Ninety-Nine Problems,
But 8-Bit Ain’t One
Golf
Nintendo Entertainment System
Greens fee: $0.00
Date played: January 31, 2026
Don’t come at me unless you rode with the Nintendo Entertainment System.
I’m not talking about the Super Nintendo. I’m certainly not talking about the Nintendo 64. That’s like comparing the Starship Enterprise to a canoe. I’m talking about the Nintendo Entertainment System — the Nintendo. The O.G. Unless you spent your afternoons with an unergonomic, plastic rectangle in your hands, sucking down poorly mixed Tang, blowing in a cartridge and saving up your Hyrule Rupees for the Blue Ring, you don’t know how it was. Eight bits. Fifty-six colors. Pixels as big as a calendar planner. We used to be a proper country, and the Nintendo was why.
Times were simple. It was the mid 1980s. Gas cost a little over a dollar. Bill Cosby and the Taliban were still the good guys. Sports video games were named what they were. The baseball Nintendo game? Baseball. The tennis game? Tennis. Personally, I was a big fan of Pro Wrestling, with its ripoff Ric Flair and a dead ringer for the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Crummy graphics? For sure. But between that swing plane and the look on his face, it seems pretty realistic to me.
I don’t remember how Golf found its way into my portfolio — a gift from my grandmother on my sixth birthday, I think. I wasn’t a fan. For one thing, no 6-year-old in his right mind likes golf. For another thing, Golf — like the real thing — required timing: click the A button to start the swing, click it again when the cursor reaches the back end of the swing meter, and then again quickly when the cursor darts back toward the front end. Depending on how close the cursor stopped to the swing meter’s “sweet spot,” the ball would fly dead straight, slice, or hook.
Whiffing was easy. Controlling your aim was limited by the fact that the direction arrow could point in only 16 directions: north, north by northeast, northeast, etc. If your target was in between one of those angles, then you’d have to draw or fade the shot — which itself required a lot of timing. And we haven’t even talked yet about accounting for the wind.
Compared to jumping on Goombas or beating up Don Flamenco, the requisite patience and precision were about as appealing as Jell-O with fruit in it. Golf spent probably the next 18 months stuffed in a box with my Pound Puppies or whatever other toys I’d outgrown.
. . .
Do you ever stop and think about how insane the pandemic was? One day, we were all going to the office and and breathing on each other like normal people. The next day, we locked our front doors and basically didn’t come out for months. More than 800,000 Americans died from Covid in 2020 and 2021. Eight hundred thousand! Meanwhile, the rest of us were stuck in our homes, putting together the same jigsaw puzzles and binge-watching “Grizzy and the Lemmings” over and over.
Cross your eyes, and the par-5 18th kind of looks like Pebble Beach’s finisher.
I hadn’t bought a video game console in nearly 20 years, but it wasn’t long before I’d either go feral or buy a Nintendo Switch — for the kids, of course.
We wore that thing out. Animal Crossing was a low-stress favorite. We could put away eight hours on Breath of the Wild without batting an eye. As it turned out, though, some of my kids’ favorite games wound up being the old, 8-bit and 16-bit games that I’d grown up with. Super Mario Bros. 3 was just as good as I’d remembered it. Metroid had aged like a fine wine. The one that I found myself pining hardest for, though, was nowhere to be found in the Nintendo Online catalog.
Covid was a lonely time, but surely, most of us have been through that before. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but my first experience with real loneliness came giftwrapped not long after Golf did. Early 1987 turned to mid-1988. My mom packed us up and moved us to Jackson, to a crummy duplex apartment on Fortification Street. Making friends at a new school was hard. Back at my old elementary school, no one made fun of anyone or bullied anyone; I guess we hadn’t been old enough for it yet. I arrived in Jackson at just the right time, I suppose. When my single mother started dating again, the loneliness only deepened. Video games might not be great for a kid’s brain, but at least my NES kept my brain occupied with something other than the nothing that waited everywhere else.
I needed it worse than ever when Mom brought her new boyfriend around. He was not a “kids guy.” We had virtually nothing in common, and I can’t remember either of us making an effort to change that. In his defense, it wouldn’t have been his responsibility to declare that to be a dealbreaker. In his further defense, when a common interest did wander into his path, he reached for it.
At times, Golf’s design style appears restrained; other times, unchained. But the course forces a player into choices at nearly every shot, which is what a good golf course should do.
And one evening, he wandered into my room and reached for the first common interest that he and I ever had: a Nintendo cartridge that hadn’t wandered into my path for a long time. Golf.
Mom’s boyfriend eventually became my stepfather. It would be nice to say that a Nintendo game bridged a divide and paved the way for our very own “Diff’rent Strokes.” Life doesn’t always imitate art, though. That said, he unwittingly exposed me to his own quiet fanaticism for the game. Sometimes we had occasion to talk about it — especially after Tiger Woods made watching golf cool for people born after 1960. And he kept an absurdly large collection of golf clubs in our hall closet — which, upon waking up one day in the late ’90s and thinking that visiting a driving range would be fun, I quietly swiped and took to meet some friends. There were probably 30 clubs in the bag. “Seems like a little more than 14,” one of my friends said. I had no idea what he meant.
. . .
Golf’s gameplay minimalism couldn’t be farther afield from its (only) course’s design philosophy: open with a few handshake holes, and then take LSD. The terrain is a mishmash of Pebble Beach, a tight tree-lined muni, and that resort course in Idaho where you have to take a boat out to a green. You play through forests and archipelagos. If the game designers could’ve thrown in a glacier, they probably would have.
Golf requires a lot of shot-shaping, but a crosswind on the long par-3 11th hole needs more than most.
Thing is, as weird as they are, Golf’s holes aren’t bad. Nearly every shot on the course forces the player to do what a good golf hole does: to choose between difficult options, and then to execute their choice. Playing aggressively close to hazards is almost always the best way to set up birdie opportunities. And since the game doesn’t show you how far a club will carry, the player is constantly required to choose shots based on feel. So, you just blasted a drive into the crook of a dogleg and have an open look at the green, eh? Good for you. Now, does the approach look more like a 4-iron or a 5-iron? And how much draw are you gonna need to hold up against that 25-mph crosswind? The answer to all these questions is usually “hell if I know.” Maybe that’s why the game is so relatable for a high-handicapper.
In Summer 2024, two childhood forces returned to my life: Hulk Hogan spoke at the Republican National Convention, and Golf landed on the Nintendo Online catalog. Revisiting that acid trip of an 18-hole design was the only one of those that ended well. Since then, for every time I’ve touched a real club, I’ve probably made a Golf loop 20 times. Such is fatherhood of young kids: it’s a hell of a lot easier to grab two Joy-Cons and 20 minutes than it is 50 bucks and six hours.
Generally, winters are mild enough in Mississippi to get out to the driving range at the very least. January temperatures in the teens are rare, but the last two weekends of 2026’s first month were colder than a well digger’s ass. So when you’re a middle-aged dad with a golf itch and 20 minutes of peace, what’re you gonna reach for? A third cup of coffee and those Joy-Cons, that’s what.
. . .
I came into this Saturday morning round with a realistic goal: breaking 80. Understand, Golf is not a child’s game. Golf cut its teeth when men were men and video games were not designed to be beaten. Threatening par on Golf is the Nintendo equivalent of Ken Duke’s Saturday round at the 2016 Players. The kids were both distracted by the Netflix flavor of the week. I settled in: One Player, Stroke Play. Time to ride.
The only character in this game is Mario — or a Mario doppelgänger, at least. Immaculate form at address, consistent swing, and no emotion. Unflappable. A stone-cold killer. And my opening shot showed it: a booming draw, slung hard into a left-to-right crosswind over the right side’s fairway bunker. It’s just as well that I hadn’t been joined by a Player 2, because they would’ve run off screaming at the sight of it.
Too much of a boom thing: a thunderous drive off the tee at the eccentric 6th hole rolled into the water, setting the stage for another triple bogey.
But things can get out of hand quickly with Golf, as with golf. Perhaps feeling too much adrenaline, I flew a long iron over the green into a bunker, needed two shots to get out, and face-planted my way into a three-putt. Triple bogey to open. Rarely has art so painfully imitated real life.
Golf’s first five holes are tough, and they test different shots — approaches requiring both long and short irons, and often demanding aggressive shot-shaping for any chance at par. Otherwise, though, they are architecturally unremarkable, meandering through forestland and lakeshore. (Mind those treelined fairway, though: an inch into the trees is counted out of bounds, as surely as if you’d sliced a drive all the way to Donkey Kong Jr. Math.)
The sixth hole is where the drugs kick in.
After the Northern Michigan-ish opening stretch, No. 6 opens up into…I don’t know, maybe the crumbled remnants of Atlantis? A 398-yard par-4, with tee and green separated by two islands providing leftward and rightward landing areas. (To be clear, there are no bridges involved in any of this.) The island on the right (I don’t think I’ve ever written those words to describe a golf hole) is the easier, safer choice off the tee, but it creates a difficult approach shot that must thread two greenside bunkers and avoid rolling off into the water. The approach from the left island allows more margin for error, but reaching safely it off the tee is nearly impossible without a helping wind — and if you slice your drive even a foot, prepare to reload.
See? I told you it’s a good hole! It’s just a deranged hole. And so I played it deranged: a quality drive to the lefthand island, but in a guess between a 4-iron or a 5, I chose less club for the approach and didn’t clear the water. Eventually, I one-putted for another triple bogey, and I was glad to have it.
With the round threatening to go off the rails before even making the turn, though, I cranked a 3-wood at the 247-yard, par-3 ninth (with a tee and green connected by what I believe to be the Asia-North America Land Bridge) to tap-in distance. A birdie brought me back down to a respectable 8-over. I looked behind me in the living room, hoping someone had seen it.
. . .
A perfect helping wind left nothing to imagination except club selection. Worst-case scenario, you could always putt it zig-zag
On the course, my golf formula is typically to collect as many bogeys as possible, to try to sneak in a par here and there, and to try keeping doubles and triples to a minimum. To pull that off, either (1.) I have to hit the green in no more than one shot above regulation and two-putt, or (2.) I have to reach the green in regulation and at least get it underground in three. It’s harder than it sounds to players with even modest consistency. And mathematically, it’s a strategy that makes breaking 80 about as likely as Bryson DeChambeau giving up YouTube for Lent.
The relatively normal 395-yard, par-4 10th hole turns back into Fangorn Forest, or wherever this godforsaken layout lies. The formula held, and I escaped with a bogey. My 5-wood tee shot to the par-3 11th hole’s island green came up wet, and a few hellishly misjudged putts later, I’d posted another triple. I was 12-over now; breaking 80 was completely out of the question. But breaking 90 in your sweatpants with a cold cup of coffee is still nothing to sneeze at. I recalibrated my goal and headed for the 12th.
No. 12 is a 410-yard par-4, with a fairway that bends less as a dogleg and more as a Brontosaurus neck. Trees pinch near the tee shot’s landing area, and a lefthand fairway bunker threatens shots that carry the chute. From there, the fairway bends right and backward at 45 degrees. Whoever designed this hole should be institutionalized, but even in a lithium-induced fog, they’d be proud of me: I blasted my drive right up to the fairway bunker’s edge, then fired a 1-iron over a broad expanse of O.B. just off the green’s edge. The putt onto the green nestled up close to the cup, and a tap-in par finished my best hole of the round. The beauty of the archipelago (we’re back in the Pacific, I guess) at the 542-yard, par-5 13th further inspired my play: I recovered from an unlucky water ball with an aggressive third shot close to the green, then putted in for a surprise birdie. The improbable two-hole run brought me back to 11-over with five holes to play. Finishing in the 80s was well within reach.
Breaking 90 was a narrowly lost cause, but there are worse ways to finish a round than a curling birdie putt from the back of the green.
Out on a real golf course, I never count up my score until the round ends. What followed is why. After a lucky bogey on the 14th, I stumbled to another triple bogey on the deceptively short 15th — a 343-yard, par-4 maniacally routed amidst a smattering of bite-sized islands. Then another on No. 16. By the time I found myself standing over my third shot on the 513-yard 18th, I needed to hole out for eagle to sneak in at 89 — but my respectable pitch narrowly missed. I settled for a well struck putt from the back of the green that curled into the right side of the hole for a finishing birdie.
. . .
It seems overdramatic to suggest that a Nintendo game led to something that’s been such a big part of my life. But it definitely opened the door. Years later, would I have walked through the door but for Golf?
My younger boy wandered out into the living room for my last couple of holes. After I finished, he asked if he could try. I handed him the controller and waited for the magic to happen. Despite my impassioned, excellent instruction (“No, you have to push the button three times to hit the — no no, wait until the arrow is back there —”), he lost interest after a couple of minutes and asked to play the new Mario Kart.
I’ve got him right where I want him.
. . .
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