When he first took up golf—long before he launched the criminally underrated Not A Scratch Golfer and became my favorite YouTuber—Adam Fine had just four months to get hooked. It was the spring of 2017, Harding Park offerec cheap prices for San Francisco residents, and Fine made it a habit to play nine holes after work. In those hours, he noticed something strange: He didn’t feel pain. He didn’t itch. He wasn’t even tired.

It was a hell of a novelty. Fine had recently been diagnosed with Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC), a progressive autoimmune liver disease with no cure except a new liver, but he’d been feeling the symptoms as long as he could remember. Despite the short reprieves at Harding Park, those symptoms were getting worse. In fact, they were the reason he tried golf in the first place—he needed an outdoor activity he could share with his girlfriend, whose energy routinely left him in the dust.

Photographs taken at the time show a gaunt, jaundiced 28-year-old clearly losing some invisible battle. He had a good job in software sales and great health insurance, but his doctor told him that because of the rigid priority system for liver transplants in northern California, his best bet was to move back to his home country, Canada, where as an added benefit he’d skip the $2 million health-insurance bill and all the paperwork that came with it. If he stayed, the doctor said, he wouldn’t be eligible for a transplant until he crossed a certain threshold, and that threshold would come very late in the game.

“I’ll be honest with you,” she told him. “I think you’ll die here.”

And so he went north, back to his parents’ home, back to Vancouver. Soon he couldn’t play golf, and that was a bad day. But a worse day came when he could no longer get out of bed.

Fine is an optimist at heart. He speaks with a distinctly Canadian combination of humility and sincerity. He rarely gets angry on the golf course, and he never curses. He’s not predisposed to doom and gloom, but as he waited in bed for a transplant that he knew might never come—his age and his 5-foot-6 height made finding a match more difficult, even in Canada—there wasn’t much to do but think about his own death.

“It was about as dark a chapter as you can imagine,” he said.

Fine is not religious and has never been inclined spiritually—he describes his conception of the world as “random chaos, with no rhyme or reason”—but there are two things in his life that have felt like miracles.

The first miracle came when he woke up from surgery in March 2018. He didn’t need a day, or an hour, or even a minute to recognize the difference: he felt better, instantly, than he ever had in his entire life. What he wanted most of all in those days of rebirth was to play golf, and he was back on the course in less than a month.

The second miracle came later, when he received a letter from the mother of his donor. It came through the hospital, with no identifying information, and he still doesn’t know who saved his life. Her son had passed away young, she wrote, and she wanted the recipient of his liver to know something about him. When he read her next line, he felt a chill.

“My son was a passionate golfer.”

Today, Fine makes his living via Not A Scratch Golfer. As the name indicates, he is not one of the better players you’ll find on the Internet. He’s the first to admit that he’s not big, he’s not strong, and he’s not athletic. His flat, somewhat restricted swing has little aesthetic appeal, and if he hits a drive 250 yards, he’s crushed it. He doesn’t try to be funny, he doesn’t play with a cool group of friends (he’s almost always with strangers), and his editing skills are merely average. He has more than 60,000 subscribers, an impressive number, but even in the golf world, he’s not especially famous—when I surveyed a small group of my golfing friends, only one of nearly two dozen knew him. Nor is the storytelling complex; his videos have overarching themes, but most boil down to him narrating a single round of golf.

As descriptions go, I realize this isn’t bound to make you rush to his channel. And yet, to watch a video like “The Reality of Single Digit Handicap Golf” is to slip into a world of surprising appeal. I first came across his content on Reddit Golf, and despite my volatile viewing habits and short attention span, I watched to the end. More videos followed, I became a devoted fan, and in trying to pinpoint why I liked them so much, I reached two conclusions.

First, on the more practical side, Fine is a very good player. Or, more accurately, he manages to extract every bit of skill from the modest natural ability he was given. His handicap is in the high 7s now—it peaked at 5.2—and while that’s partly because he worked at his game, it’s also because he’s uncommonly smart, which he attributes to a plus-handicap friend who gave him hands-on lessons in course management. The insistent message of his content is that if you use your brain and check your ego, you don’t have to be very good to break 80 or to maintain a single-digit handicap.

Every video he makes is about proving that point.

“There was a trend on Reddit for a while where people would upload a video of their swing and say, roast my swing and guess my handicap,” Fine remembered. “I was playing good golf by my standards, and had just played well in a tournament, and I know I have an ugly golf swing, so I was kind of deliberately trolling. I knew if I uploaded my swing, everyone would guess I’m a 20 handicap.”

He uploaded his swing, everyone guessed he was a 20 handicap, and when he told them he was a 6.3, he got downvoted into oblivion. Nobody believed him, which made him eager to post results from his next tournament, a USGA mid-am event. Playing on an extremely hard course, he posted 81, 85 and 82, the differentials ranging from 5 to 10. That would be evidence enough, he thought, that the handicap was accurate.

“Then I put it up,” he says, “and everyone’s like, ‘dude, you’re such an idiot. You’re claiming you’re a 6 handicap, but you shot 85.’”

That was a lightbulb moment. He realized that not only were people stuck thinking it took a beautiful swing and Herculean strength to achieve single digits, but they didn’t even understand how a handicap worked.

That gave him the impetus to start a channel, but the inspiration came from another YouTube golfer called Golf Sidekick whose work he loved. It’s run by Matt Sanovabicci, a South African based in Thailand, and Fine calls his own channel a “low-rent version” of Sidekick. When he saw a tutorial on how Sanovabicci’s videos were made, he decided to give it a shot himself. (Somewhat embarrassingly, I didn’t know Golf Sidekick before interviewing Fine; I can now confirm that it is excellent.)

In March 2021, three years after his surgery, Fine posted his first video—a commentary-free 77 played on his home course in Vancouver. Golf Sidekick helped ensure that he wouldn’t be launching his channel into the abyss.

“Adam took a chance and sent me a private message when his channel was new,” Sanovabicci said through email, “with a link to one of his first videos. I liked the style of the video and could tell he had been influenced by my channel, so I posted it to my community tab on YouTube.”

Fine is a one-man band, taking videos with his iPhone, coming up with a story for each episode then needing roughly 10 hours to edit and put together the finishes product.

That gave Fine an immediate audience, and though his numbers don’t quite match Golf Sidekick’s, and there are certain stylistic differences—Sidekick calls its content “gonzo golf edutainment for the over 25 crowd,” while Fine takes a more sober approach—there is a philosophical similarity you can’t miss.

“Everything eventually becomes sanitized and overly polished for sponsors and money,” Sanovabicci said, “and YouTube golf looks like that currently with all the VC and agency funds. There’s a niche of people who are jaded and bored of it and want something authentic. They’re looking for something relatable and real. Everyone wants to look perfect. Adam is the opposite. He shows it all. People like that.”

“We both use an iPhone and a cheap tripod to make our videos,” he continued. “We’re one-man bands.”

Over time, Fine’s graphics improved, he added voiceover, and he framed the videos around a kind of lesson, like “The Ten Commandments of High Handicap Golf,” but the basic structure was already in place.

It’s not exactly his intent to be a teacher, or at least not his sole intent, but functionally, that’s what he’s become. He has an excellent short game that bails him out of tough situations with impressive regularity, but it’s his mental game that distinguishes him. He always knows where to miss, his negative ego is nonexistent (he shows every bad shot he makes, complete with the noise of a quacking duck), and he never lets his anger stick around long enough to affect the next shot. It’s hard to be angry on a golf course, apparently, when you know what it’s like to be on your deathbed.

For someone like me, who reached a career-best 11 handicap this past summer at age 41 but didn’t start playing until after 30 and can’t relate to the scores of YouTube golfers who have beautiful par-breaking swings cultivated since youth, Fine’s content is aspirational. An example: In the process of writing this article, Fine released a new video called “How To Actually Improve at Golf” in which he kept a bad shot counter that finished at 20 shots when he blew a short par putt on 18. Nevertheless, he carded a 79 on a tough course—a perfect embodiment of what makes his game special.

Becoming a scratch golfer is not in my future, and I have very little interest in all the conflicting technical advice that abounds online, but a game like Fine’s seems achievable for me due to the simple fact that he got there by being steady and smart in the face of skill errors. We don’t all have a long history of playing golf, and we’re not all in our athletic prime, but every one of us has a brain.

The insistent message of Fine’s content is that if you use your brain and check your ego, you don’t have to be very good to break 80 or to maintain a single-digit handicap.

In short, because he positions the sport as a soluble puzzle, Fine makes me want to play more golf, and watching his videos heightens my appreciation. I’m almost positive it makes me better, too.

The second, less practical side of his channel’s appeal is tougher to describe. It might be as simple as saying that it’s surprisingly fun to watch someone like him play a round. There are certain technical elements, like the shot tracer and the scorecard he designed on Powerpoint, that are necessary from a narrative standpoint, but beyond those digital add-ons, there’s a stripped-down quality to his work that appeals almost by contrast. YouTube content in general, and golf specifically, has a tendency to present itself as busy and striving and chaotic, with high-volume personalities competing for attention, the kind of forced laughter reminiscent of NFL pregame shows, and an aesthetic that is clearly designed for young men who need friends.

More power to them. But I’m glad there’s a place for a sincere Canadian who almost died to quietly show us what’s special about golf.

Fine makes less money than he did in software sales, but he makes enough to earn a full-time living. Some of that money comes from YouTube AdSense, which, per Fine, pays roughly $6 to $12 for 1,000 views. Most of what he earns, however, comes from sponsors that sign on for a set number of videos and get personalized ad reads in return (his previous career as a sales rep helped him in that regard). The job isn’t without stress; he gets to play a lot of golf at beautiful courses, much of it for free, but each video takes him around 10 hours to edit and put together. The hardest part, he says, is coming up with the storylines.

“This summer, honestly, has been a struggle,” he told me when we spoke earlier this year. “I’ve only released, I think, four videos. I’m not a naturally creative person. And so the most difficult part isn’t the 10 hours of clicking. It’s like staring through raw footage being like, how do I turn this into a narrative and a story? I often feel like, ‘how many more hundreds of videos can I make?’”

Nor is it easy to keep an audience growing. There is nothing to guarantee an upward trajectory, and it’s very hard to predict which videos will catch fire. On top of it all, there’s a chance—Fine calls it “more likely than not,” based on early signs—that he will have a recurrence of PSC and need a second liver transplant. In other words, what seems like an ideal life has a lot of perks, but isn’t without its anxieties for a 36-year-old trying to make a living on the Internet.

Fine says his favorite aspect of his life as a YouTuber isn’t that he gets to play for free, or even that he gets a paycheck to play a sport. What he loves best is meeting new people with their own golf stories.

He still considers it a dream job, though, and his favorite line about the gig came from the girlfriend he began playing with at Harding Park. They aren’t together anymore, but they remain good friends, and when she learned about his career as a YouTube golfer, she sent him a text that summed it up: “This seems like the right amount of job for you.”

Today, Fine splits his days between Vancouver and Palm Springs, the seasonal home base of his parents, and spends a good deal of time on the road. From October to March, he’s rarely in the same place for more than a week at a time, and this year again his plan is to travel around the southwest making videos. His favorite aspect of this life isn’t that he gets to play for free, or even that he gets a paycheck to play a sport. What he loves best is meeting new people with their own golf stories.

My own golf story, while not particularly interesting, has been enriched by Fine’s channel. He manages to infuse the sport with the dueling elements of purpose and serenity, and presents a vision of recreational golf that is more intentional and therefore more meaningful. It’s enlightenment by virtue of an intense scholarly interest. In these unadorned videos, there is a raw, interior quality; the ineffable something that resonates when we are most deeply in love with the game.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com