Golf has a complicated relationship with luck, and a lot of the time golf doesn’t try to fight it. He doesn’t try to pretend to his players that luck will play no part in their performance; instead, they devise coping strategies. It’s OK to accept that luck plays a role, but we have some control over luck by how we respond to it.”In modern sport, luck is more harassed than it once was. In this rampant intellectualisation of sport, though, luck has become an inconvenient outlier: a known quantity with an unknown value. That’s just luck and no luck.

Source: The Irish Times January 17, 2026 10:43 UTC