How golf taught me not to be a snob. Yes. Golf.

It takes a certain amount of gumption to take up golf if you’re female, and the women I met through the game turned out to be fun, funny, confident, decisive, and resilient.

I learned to be a snob at a snooty little college. I’d fled a big regional high school with a student body that included nearly every sort of teenager except, apparently, mine.

I took a stab at trying to be popular at one point, but that episode ended in humiliation and I returned to artsy fartsy. My popular peers acquired grownup breasts and immature boyfriends, then headed off to state schools for training in girly jobs like teacher, nurse and bookkeeper. I ran away to academic preciosity and vowed never to return to that life and those people. Mostly I didn’t, for the next 25 years.

In college and the newsrooms that followed, I made lots of stimulating friendships among the oddballs who prevailed there. Our interests, if not our incomes, pretty much defined Eastern liberal elite: fancy food and wine, longhair music, tricky theater, ironic art, and freshly fashionable sports like Nordic skiing, bicycling and running.

In my 40s, though, my athletic life turned upside down: I got hooked on golf. Even more unexpected was its impact on my personal life.

It all started when I finished writing the corporate annual report for a medical device company (a career change that better matched my income to my aspirations than newspapering did). My clients, a couple of finance department executives, invited the graphic designer and me to a round of golf at their corporate club.

Snooty indeed. Better take some lessons, friends said. The result was a remainder-of-lifetime addiction that has actually involved very little business golf but a whole lot of friendship.

I grant you, my first grownup golf experience did not make the case for the sport as democratizing. Remember, though, golf is a pastime invented by bored agricultural workers fooling around on Scottish public property.

Many of the courses I play these days are city-owned municipal parks built during the Great Depression, creating jobs then and offering low greens fees now. The parking lot at my home muni sees both rusty pickups and Mercedes with MD plates. Depending on whose data you tap, golfers are only half white-collar and increasingly non-white, approaching 30 percent.

The realm where golf discriminates the most is not money, but gender. Women are still only a quarter of avid U.S. players. It takes a certain amount of gumption to take up golf if you’re female, and the women I met through the game turned out to be fun, funny, confident, decisive, and resilient.

Shortly after my introductory business golf round, I joined a woman-friendly (and then-cheap) country club and the local chapter of a golf organization serving women with day jobs. On weekends I played with a regular female foursome, on weekdays I played in evening leagues, and several times a year I played on all or mostly female teams in tournaments.

These new women in my life were current or retired teachers, nurses, and bookkeepers. Yup, the women I went to high school with.

My female playing companions are also lawyers, doctors, CPAs, brokers, recruiters, entrepreneurs, and IT managers—as are my high school classmates—because that’s what women do now. Yet on the course, your profession doesn’t matter much anyway.

Want to be one of the popular girls? Show up, play fast, help others, exhibit good humor, and take on volunteer jobs. What you otherwise do or wear doesn’t matter—not even how well you play.  

I discovered that these women, the sort I went to high school with, are fine companions when life’s going well and solid supporters when things turn tough. After my husband died, they brought me food, cleaned my house, and kept me company. Newly living alone, I got colonoscopy rides and norovirus medication deliveries from them.

Through high school reunions and social media, I’ve also reconnected with actual high school classmates. Now that we’re honed by decades of bumps and grinds and splits, we’re more interesting and far kinder than we were as teenagers.

A few years ago I helped organize the golf outing at my high school reunion. Luck of the draw put me on the first tee with two former football players. Once they got over the shock of seeing the geeky valedictorian lugging a bag of clubs, their main concern was they’d have to clean up their language.

That fear disappeared when I hit my first bad shot. By the sixth hole these guys were cheering when my drive from the very forward tee (7-iron yardage for them) nearly hit the green. They dubbed me The Beast. Post-round beers were enjoyed by all.

I’m still close to many people who don’t care for golf—my oldest bestest is a college friend who’d only pick up a sand wedge to fight off a bear. My first husband didn’t play; my last husband only does so occasionally, to make me happy, less so himself.

But golf also opened the door to friendships snobbery had shut out. You might call it a mulligan on my social life.