Who's in Your Perfect Foresome?

Every sport has its version of the question. Basketball fans argue the Mount Rushmore of all time greats until someone flips a table. Football fans debate the four faces of the sport across generations, across eras, across conferences, across whatever argument they need to start at a bar on a Sunday. Baseball fans have been doing this since 1927. The premise is always the same: if you could build the ultimate group, the four names that represent the absolute ceiling of the conversation, who are they?

Golf has a better version of the question. Because in golf, the four names do not just represent something. They actually have to play together. They have to stand on the same first tee, shake the same hands, agree on the same stakes, and spend the next four and a half hours in each other's company. The argument is not theoretical. It has consequences. It has a scorecard.

So. Who's in your perfect Foresome?

Not who's the best. Not who's the most decorated. Who do you want on that tee sheet with you, or better yet, who do you want to watch go at it for eighteen holes while you sit in a cart with a cold drink and a front row seat to the greatest group ever assembled?

The question sounds simple. It is not simple. It never is.

The Case for Watching

Before building anything, consider what it means to be a witness.

There is a version of this where you are playing. You are the fourth. You fill out the group. You get to say for the rest of your life that you walked eighteen holes alongside the three people you chose, that you heard them talk, that you watched them compete, that you saw what they are actually like when a putt does not drop on the fourteenth green and there is money on the line and nobody is performing for a camera.

That version is great. That version is the dream.

Then there is the other version, the one where you are not in the group at all. You are standing behind the ropes. You are watching four people who were built for competition find out what happens when you take them off their court, off their field, off their stage, and put them on a golf course where the only thing that matters is a small white ball and whether or not they have the patience to let it go where they told it to go. You get to watch the trash talk. You get to watch the ego. You get to watch someone who was the best in the world at what they did for twenty years discover, on the seventh hole, that golf does not particularly care.

That version might be better.

The All Athlete Foresome

Start here because this is where the argument gets violent fastest.

Michael Jordan is the obvious pick and also the correct one. Not because of what he accomplished in basketball, though what he accomplished in basketball is not something that needs a sentence explaining it. Jordan belongs in this group because of what golf did to him. Golf found the one arena where Michael Jordan could not will himself to greatness. He played to a plus handicap at his best. He was obsessive about the game in the specific way that only people who are genuinely good at something and still cannot make it do what they want can be obsessive. He was, by all accounts, a man who talked as much noise on a golf course as he ever did on a basketball court and backed up approximately sixty percent of it. The other forty percent is what made watching him worth the price of admission.

Tiger Woods is in the group because Tiger Woods is always in the group. The conversation about whether Tiger belongs in a perfect Foresome is not a conversation. It is a statement of fact followed by an argument about the other three spots. Tiger on a golf course, in a competitive setting, with something on the line, is the most purely watchable athlete the sport has ever produced. Put him in a casual round with three other legends and watch what happens. There is no such thing as a casual round for Tiger. He will be keeping score. He will be keeping your score. He will remember every shot you hit on every hole and tell you about it on the eighteenth green with a smile that does not quite reach his eyes.

Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian in human history, a man who trained his entire life to move through water with a precision and an efficiency that borders on the inhuman. Golf asks something entirely different of him. Golf asks him to be still. Golf asks him to slow down, to wait, to let the club do the work, to resist the instinct to apply more force when more force is exactly the wrong answer. Phelps in a swimming pool is a machine. Phelps on a fairway is a man learning a completely different relationship with his own body, and that negotiation, playing out over eighteen holes in front of Jordan and Ali and Tiger, would be one of the more honest athletic stories you have ever witnessed.

Muhammad Ali would spend the entire round narrating his own performance in verse and you would never want it to stop. He would tell you on the first tee that he was going to birdie every hole. He would bogey the second and explain, with complete conviction, why that bogey was actually part of the plan. He would make a twenty foot putt on the ninth and look at everyone in the group like he had predicted it in a press conference three days ago. Golf humbles every person who has ever played it. Watching it try to humble Muhammad Ali would be the greatest sporting event in human history.

The All Women Foresome

This group does not need a qualifier. It does not need to be the best women's Foresome. It is simply one of the best Foresomes on this entire list, full stop, and anyone who wants to argue about that is welcome to take it up with Serena Williams directly.

Serena Williams plays golf with the intensity of someone who does not accept the premise that she is supposed to be a beginner at anything. Watch her on a course. Watch her decide, somewhere around the fourth hole, that she is going to figure this out by the eighteenth. Watch what happens. The group needs someone who is going to refuse to lose with a swing that has no business being as good as it is and somehow make it interesting anyway. That person is Serena. It is always Serena.

Sue Bird spent twenty years as the most composed, most intelligent, most difficult to rattle player in the history of women's basketball. Point guards read the floor the way great golfers read a course: always two shots ahead, always aware of where everything is, always making the decision that gives the next decision the best possible chance of working. Bird on a golf course is a woman who has spent her entire athletic life mastering the space between instinct and execution. Golf lives in that space. She would be dangerous from the first hole and the rest of the group would not fully realize how dangerous until the back nine.

Mia Hamm won two World Cups and two Olympic gold medals and did it as the kind of player whose greatness was always slightly bigger than her ego, which in the world of elite athletics is one of the rarest combinations you will ever encounter. Hamm on a golf course brings that same quality: competitive without being consumed by it, precise without being rigid, capable of elevating the group around her simply by being the kind of player she is. She would be the one the group rallied around on a bad hole without anyone deciding to make that happen. It would just happen because that is what Mia Hamm does.

Danica Patrick drove cars at two hundred miles per hour and made it look like something a person could manage with the right amount of focus and nerve. Golf is slower than that in every way that can be measured and faster than that in every way that cannot. The decision window on a golf shot is not two hundred miles per hour but the requirement for total commitment to a choice in a fraction of a second is identical, and Danica Patrick has been making those commitments her entire career. She would have no patience for indecision and no tolerance for anyone who stood over the ball too long and thought about it too hard. She would be right about both things.

The All Comedian Foresome

This one is not about golf. This one is about survival.

Katt Williams is in this group. This has been established. Katt understands the game. Katt respects the game. Katt will also spend a meaningful portion of the round delivering a commentary on everyone else's swing that is so accurate and so funny that people will lose concentration and hit bad shots because of him and then have to listen to him explain why those shots were bad. He is the most dangerous playing partner in this category.

Richard Pryor is the second pick because Richard Pryor on a golf course would be one of the most honest human beings you have ever watched interact with an inanimate object. Pryor did not perform. He reported. He stood in front of audiences his entire career and told them the truth about himself with a precision and a vulnerability that made people laugh and hurt at the same time. Put that man on a golf course, hand him a seven iron, and watch him discover that the game has its own truth to tell him. Every missed shot would be a story. Every bad hole would be a bit. By the back nine he would have written forty five minutes of material without trying and all of it would be about the back nine.

Mitch Hedberg never got the chance to tell us how he felt about golf, which is one of the genuine losses of his absence from the world. What is known is that Hedberg saw the universe sideways, that the things everyone else walked past without noticing were the things that stopped him completely, that he could find the one angle on a completely ordinary situation that made it suddenly and permanently funny. Golf is full of ordinary situations that are completely absurd if you look at them from the right angle. Hedberg would have looked at all of them from the right angle. He would have said something on the third tee that the group would still be laughing about on the eighteenth green, not because he was trying to keep the bit alive but because the observation would have been so precisely true that the laughter kept finding it on its own.

George Carlin is the fourth because nobody spent a career more ruthlessly examining the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they actually are, and golf is one of the widest gaps of any activity in human civilization. On a golf course he would be a man surrounded by material on every hole. The etiquette. The clothing. The language golfers use to describe what is happening to them. The way grown adults talk to a ball as though it has the capacity to comply. He would not be playing golf. He would be documenting golf with the relentless curiosity of someone who cannot believe this is a thing people do voluntarily and loves them for doing it anyway.

The All Actor Foresome

This category requires a different kind of imagination because actors, more than any other group, understand how to play a character. The danger of a golf course is that the game eventually strips that away. You can be whoever you want to be on the first tee. By the fourteenth you are just yourself.

Bernie Mac is the first pick and Bernie Mac is the first pick because there was nobody in the history of American comedy and film who held a room the way Bernie Mac held a room. Not by being the loudest. By being the most certain. Bernie Mac walked into every situation already knowing how it was going to go, and the group always felt that, and the group always adjusted around it. Put him on a first tee and watch the dynamic of the entire round establish itself in the first three minutes. He would talk to the ball. He would talk to the hole. He would talk to the wind. He would be talking to someone on every shot and it would never be any of the three people standing next to him.

Samuel L. Jackson is a real golfer. This is not a celebrity who dabbles. Jackson plays to a legitimate handicap, has been photographed on courses all over the world, and has openly said that golf is the one thing in his life that gives him peace. Put him in a competitive group and watch what happens to the peace. Watch the man who has delivered some of the most intense performances in cinema history try to stay calm after a three putt on a hole he had in two. The language alone would be worth the green fee.

Jamie Foxx is the third pick because there is almost nobody in American entertainment who can do more things at a genuinely elite level than Jamie Foxx. He is an Oscar winning actor. He is a musician. He is a standup comedian. He is someone who walks into every room having already assessed it and decided exactly how he wants to leave it. On a golf course that skillset translates into the most adaptable playing partner in the group, the one who reads the energy of every hole, adjusts, and finds a way to make whatever is happening work in his favor. Foxx would be the one trash talking Bernie Mac, complimenting Samuel L. Jackson's swing in a way that was somehow also an insult, and draining a clutch putt on the sixteenth while the rest of the group was still processing what he said three holes ago.

Bill Murray closes the group because Bill Murray is legitimately an actor and legitimately one of the great forces of nature on a golf course and the idea of him alongside Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Foxx, and Bernie Mac is almost too good to be responsible for.

The All Musician Foresome

Justin Timberlake is a scratch golfer. He plays to a genuine single digit handicap and has for years. He belongs in this group not as a celebrity who dabbles but as someone who actually plays. Put him in the group and watch everyone else realize, somewhere around the fifth hole, that they brought the wrong guy to hustle.

Snoop Dogg is the second pick because he approaches golf the way he approaches everything, which is with an ease and a comfort that makes it look like he has been doing it his entire life even when he has not. He is an avid golfer and a man who would show up to the first tee with his own caddy, his own playlist, and a pre round ritual that is entirely legal in certain states and entirely responsible for the most relaxed back nine anyone in the group has ever played. His contribution to this round extends well beyond club selection. The group would be looser, slower in the best possible way, and significantly more appreciative of the trees lining the fourteenth fairway than they would have been otherwise. He is always taking the golf seriously. Everything else he takes at exactly the pace he chooses.

Alice Cooper might be the most serious golfer in the history of rock and roll, which is a sentence that sounds like a punchline and is actually just true. Cooper plays every day. He has played thousands of rounds. He has talked about golf in interviews with the same depth and passion that he brings to music, which means he would be the most knowledgeable person in this group, the one who knows the course, knows the wind, reads the greens correctly, and does all of this while being Alice Cooper. There is no version of this that is not extraordinary.

Prince is the fourth because nobody in the history of popular music was more unreadable in any room he ever walked into, and on a golf course that quality would be something to behold. Nobody would know what to make of him from the first tee. He would hit a shot and you would not be able to tell from his expression whether it was exactly what he intended or a complete surprise to him as well, and the answer was almost certainly both things simultaneously. He would say very little. What he said would land in a way that nobody in the group could fully explain afterward. He would finish the round and you would have no idea whether he had fun, whether he cared about the score, whether he would ever play again, and you would spend the drive home thinking about it.

The Fictional Foresome: Serious Cinema Edition

This is where the rules change entirely. The people in this group never existed. That does not mean the round is not worth playing.

James Bond. Not any one actor who played him. The character. The man who treats every situation in his life, including situations involving imminent global catastrophe, with the same quiet assurance of someone who has already accounted for every variable. Bond on a golf course is a man who has played every great course in the world, knows every rule, hits every shot cleanly, and is somehow simultaneously running an intelligence operation in the clubhouse. He would be impeccably dressed. He would win the back nine bet with the same expression he uses when he defuses a bomb with four seconds remaining. He would order something perfect at the nineteenth hole and leave before anyone thought to ask him about his handicap.

Don Corleone. He does not play golf because it is fun. He plays golf because important conversations happen on golf courses and he is always available for an important conversation. He would move slowly and deliberately. He would listen more than he spoke. He would make an offer on the seventh fairway in a voice so quiet you would have to lean in to hear it, and once you heard it you would spend the rest of the round wondering whether you had just agreed to something. His short game would be impeccable. Everything about Don Corleone is impeccable. He did not get where he got by leaving things to chance, and he did not get there by three putting.

Jack Sparrow. The most chaotic navigator in cinematic history on a golf course is a man who would somehow, against every conceivable odd, find a way to make the round work in his favor. The swing would be wrong. The club selection would make no sense. The decision making would follow a logic that exists only inside Jack Sparrow's specific and gloriously broken compass. And yet. By the back nine something would have happened that nobody in the group could explain, some sequence of improbable bounces and fortunate misreads and shots that should have gone out of bounds and somehow did not, that left Jack Sparrow in a position he had no business being in. He would accept it as though he had planned it this way from the beginning. He probably had.

Sherlock Holmes. The most observational mind in the history of fiction standing on a first tee is not a man who plays golf. He is a man who solves golf. Before addressing the ball he would have catalogued the grain of the green from forty yards out, calculated the wind speed from the movement of a flag on the adjacent hole, noted that the superintendent overwatered the left side of the fairway three days ago and that the ground there will play slower, and deduced from the worn patch on your glove exactly how many rounds you have played this season and what your most common miss is. He would tell you all of this. He would not be able to help it. The information would simply be available and withholding it would strike him as inefficient. By the fourth hole the group would be simultaneously grateful for and exhausted by Sherlock Holmes. By the fourteenth they would be asking him to please just read the putt and say nothing else. He would read the putt, say nothing else, and be right.

The Fictional Foresome: Comedy Edition

Some rounds are not about winning. Some rounds are about watching things go sideways in real time while everyone involved refuses to admit that is what is happening.

Ace Ventura. A man who approaches every problem in life with a method that has no name and should not work and does. Ace on a golf course is someone who would spend the first hole interrogating a squirrel near the green for information, spend the second hole taking a drop from a location nobody in the group can explain, and then drain a forty foot putt by addressing the ball from between his legs while making a sound that causes three members of the gallery to leave. He would be two under through six. Nobody would be able to explain it. Ace would not be able to explain it either because Ace would already be in a conversation with a groundhog by the seventh tee.

Tommy Callahan. Not Tommy Boy the buffoon. Tommy Callahan the man underneath the buffoon, the one who actually loves people, who wants desperately to get it right, who has more heart than anyone in the room and slightly less coordination than the situation usually calls for. Tommy on a golf course is someone who would destroy three balls in the first four holes through a combination of enthusiasm and physics, apologize to every one of them personally, and then somehow make a par on the fifth in a way that makes everyone in the group genuinely happy for him. The group would be rooting for Tommy from the second hole. That is what Tommy does. He makes you root for him.

Clark Griswold. The most optimistic man in American cinema standing on a first tee with the absolute certainty that this round is going to be perfect, that everything has been planned, that he has the right clubs and the right shoes and has watched seventeen instructional videos this week, and that today is going to be the day everything comes together. It will not come together. Something will happen on the third hole that sets off a chain of events nobody anticipated. Clark will respond to each new development with the specific emotional range of a man who was so certain of success that failure does not compute until it is absolutely unavoidable, and then computes all at once. The back nine will be a masterpiece of barely controlled chaos. Clark will call it a great day on the eighteenth green and mean it completely.

Ron Burgundy. A man of tremendous personal confidence and deeply questionable judgment, which is a combination the game of golf rewards in unpredictable ways. Burgundy would arrive having declared himself an excellent golfer to anyone who would listen in the clubhouse. He would hit his opening drive while delivering a quiet monologue to himself about the importance of staying in the moment. He would have opinions about every aspect of the course stated with the authority of someone who has studied the subject and the accuracy of someone who has not. By the back nine he would be in a full crisis of identity that resolved itself on the eighteenth green into something approaching a genuine breakthrough, and then he would say something so absurdly confident about his final score that everyone in the group would burst out laughing and Ron Burgundy would accept that laughter as a standing ovation.

The Superhero Foresome: Marvel and DC United

Forget the most famous. The question here is who would actually be the best golfers. Who has the temperament, the physical precision, the patience, and the competitive architecture to thrive in a game that punishes ego and rewards stillness?

Hawkeye. Clint Barton. A man whose entire existence is built around one thing: hitting a target precisely, under pressure, from distances that should not be possible, with no margin for error. Golf is an archery problem with a club instead of a bow and Hawkeye has been solving archery problems his entire life. He would be the best golfer in any group that includes people who can lift cars and fly through clouds, because he is the one whose power is precision rather than force. He would not overswing. He would not overthink. He would pick his line, commit to it completely, and execute. He would be quietly, almost boringly excellent and you would only understand how good he was by looking at the scorecard at the end. That said, the claim that Hawkeye once played eighteen holes and shot eighteen is out there in the world and it deserves acknowledgment. Eighteen holes. Eighteen. That is either the greatest round of golf ever played or the greatest lie ever told by a man with a bow. Either way it belongs in the conversation.

Batman. Bruce Wayne on a golf course is a man playing a game that he has already mastered through sheer discipline and obsessive preparation, because Bruce Wayne masters everything through sheer discipline and obsessive preparation, that is the whole premise of Bruce Wayne. He would have played every great course in the world. He would know the greens at Augusta better than the members do. He would not enjoy it the way other people enjoy it because Bruce Wayne does not experience joy the way other people experience joy, but he would play it with the same total commitment he brings to everything, and watching someone bring that level of intention to a recreational round of golf would be both impressive and deeply unsettling.

Captain America. Steve Rogers is in this group because Steve Rogers is the living embodiment of doing the right thing the right way regardless of what it costs him, which is exactly the ethical framework golf was built on. Rogers would call every penalty on himself before anyone else saw it. He would take the drop from exactly the right spot. He would play ready golf, repair his divots, tend the flag, and thank the group at the end of the round with the sincerity of someone who genuinely means it every time. He would also be very good. The hand eye coordination, the focus, the physical discipline, and the absolute absence of ego when it comes to doing things correctly rather than impressively, those are the ingredients for a golfer who compounds quietly and finishes the round two shots better than you expected.

The Joker. Not because he would be good. Because a golf course needs one person who does not care about any of it in the most destabilizing possible way, and the Joker is the greatest agent of chaos in the DC universe dressed in golf attire and given a scorecard. He would keep score incorrectly and insist his numbers were right. He would offer advice on other people's swings that was technically sound and delivered in a way that made it impossible to use. He would laugh at the wrong moments, go completely silent at the moments you expected him to laugh, and hit one shot somewhere in the middle of the round that was so precisely, inexplicably perfect that everyone stopped and stared at him and he just shrugged and kept walking. The golf course has never seen anything like him. The golf course would not recover.

The Historical Foresome

This category requires a different kind of respect. These are people who shaped the world. Putting them on a golf course is not satire. It is an attempt to imagine what they were like when nobody was watching, when the weight of what they were doing was set down for four hours and they were just people standing in a field trying to get a ball into a hole.

Winston Churchill actually played golf. He played it badly and enthusiastically, which is a combination the game has always welcomed. Churchill on a golf course would be a man fully present in a way that the demands of history rarely allowed him to be. He would smoke. He would comment on everything. He would lose a hole badly and immediately begin constructing the argument for why the next hole would go differently. He would be the most entertaining playing partner you ever had and also the most exhausting, and you would not trade either quality for anything.

Achilles. The greatest warrior in the history of Western literature standing on a first tee is a man who has known since birth that he is exceptional, that everything he does will be watched and remembered, that glory is the only currency that matters. Golf offers Achilles no glory. Golf offers Achilles a five iron and a two hundred yard carry over a bunker and an outcome that is entirely dependent on whether he can quiet something inside himself that has never been quiet a day in his life. The heel was never the real weakness. The ego was the real weakness. Every golfer knows that weakness. Nobody in the history of civilization has ever had it worse than Achilles. Watching him play the back nine after a double bogey on the seventh would be the most dramatic front facing athletic event in human history that did not involve a battlefield.

Leonardo da Vinci on a golf course is a thought experiment about what happens when the most curious mind in human history encounters a problem it has never seen before. Golf is a problem. Da Vinci would approach it as one. He would spend the first three holes observing. He would spend the next three taking mental notes. By the seventh he would have redesigned the grip, reconsidered the geometry of the swing, and arrived at three original insights about ball flight that the golf world would spend the next century catching up to. He would also probably sketch the course from memory on the back of his scorecard and it would be a masterpiece.

Mark Twain, who once said that golf is a good walk spoiled, belongs in this group precisely because of that quote. Twain in the group means the round has a narrator. Everything that happens, every bad shot, every unlikely birdie, every moment of absurdity that the game manufactures without effort, gets filtered through the sharpest wit in American literary history and comes out the other side as something worth writing down. By the back nine Twain would have enough material for a novel. By the eighteenth green he would have delivered a sentence about the game that nobody in the group would ever forget and nobody would be able to fully explain.

The Scary Foresome

Some rounds you watch from a safe distance. A considerable distance.

Jason Voorhees. The most reliable thing about Jason is that he keeps coming. You cannot stop him, you cannot slow him down, and he does not acknowledge obstacles as obstacles, he acknowledges them as things that are briefly in the way before they are not. On a golf course this translates to a man who would drive the ball an incomprehensible distance by applying to a golf club the same force he applies to everything else, which is all of it, all the time, without calibration or hesitation. The problem is everything after the drive. Precision is not Jason's register. Patience is not Jason's register. By the third hole the group would be playing very quickly and very quietly and making sure nobody was ever alone near the tree line.

Jack Torrance arrived at the Overlook Hotel a man and left something considerably different, which makes him a fascinating golf companion because the game of golf has a similar effect on people under the right conditions. Jack on a golf course would start the front nine with a kind of manic enthusiasm, enthusiastic about the fresh air, the company, the simple pleasure of a game being played in a reasonable world where things make sense. By the back nine the conversation would have shifted. Something on the course, a bad break, an unfair bounce, a putt that lipped out when it had no right to, would have begun the process. By the seventeenth hole someone in the group would be watching him very carefully. By the eighteenth they would be watching the parking lot.

The Terminator would shoot under par. Not because it cares about par. Because it has calculated the optimal solution to each hole and is executing that solution without ego, without nerves, without the human machinery that causes every other golfer on earth to occasionally fall apart. It would not celebrate a birdie. It would not react to a bogey. It would process each result as data and apply that data to the next hole. The most unsettling thing about the Terminator on a golf course is not the strength or the precision or the complete absence of emotion. It is the pace of play. It never waits. It never hesitates. It addresses the ball and hits it and moves. The group would be done in under three hours and nobody would have said a word the entire time.

Dracula has been alive for centuries and in that time has presumably played a great deal of golf, which means he is either very good at it or has had enough time to develop a refined and deeply personal relationship with failure. Either way he brings to this round a perspective none of the others have, which is the perspective of someone for whom a bad back nine does not register against the backdrop of eternity. He would only be available for morning rounds in the winter months. He would dress impeccably. He would be excessively charming at the first tee and progressively less charming as the round went on and the sun moved across the sky. His short game would be flawless. He has had centuries to work on his short game. He would win whatever was on the line and leave before sunset without signing his scorecard and nobody in the group would say anything about it because nobody in the group wanted to have that conversation with Dracula.

The Foresome That Actually Means Something

Every category above is a thought experiment. The groups are fun to argue about. They are fun to imagine. They are fun to debate over a beer after a round when nobody wants to go home yet and the conversation needs somewhere to go.

Then someone at the table gets quiet for a second.

Because the real answer to the perfect Foresome is not Michael Jordan. It is not Tiger. It is not James Bond or Achilles or Hawkeye, though all of them would be worth watching for completely different reasons.

The real answer is the person you cannot call anymore.

It is the grandfather who taught you that golf was a game worth caring about. The father who drove you to the range on Saturday mornings before either of you had anywhere else to be. The friend who would have loved this. The mother who never played but would have shown up anyway because that is what she did, she showed up, and you would have spent four hours watching her figure out the game and laughing at all the right moments and keeping her score even when she told you not to bother.

Golf is one of the few games you can play for your entire life. It is also one of the few games that gives you enough time, four hours, eighteen holes, all that walking and waiting and standing in the middle of a fairway with nobody saying anything for a few seconds, to think about the people who played it with you and cannot anymore.

The perfect Foresome is not hypothetical for everyone. For some people it is the most specific thing in the world. Three names and a tee time and a course they have played a hundred times. The conversation they would have on the fourth hole. The bet that would start somewhere around the seventh. The moment on the eighteenth green when everyone would know exactly how it felt to be exactly where they were.

Here is one to start with.

Barrett Edri. Norman Share (Papa). Robin Williams. Larry Bird.

Papa because there is no round worth playing that he would not have made better. Robin Williams because the man made the whole world laugh about golf before most people thought golf was something worth laughing about. He did a bit about the Scots inventing the game, about standing on a cliff with a stick, about the specific madness of caring this much about a hole in the ground, and it was so sharp and so true and so full of love for the absurdity of it all that you could feel how much he actually loved the game underneath every joke. To play a round with Robin Williams would have been four hours of that, live and unscripted, on every hole. Larry Bird because Bird on a golf course would be the most competitive, most honest, most gloriously stubborn version of the game you have ever seen, and the trash talk alone would be worth whatever the green fee costs.

That is a Saturday morning worth waking up early for.

Now it is your turn.

Three names. One tee time. Anyone who has ever existed, anyone who never existed at all, anyone you loved, anyone you miss, anyone who would make four hours on a golf course feel like the best four hours you ever spent.

Who's in your perfect Foresome?

Robin, Papa, me, and Larry. The Saturday morning that lives in my head.

Foresome. Love the Game.