Nine holes with your father, once a month, booked a year out

Ring the pro shop on a Tuesday morning, ask for the 8:10 on the second Saturday of every month, and book all twelve. Most clubs will let you. Municipal courses almost always will, and they'll be glad of the certainty. Then put the whole year in your phone as a repeating event and tell your father it's done.

That's the trick. Not the golf. The booking.

Because the version where you both agree you should play more often, and you each wait for the other to suggest a date, produces about two rounds a year. The version where the tee time already exists produces nine or ten. You'll cancel some. He'll cancel some. There'll be a Saturday in February when the greens are under frost and the pro rings you at seven to say the course is shut. Fine. The other eight still happened.

Nine holes, not eighteen

Eighteen holes with a walk to the car park is four and a half hours, and the last two hours are usually worse than the first two. He gets tired. You start checking your watch because you told your wife you'd be back by one. The round stops being a pleasure and becomes a commitment being discharged.

Nine holes is about two hours. You can be home by half ten with the day still in front of you. You can do it before church on a summer Sunday if your course opens early enough, or after it. And crucially, nine holes is repeatable. You can do nine holes every month for fifteen years. You can't do eighteen every month for fifteen years, because at some point in that stretch he won't be able to, and then you'll stop altogether rather than downgrade.

Start at the level you can sustain. Go up to eighteen occasionally, on his birthday, when the weather's absurdly good, when one of you has something to celebrate. Make the big round the exception and it stays a treat.

Take the buggy earlier than you think

There's a certain kind of man who regards a buggy as an admission. My advice: get over it about five years before you have to.

Walking is better golf and better exercise, and if he's seventy and still marching the hills with a carry bag, good. But the moment walking becomes the thing that determines whether he plays, take the buggy. A man who can't walk 6,200 yards can still hit a seven iron beautifully. Don't let the legs end the golf when the hands are fine.

Same logic on the tees. Move him forward. Not with a speech about it. Just say you fancy playing the yellows today, or the forward tees, because you want a shorter round. He'll take the excuse and you'll both pretend you offered it for your own benefit.

Don't coach him

He taught you to play. He won't want a lesson from you at sixty-eight, and the one thing guaranteed to sour a round is you explaining his takeaway on the fourth tee.

If he asks, answer once, briefly, and let it go. If he doesn't ask, say nothing. Ever. Not even on the twelve consecutive drives he slices into the trees. You're allowed exactly one intervention across an entire calendar year, and you should save it for something kind, like telling him his new putter looks good.

The exception is equipment. A man playing thirty-year-old blades with a steel shaft stiff enough to pole-vault on is playing a harder game than he needs to. That's a gift conversation, not a coaching one. Take him to get fitted for a driver and a couple of hybrids. Let the fitter tell him what his swing speed's doing. It lands differently from a stranger.

Keep the scorecards

Write the date on the top of every card in the pencil they give you. Then keep them. A shoebox, a drawer, the glovebox, it doesn't matter.

I know a man who has every card from every round he played with his dad, going back to when he was eleven and shot 74 for nine holes. The cards are mostly illegible. That's not the point. The point is the date, the course, two sets of initials, and the handwriting, which is his father's on the ones before 2009 and his own on the ones after, because that's the year his father's hands got bad enough that marking became awkward.

You'll want those later. You won't want them now, which is exactly why you have to start keeping them now.

When the golf stops being golf

There comes a stretch where he can't break 110 and he knows it, and the scorecard turns into a running tally of decline. That's the moment to change the game rather than quit it.

Options that work:

• Stop counting. Play for the shots, not the score. He'll still remember the good five iron on the seventh.
• Play a scramble. Both of you hit, take the better ball, both play from there. It hides his bad shots inside your decent ones and it speeds the round up enormously.
• Drop to the par-3 course. Nine short holes, no driver, no lost balls in the gorse, forty-five minutes. The holes are 90 to 160 yards. He can play those long after he's finished with a full course.
• Go to the range. A bucket of balls and a coffee. It's not a round, but it's an hour side by side and it costs almost nothing.

The failure mode is binary thinking. Either a proper round at the proper course or nothing at all. That's how the golf ends four years earlier than it needed to.

If he doesn't play golf

Then this isn't about golf, obviously. It's about the structure.

What golf provides is a long stretch of time, side by side, facing the same direction, with something to do with your hands and natural gaps in the conversation. Men talk in those gaps. They rarely talk across a table with eye contact and nothing to look at.

Fishing does the same job. So does a drive to collect something from a yard two hours away. So does a shared project with a fixed finish, like rebuilding a shed. Pick the thing he already likes, put it in the diary on repeat, and stop waiting for a natural occasion.

And if the relationship is strained, don't open with four hours. Open with forty-five minutes at a range. Low stakes, easy exit, and neither of you has to perform.

Bring your son at nine or ten

Three generations on a nine-hole course is a very good afternoon, with one rule: the boy plays alternate holes, not all of them, or he'll be bored by the fifth and everyone will be managing him instead of enjoying it.

Watch what happens on the tee. Your father will coach your son, which he isn't allowed to do to you, and your son will listen, which you no longer do. There's something in that arrangement that works and I've never fully understood why.

The first Saturday you turn up and he says he doesn't fancy it today, you'll go anyway, alone, and play the nine in an hour and ten. And you'll spend most of it working out how many of those bookings you left on the table.