I have bought my golf-obsessed husband 11 Golf presents. Only one of them still gets used.
I do not play golf and I cannot tell you what a wedge does. Here is what eleven years of guessing taught me, and the one present that actually landed.
We have a cupboard I call the graveyard. In it: a headcover shaped like a shark, a mug that says World's Best Golfer, a dozen golf balls with my husband's face on them, and a lesson voucher that expired in 2021.
I chose every one of those, and I tried. The problem is that if you do not play, you cannot tell the difference between a thing a golfer wants and a thing with a picture of a golfer on it. So you buy the second one. Every year. He says thank you and you both know.
Last Christmas I got it right. Not because I finally understood golf. Here are the failures first, because the pattern in them is the useful bit.
The personalised golf balls
His face, printed on a dozen balls. He laughed properly, which felt like a win for about four minutes. Then he pointed out that you lose golf balls. That is the entire life cycle of a golf ball. He used two, lost both, and could not bring himself to hit the other ten.
Worked
- Genuinely funny on the day
- Good photo for the family group chat
Did not
- Golf balls are consumable, so it is a joke you can only make once
- Ten of them are still in the cupboard
The lesson voucher
This one I was proud of. Thoughtful, useful, he is always saying he wants to fix his slice. It expired unbooked eighteen months later.
A lesson voucher is homework. You are handing someone a job with a deadline and calling it a present. It also quietly says he needs fixing.
Worked
- Looked thoughtful on the day
Did not
- Requires him to organise something
- Quietly says you are not good enough
- Expired, so I paid sixty pounds for nothing
The novelty headcover
A shark. It went on the bag for one round. I know because I asked. The men he plays with are merciless and there is a line between having a bit of character and looking like you are not taking it seriously.
Worked
- Cheap, and he did use it once
Did not
- He has to be seen with it by people whose opinion he cares about
- Back in the cupboard by February
The expensive gadget I did not understand
A rangefinder. I spent a long time on this, read a lot of reviews I did not follow, and spent almost two hundred pounds. He already had one. A better one.
He was nice about it and said he would keep it in the car as a spare. It is still in the box. That is the trap with buying real equipment for someone who is properly into something. They have already bought the good version of everything they want.
Worked
- It is a real piece of golf equipment
- He could tell I had tried
Did not
- He already owned a better one
- Too expensive to be a nice surprise, too awkward to return
- I had no way of knowing
The one that worked, and why
Here is the thing that changed how I buy for him. I stopped trying to think like a golfer and started with something I could actually see.
What I could see was mud. Mud on the hall floor every Sunday afternoon. Sand in the footwells of the car, permanently, since roughly 2018. A towel on the radiator that never quite dried. I could not tell you whether his irons were any good, but I could tell you that he came home irritated and spent ten minutes in the driveway scraping his shoes with a tee.
Air Caddy Pro 2.0
It is a small cordless blower that lives in his golf bag. He points it at his shoes and the mud comes off, dry, in about three seconds. No water, no towel, no scraping in the driveway.
It worked because it was the first present I bought that fixed something I had actually watched annoy him. He has used it every single round since last Christmas. He has also, without me asking, done the car with it twice.
The part I did not expect is that his friends ask about it. He came back from his first round in January pleased with himself because two of them wanted to know where he got it. That has never happened with a mug.
Worked
- Fixes something you have actually seen bother him
- He uses it every round, not once
- Nothing to book, set up or learn
- His friends ask about it
- It arrives in a proper box, so nothing to wrap
- 30 days to send it back if you get it wrong
Did not
- The carry case is extra
- More than I would normally spend on one present
Worth knowing: they sold out before Christmas last year. At the time of writing there were under 200 units left on the current run.
If you are buying for a golfer this year
My rule now: nothing that is a joke, nothing he has to book, nothing he might already own a better version of. Buy the thing that fixes something you have watched annoy him.
With golf, that thing is almost always mud.
Claire Bennett, Contributor
Claire Bennett writes about gifting. She has been buying Christmas presents for a golfer for eleven years and got it wrong for most of them.