As a Hunter Thompson fan, I’d love to say we were somewhere near the bar cart when the drugs began to take hold, but I was honestly pretty stoned well before we teed off. About an hour before heading to the course, I downed some chocolate loaded with grams of psilocybin to give the magic a chance to gather ahead of my tee-time. Mission accomplished! By the second hole, my vision had sharpened and things were getting a wee bit trippy. After a nice drive, I found my ball in the middle of the fairway, and as I stepped up to hit my next shot, the tightly mown blades of grass beneath my ball began to “grow.” Like the tentacles of an anomalous organism, they seemed to reach out in every direction and then pulse before retreating. Buy the ticket, take the ride. At first, the effect was fairly distracting, but after a few seconds, this mild hallucination created a sort of cinematic bokeh, throwing the background out of focus and lifting the ball on to a higher (pun intended) plane. I drew back the club, fired my hips and flushed it at the pin. The strike was the best I’d made in months.
Despite putting in a good amount of work early in the season, anno domini 2025 has seen some of my worst golf in a decade. On the course, I seem to have forgotten how to swing a club — and for the last eight rounds or so, it’s nothing but two way misses off the tee, iron shots hit thin, fat or just straight-up shanked. I’ve embarrassed myself and my middling 11 handicap on golf courses high and low — from Cleveland’s Canterbury Golf Club, where my score was so bad, I stopped writing down numbers and started drinking in earnest, to notching a trio of triple bogeys and a pair of doubles at the re-opening celebration of Baltusrol’s Upper Course… much too sober.
Even my home games at the local muni have been unmitigated disasters. As many times as my drives have found in the woods, I’ve been lucky to escape without a tick bite. To add insult to injury, my putter has gone frigid — zero birdies on the year.
So, what the hell is going on? My driving range sessions are generally encouraging, and my ball striking is good enough to focus on trying to control ball flight and distance. It’s not like I’m trying to fix a chronic slice. I’m perfectly capable of scoring in the 70s but have barely cracked 85 this year.
I love golf for a multitude of reasons — though the facet that fuels my obsession the most is the game’s endless opportunity for improvement. Hit a bad shot, and the game affords you a chance to make a better swing next time. Have a bad round, you can play again tomorrow and try to make fewer mistakes. But lately my ability to recover on the course and shake off a bad shot, hole or round seems to be waning. I know I can play, but somewhere in my head, I seem to also think I can’t.
Arnold Palmer understood as well as anyone who has ever picked up a club, “golf is a game of inches… the most important are the six inches between your ears.” To play, you need to calculate, strategize and execute. But right now my headspace is a cluttered mess of swing thoughts, and I need some version of Marie Kondo to help re-organize my brain.
Enter magic mushrooms. Today psilocybin is all the rage as a possible panacea for treating a range of mental illnesses, including depression, anxiety and addiction. Not that I’m trying to cure my golf “addiction,” but my “anxiety” standing over a golf ball is another story.
For golfers like me, bad habits and negative patterns can develop over time and become hard to transcend. Psilocybin and other psychedelics can amplify neuroplasticity, which allows your brain to adapt and change. So the thinking goes, by enhancing neuroplasticity, psilocybin could theoretically help players move beyond self-created cerebral hurdles.
The idea of mixing golf and magic mushrooms has been germinating since I interviewed Bob Parsons of GoDaddy and PXG fame about his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from his service in the Vietnam War. Parsons experimented with psilocybin as well as LSD during his journey. “I did a few mushrooms over a one-week period, and after the psilocybin, the next day I went on the golf course … never putted so good in my life,” he said. “I was able to read breaks like I never have been able to.”
I was intrigued, and it seemed I wasn’t the only one. A few years later, some PGA Tour players have embraced psilocybin as well as other plant-based medicines, like ayahuasca, as a way to deal with on- and off-course anxiety.
Could magic mushrooms be the key to hacking my golf brain? Obviously, I was down to give it a try.
(I should mention that while psilocybin has been decriminalized in some local jurisdictions, it is still classified as a Schedule I drug in the United States and federally illegal. Plus, buying, selling and using it could be considered crimes in most states. So I, as well as InsideHook, do not endorse or recommend its use. Psilocybin is also not safe for everyone, especially anyone with brain trauma, a family history of schizophrenia or suicide. So the curious should not take psilocybin or other psychedelic drugs without consulting their physician and psychiatrist.)
My goal was to give my golf mind and body a hard reset. Thus the large five-gram dose to start the round, which actually worked… sort of.
My swing felt easy and fluid. I knew where my club head was nearly every time I took it back, and I was solidly connecting with the ball. Was every shot perfect? Of course not… I was super fucking stoned, and the air temperature was well into the 90s… as was my final score. The drugs slowed my swing speed down, and I consistently came up short on approaches, like the one that felt so good on the second hole, which finished just shy of the front edge.
My mushroom-addled brain also forgot how to strategize and plan for misses. So I frequently left myself short-sided with little chance of recovery. On the seventh hole, a man who looked like Fred Flintstone in a purple paisley polo appeared from the trees, looking as lost as I felt. Later in the round, I saw another dude with a cartoon character vibe — a Super Mario dressed all in black, and judging from his crappy tee shot, he forgot to eat his magic ‘shroom. My playing partner (always use the buddy system with psychedelics) and I laughed well down the fairway.
But my tempo on short shots was sublime. I pitched a 56-degree wedge over a bunker to a pin I couldn’t see, 40 yards away, to about five feet — a tour-level recovery shot that will live in my memory banks for a while as an inspiration for what I’m capable of. I missed the putt, but I won’t carry that with me much past writing this sentence, since it’s tough to pick a spot to roll your ball over when the grass looks like a Brillo pad made of moving tentacles.
The intensity began to wear off as I approached the turn, so I popped another five grams. The rest of the round went roughly the same as the first nine. Eventually I was reduced to chanting “Namu Myoho Renge Kyo” over subsequent shots to try to maintain focus… especially over putts, which became “hit and hope.”
It probably goes without saying: that’s way too much psilocybin for a day on the course. Golfers looking to make gains with mushrooms typically micro-dose ahead of the round and may add another small amount to cap things off (pun intended again) at the turn.
According to Taylor Massey, who advises golfers on how to harness plant-based medicine for improvement, my desire for a hard reset via psilocybin wasn’t totally out of bounds, but I should have done it at home. “Ten grams is way too much,” he said. “Anything over seven is just stupid. Five, six or seven is plenty, especially for people who only do it once or twice a year and really want to get there.” Not the first time I’ve done something stupid, and likely won’t be the last.
Massey is neither a doctor, nor a licensed trainer or a coach, but he has spent the last several years advocating for psychedelic medicines for veterans as well as those in action sports and golf and is a +2 handicap, a three-time qualifier for the US Mid-Amateur Championship and eight-time club champion from Virginia to La Costa California. He suggested, if I choose to try it again, to limit my sensory experience, covering my eyes to reduce stimulation and listening to the magic playlist from Johns Hopkins. “That is really gonna bring you a lot of good stuff and a lot of answers,” he says. “Physiologically it lights up your brain and the neuroplasticity would be amazing for anyone, from being a parent to running a business or playing sports.”
Psilocybin does two major things inside your brain, according to Massey. It breaks (existing) neural pathways and then creates new ones. “Electric pulses that go through our neural pathways equal thoughts and patterns that store our thoughts, actual conscious thoughts, which is crazy,” he says. “So if you have some neural pathways from a lot of bogies or losing tournaments or not doing well, having those broken and new neural pathways being built is a huge deal because they’re new thoughts, and maybe those new thoughts can help you let go of the old patterns.”
According to a study published in Nature, psilocybin can create ego dissolution, or a diminished sense of self or feeling distinct from the rest of the world. “Letting go of the ego. Imagine what that would do for your golf game,” Massey said. “Having a chance to strip that down on the course could be really incredible.”
The ideal dosage on course is around 200-250 milligrams, according to Massey. “It’s supposed to be sub-perceptual,” he says. So you shouldn’t really feel it. “But it’s the best vitamin in the world, and it starts working in about 20-to-30 minutes. So you’d want to take it before you get to the range.” He also recommends pairing it with both Lion’s Mane functional mushrooms and some clean caffeine, like green tea. “The nickname for magic mushrooms is ‘mushy’ because at any level more than a micro dose you can get a little bit happy and lazy. So the caffeine just heightens it and sharpens your focus,” he explains.
So I went back to the course for a more reasonable dosage. My neck felt loose, my vision sharpened slightly, and my mouth was coated with the same odd umami mucus taste I had noticed during the previous outing, but I wasn’t buzzed. Nor did I experience any hallucinations. I started the round with a comfy par, but managed to double the second hole from the fairway trying to get cute with a pair of exceptionally poor chips from just off the green. A scrambled par on the third let me know the putter was working again. But on the fourth, the driver slipped in my hand thanks to the 95-degree air temperature and triple digit heat index — double bogey.
I overcooked a draw off the next tee and found the fairway bunker — another bogey. Regrouped with a pair of solid pars on the sixth and seventh. A hole later, I blocked my drive right and had to manufacture a shot from the rough under some low-hanging branches. I nearly pulled it off, but the ball clipped a small cluster of leaves and ended up in the greenside bunker — another bogey.
Coincidentally, I played a nine iron dead into the wind on the ninth hole that finished less than 10 feet from the hole. The down-hill putt had what looked like some obvious right to left movement, so I aimed it a ball out. Sadly, it stayed straight, but I’m not complaining about a tap-in par.
After another par on 10, the siren blew signaling all the players to take shelter. A wild electrical storm had blown directly overhead. From the clubhouse portico, we watched around a dozen bolts of lightning pummel the area — a scene that would have been a little too trippy for a macro dose. It was also too serious for players to return to the course. So I finished with a 41 on the front (par 35.) Typically I play better on the back, so this had the potential to be a solid round and more representative of my ability.
So, did the drugs help? I’ll need to take a couple more “golf trips” before I can offer any judgement. But every round is a journey, and I’ve got a rain check in my pocket. Buy the ticket, take the ride.
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