You also perform a thorough survey of golf's more unsavory elements, from khakis to land-use. Based on your historical overview, my interpretation is that golf's most exclusionary aspects are uniquely American, and inconsistent with the game's origins.
This could just reflect my own acquaintances, but based on golfers I know, it sounds like a very male space — the joke that guys play golf because they can't ask their friends to go on a walk. In your recent experience, how is golf doing in terms of gender equity? Any better or worse than other sports?
Drew: One thing I will say about this is that the LPGA changed its rules to allow trans women to compete in events back in 2010. Unsurprisingly, though, people freak out whenever a trans woman actually participates in an LPGA event, because as an institution, golf loves trying to cover its ass by being like "hey look we did a thing" and then do absolutely nothing when it's time to show it has any mettle whatsoever.
But that's on the professional level. On the playing level, golf genuinely is more diverse than ever, and that's from about every angle you can think of. I hate to say it, but TopGolf has really helped golf get a lot more mainstream acceptance than I thought would ever be possible. However, I have not been to TopGolf so I cannot comment on whether it's tight or not at this time.
Pete: Your book helped me better understand the appeal of joining a country club — as in, it's the cheapest way to play a lot of golf. That said — and I'm going to sound like a rube here — I'm still curious about the actual playing experience. Does playing the same course cultivate bad habits? Does it feel like playing the same video game over and over again?
Drew: Nah, not really, because a well-designed golf course never plays quite the same way twice. Courses are usually pretty good about moving the tees around so you've always got a different angle into the fairway, and weather conditions always affect how your shots fly or roll out. I would, however, compare it to playing the same video game over and over again, but only if we are talking about a teenager in the mid-to-late-2000s who is severely addicted to World of Warcraft.