There are women who carry whole generations inside them when they walk onto a golf course. Women who have buried fathers and rebuilt families, who have lived on the hill and learned how to live without it, who have loved and lost and found their way back to love again. Women who know, in their bones, that the rough is not the end of the hole. It is just part of the course.
Marietta Berry Goodman is one of those women.
She is a mother, a grandmother, a career woman who pivoted from banking to human resources, a novelist in progress, and someone who has navigated marriage, divorce, and the grace of finding her forever partner. She is the youngest of six children, the keeper of family stories that go back to Alabama golf courses where her cousins worked as caddies and cooks, invisible to the game but essential to it. She is a woman who has played many different courses in this life and figured out, every single time, how to find her footing.
When she talks about golf, she is always talking about something more.
“You get stuck,” she says, without apology or drama. “You’re challenged by your children and your partner and life. And you have to restart, stay focused, and just get up and stay in the game.”
She did not learn this from a golf instructor. She learned it at eleven years old, standing in the aftermath of her father’s death, watching her mother, a woman who had never worked a day outside the home, quietly refuse to stop moving forward.
“She never gave up,” Marietta says softly. “She always showed up. And she was willing to learn new things and be open to new people.”
Decades later, that is still the swing she returns to. Not the perfect one. The persistent one.
Rough Days and the Right Tools
Ask Marietta Berry Goodman to describe the connection between golf and motherhood, and she doesn’t reach for a tidy metaphor. She reaches for a memory.
Not long ago, she had a rough day at Shawnee Golf in Cleveland, Ohio. The weather was unsettled. The back nine stretched out long and unforgiving. Balls were getting swallowed by the rough, the kind that doesn’t give them back easily.
“As a mother,” she says, “I think of the fact that you get stuck. You’re challenged.”
It wasn’t a complaint. It was an observation. The rough is part of the game, just as hard seasons are part of motherhood. The question she asks herself on the course is the same one she poses to any woman who finds herself in a difficult stretch of life.
“What tools are you using? What resources do you have around you to get you out of that?”
She pauses, then adds something every experienced golfer knows but not everyone applies to the rest of their life.
“Sometimes we don’t ask for help.”
A sand wedge gets you out of the rough. So does knowing when to reach for something different than what you’ve been using. So does being honest enough to look around and ask who and what is in your corner. These are not just golf lessons. For Marietta Berry Goodman, they are survival skills, passed down through a family that has been connected to the game in more ways than one.
Roots in the Game
Golf is not new to Marietta’s family tree. Long before she ever picked up a club, her people were already embedded in the world of the game, though rarely on the side that got written about.
Her cousins worked the courses of Alabama, one as a caddy, one as a cook. They worked behind the scenes, in the service of a sport that, for most of the twentieth century, was not built for people who looked like them. But they showed up. They worked. And one cousin, she says with a quiet pride, figured out a way to make the game work for him in ways nobody expected.
“He would dress like the guy,” she says, describing how her cousin, an excellent golfer, would sometimes slip in and play for wealthy white men who hired him for his swing, not his name. “He’d keep his cap down, come out from the bushes, take over and play as the guy. Same build. Same clothes. Nobody knew the difference. They just saw the ball.”
He was paid extra for those rounds. He taught others how to play. He thrived on a course that was never built to include him.
There is something quietly powerful in that story. A Black man in South, more skilled than the men he was serving, finding a way to play the game on his own terms. Marietta carries that history with her, even if she never puts it in those words. It is the kind of legacy that doesn’t announce itself. It just shapes how you show up.
The Shift After the Shift
Marietta didn’t begin playing golf seriously until she was already well into her professional life, around the time she made one of the biggest pivots of her career. She had been working in banking when she decided to move into human resource management, a transition significant enough that she hired a career coach to help her navigate it.
“The best three thousand dollars I’ve ever paid,” she says without hesitation.
That coach encouraged her to get on the golf course with clients. She went to an outing. She had never played seriously before. She was nervous. Then an executive who noticed her hesitation said something that stayed with her.
“Everyone has something to offer.”
She putted that day and gave her team a hole in one. Her friend Lorraine, who ended up in the cart with that same executive, walked away with every raffle prize at the event.
“We barely could get the stuff in the car,” Marietta laughs.
She has been playing ever since, leaning into the game the same way she leans into every new chapter: with openness, a willingness to be a beginner, and a commitment to not letting pride keep her on the sideline.
Every Course Is Different
One of Marietta’s favorite things about golf is also one of the things that makes it hardest: no two courses are the same.
“You can master one course,” she says, “just by doing it. And then another course has sandbunkers, lakes, hills, and you’re like, darn it. I’ve got to navigate this space.”
She plays new courses on purpose. Her coach told her to challenge herself, so she joined a league of players who push her, which includes, she says with a laugh, a league of middle-aged women that don’t look like her.
This is the same logic she applies to every transition she has walked through. She was married, then she was divorced, then she found what she calls her forever partner. She worked in banking, then she didn’t. She raised her own two children and helped raise nieces and nephews along the way. She is now a grandmother to a five-year-old granddaughter who already has a Fisher-Price golf set at home, a gift from Marietta and the little girl’s father.
“In each shift,” she says, “be open to new people. Don’t be stuck saying this is how it’s done.”
Her mother modeled that. When her father died and the family’s financial footing changed overnight, her mother didn’t close herself off. She adjusted. She showed up somewhere new and figured it out. Marietta watched that and filed it away, pulling from it every time her own life required a recalibration. Her mother also left her daughters with a piece of advice so plain and so wise that Marietta still repeats it today.
“Keep yourself ready,” she says, passing it on the way her mother passed it to her, “because you may have to change persons.”
Not change clothes. Not change careers. Change persons. The full version of yourself that one season required may not be the version the next one calls for. Stay ready to become someone new.
“When I was married, I lived on the hill,” she says. “And when you live on the hill, you don’t see the people below.” When that chapter ended, she had to learn a different kind of resourcefulness. It was uncomfortable. It was also, she says now, exactly what shaped her.
It Is Never Too Late
If there is one message Marietta Berry Goodman wants to hand directly to every woman reading this who has ever thought the game passed her by, it is this: Colonel Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken at 83 years old.
“If he can do it,” she says simply, “you can do it too.”
She means this beyond the novelty of the reference. She means it as a genuine framework for thinking about timing, opportunity, and the stories we tell ourselves about when it is acceptable to begin something.
“Look at the computer,” she continues. “If you’re of a certain age, you didn’t learn that in school. You had to learn it. Any skill you’re going to enjoy, you have to learn.”
Her advice for women intimidated by starting golf, and by starting anything new, is practical. Find a pro. Take lessons. Dress the part. And, critically, find the right environment to learn.
“Maybe you don’t play with those people who are so into the game,” she says. “Find your tribe. You may not want to be with those who really know what they’re doing and don’t have the patience for newer players.”
She remembers a league she nearly quit because a handful of women were unnecessarily exacting, playing as though the LPGA professional tour card was on the line. Her forever partner talked her out of not leaving. He bought her new outfits for every week she stayed. And by the end of the season, those difficult women had made her a better golfer.
She never says it gets easy. She says it gets worth it.
Drive for Show, Putt for Dough
Marietta Berry Goodman putts every single day. This is not a coincidence.
The part of the game most beginners overlook, she says, is the part that actually determines the score. Everyone wants to swing. Everyone wants to drive. But the strokes pile up on the green, and that is where the game is truly won or lost.
“Most people focus on the swing,” she says. “But it’s your feet and your setup. It’s your setup all the time.”
Her putting philosophy is as methodical as her approach to everything else. Get your feet right. Understand the ground will do some of the work. Don’t overpower a putt when a gentle stroke will let the ball find its own way.
And whenever possible, she says with a knowing look, don’t be the first one to putt.
“Be the second person. Then you can see the read, see where the ball is going. You get it close enough and you’ve got it.”
There is, she would be the first to admit, a metaphor in there too. Patience. Observation. Letting things unfold before you commit to the full swing. It is how she has approached every major decision in her life. Watch first. Learn the read. Then step up to the ball.
Enjoy the Sun
Marietta Berry Goodman closes the conversation the way she lives her life: with warmth, a little humor, and wisdom borrowed from the women who came before her.
“Present yourself well,” she says to younger women stepping onto the course. “Enjoy yourself. Don’t get all bent out of shape.”
Her grandmother used to say it in plainer terms.
“Enjoy the sun, because you’re going to be in the shade more times than you are in the sun.”
She is not being pessimistic. She is being honest in the way that only someone who has walked through their own rough patches can be. The sun comes. Take it. Let it warm you. Don’t waste it worrying about what someone thinks of your swing.
She is writing a novel now. Taking classes. Playing new courses. Showing up for her granddaughter. Living, she would say, exactly the way she’s always tried to live, fully present for whatever season she is in, and ready for the next one.
“You’ve got to start somewhere,” she says. “And everything is not presented to you at certain times in your life. They’re presented to you in the way God wants you to show up.”
She picks up her club. She takes her stance.
She shows up.
Marietta Berry Goodman is a human resources professional, career coach, and golfer based in Cleveland, Ohio. She is a mother, grandmother, and lifelong student of the game. You can connect with her on Facebook (click here).
This feature is part of The Green’s Ladies Golf Club’s 2026 Mother’s Day Series, celebrating women who are redefining what it means to play the game, on and off the course.
