Can You Go All In on Golf AND Fatherhood? | Max Adler of Golf Digest

Look at that. First birdie of Card Talk. First hole, one under, one up. First birdie. Let's go in. I mean, he made a birdie on the first hole. Yeah, that's it. Max Adler gets paid to think about this game for a living, but he also has four kids under 12. So today, I want to find out, when golf is your job and your escape, where does everything else fit? Welcome to Card Talk, where I play nine holes with a dad to talk about what really matters. Golf. Fatherhood. Life. I'm Paul Sullivan, founder of The Company of Dads and a contributing editor at Golf Digest. Today, my guest is Max Adler, editorial director of Golf Digest, father of four, and remarkably good guy. Paul. Hey, buddy. How we doing? Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. It's the beginning of the day for me, so I'm hitting three wood. That's the way I do it. Yeah. It's just got to ease in. You're a big hitter, though, so the three wood won't hurt you. First hole at Woodway Country Club in Darien, Connecticut. Classic Willie Park Jr. course. Straight on par four. The closer you can cheat it to the right side of the fairway, the better. I usually don't bring this up, but to be fair, there is water on the right. You lead. I'll lead. All right. Yeah! Max plays like a guy who spent his whole life inside this game because, well, he has. Look at that. That's kind of perfect. I mean, I started playing when I was, like, 13. You know, went to school at the University of St. Andrews, got my master's in English, played on the golf team, and in that summer of 05, I caddied at the old course. But I was one of two token American caddies. They've saved, they've planned, they're going to the mecca of golf, the home of golf. They want Mungo or Willie or Scott, and they get Max from New York. They're devastated. But usually after, like, five or six holes, I was a pretty good caddy, like, you know, attentive and energetic. And so I usually won people over. In the bunker. He's in. He's out. 2-0-9. 2-0-9 in the bunker. What am I doing? Oh, look at this shot. Out of the bunker. Five iron. Draws it. Come on, Paul. Look at that. I'm excited. Hold on. I am excited. I'm watching you. Yes. Oh, it's Pat. Got past the pin. Did you get that rake job on camera? It's a pretty. Look at that. Pretty good rake job. That's a man who's caddy. A lot of rake jobs in fatherhood. You got to smooth things over. You got to, you know. Ooh. I don't know. Well, you talked about your hybrid earlier. Look at this thing. That is old. 19 years old. First year working at Golf Digest, being the hot list coordinator. This is where that came from. And I just love it. It never left your back. It goes 230 yards. That's great. Every time. That's it. A scratch player, a career built inside the ropes. That's the Max everybody in golf knows. But I wanted to know about the other guy, Max, the dad. Four kids. Twins in the middle, right? Yeah. So we're going to ring up some birthdays here in about a month. And my oldest daughter will be 12. My identical twin daughters will be 10. And my young boy will turn eight. Those years when we had four kids under age four. Just the mechanics of car seats, timing, shopping, travel, diaper changing, bottles, everything. Like pretty militaristic. You got it all locked in. I'm just impressed that after you had twins, you said, let's have one more. Even numbers. All right. So how many of your kids, your son plays golf. What about your daughters? They don't play golf. So you're very disappointed in them. It's honestly, if you told me before I had kids that, you know, whatever, three of my four would not play golf and there's still time, of course. I would. Yes. I would be disappointed. But like the way actual life pans out. I'm so happy that each of them has things that they are passionate about and love. That's really all that matters. Four kids. A career that never clocks out. That's a lot to balance, but watching Max, the way he pulls it off isn't by splitting his attention. It's by fully jumping into wherever he is. I wanted to know where that came from. When you think about being a dad, what did you learn about fatherhood, either from your own father, from an uncle, from a grandfather that you remember as you're, you know, going up being a being a dad day to day? You know, I think just to be like, to be very invested in your children and to make them feel like they're important and to be, you know, interested in what they're doing. My dad, favorite thing that he did for me was he would take me out of school to go ski eight. Yeah. That's for life. Go live life. Have good experiences. For my dad, I think about, like, my parents were divorced back in the 80s. Whenever I'd see him on the weekends, he had nothing else planned and he was always present. So I tried to do the same thing with my daughter. When we play golf, like, we're not looking at a phone. We're just engaging. And so when I'm with the girls, I try to put my phone away. Yeah. I like that. I think I try to follow the same principle. That makes a lot of sense. Harder and harder these days with working from home sometimes and, you know, laptops and phones out. We did, like, a family weekend in this sort of, like, cabin in the Adirondacks not long ago. And it had no TV or no internet or anything. Instantaneously in two minutes, like, they're making up plays. They're having fun. They're not fighting. They're playing with each other. They're, like, drawing and reading. Let's say, what's the best piece of advice you've ever received? Could be golf. Could be fatherhood. I mean, golf is simpler. If you can pause, you can play. Buddy Marucci. So that means no matter what's going on in your golf swing or whatever, what's going on in your game, if you can pause at the top of your swing and not like an exaggerated pause, but just that little bit of pause. You can do that. That means you can go play golf. That's the whole game, really. And maybe the whole job of being a dad, too. Just pause long enough to actually be there. All right. Last hole. Ninth hole here. Woodway short par three over the water. Oh, no. Safely in the sand. Nine holes does fit fatherhood and life well. It's kind of the right number. The right number. It's the right time. You don't have the luxury of warming up for an hour. You're probably coming in hot. And, because I'm not thinking, birdied the first hole, and then once I actually have time to get in my own head, that's when the wheels start to wobble. Thank you, sir. Enjoyed it. Great round. Thanks for doing this. Of course. My pleasure. Fun round. Very fun round. Fun round. It's about going out there with your friend and having fun. Golf is a big part of my life and work. The course, the range, they're places I know how to just show up. No phone. No score that actually matters. Nine holes with a guy I like. Turns out, that's not a bad way to be a dad, either. You can't keep score in fatherhood. People don't keep score in fatherhood. Go drive around, see all the stickers of universities. People are keeping score out there. Yeah, yeah. But we don't have to keep score. We don't have to keep score. No. We had a good round. You won. I did. You won. Ha, ha, ha.