It finally happened.
After more than 20 years, I somehow made it back to a driving range for the second time in my life.
The first time I was 18 or 19. I went once, hit a few balls and then apparently decided that 25 years was a perfectly reasonable break before trying golf again.
This time I was not alone. Chandni, 40, had never held a golf club in her life. I am 43 and had technically held one before, although one visit to a driving range in the late 1990s probably does not qualify me as the experienced golfer in the relationship.
Still, I had prepared.
For a few days before our visit, I watched YouTube videos about grip, stance and the golf swing. I even practised the movement in our living room. Without a ball. And, to make it even safer, without a golf club.
So basically I was standing in the living room swinging my arms around and convincing myself this counted as golf training.
I also hoped that my years of playing tennis might somehow help.
We visited the golf course in Kirchheim-Wendlingen, where we were incredibly lucky to have my friend Mirko with us. He has been a member of the club for more than 30 years and took a lot of time to show us around.
We jumped into a golf cart and explored the course, saw several holes, the newly created large lake and heard stories about the history of the club, club life and how Mirko himself first got into golf.
It was a brilliant introduction because we did not just arrive at a driving range and start hitting balls. We actually got a feeling for the whole place.
I should probably also mention my trousers. I had ordered orange golf trousers online. They looked quite tasteful on the website. In real life they were significantly more orange.
Very significantly.
Basically, if you look at the pictures from our visit and wonder why there appears to be a traffic cone holding a golf club, that is me.
I promise they did not look that bright online.
After the tour it was finally time for the important part.
We grabbed a few baskets of balls and headed onto the driving range.
Chandni was holding a club for the first time ever. I was starting my glorious second golf session in approximately 25 years.
And somehow, something completely unexpected happened. I hit the ball. First attempt. Then I hit it again. Second attempt.
Properly.
And it actually flew. Quite far. I had mentally prepared myself to miss the ball completely, spin around in a circle and possibly become the first person politely asked to leave the driving range after three minutes.
Instead, it felt surprisingly natural.
Mirko gave us a lot of encouragement and was genuinely impressed with how we started, which obviously made us feel even better.
There were bad shots too, of course. Some balls had very different ideas about where they wanted to travel.
But the good shots felt brilliant.
That sound when you make proper contact with a golf ball is strangely addictive. You hit one good one and immediately want to do it again.
Maybe the tennis background helped. Maybe YouTube helped. Maybe my invisible golf club training in the living room was secretly revolutionary. Or maybe the orange trousers simply gave me special powers.
We finished by practising our putting, which was just as much fun in a completely different way. And by the end of the visit, the biggest surprise was not that we had actually managed to hit golf balls.
It was how comfortable we both felt at the club.
As complete beginners, golf can look slightly intimidating from the outside. You wonder whether everybody will immediately notice that you have absolutely no idea what you are doing.
Instead, we felt welcome from the beginning. We really enjoyed discovering the course, learning a little about the club and spending our first proper afternoon with golf. And we definitely want more.
Our next step will be a proper lesson with a professional coach, because even I understand that watching
YouTube videos and swinging an imaginary golf club in the living room probably has its limits.
But this first experience has made us even more excited about starting our golf journey.
We are complete beginners.
We will definitely hit terrible shots.
We will probably lose plenty of balls.
There will almost certainly be moments where we question why anybody decided golf was a sensible hobby.
But we also now understand why people fall in love with it.
And we would genuinely love Kirchheim-Wendlingen to be part of that journey. After all, it is where Chandni hit her first golf balls.
It is where I returned to golf after more than two decades.
And it is where the world first discovered that my orange trousers were much, much brighter than advertised.
