I must know a couple of thousand people on a first-name basis who play golf, but I know only two who climb mountains. I went to Arizona to see one of them on the way to see the other in Kansas. I asked the first what I should ask the second. They’re both in the golf business, and I was looking to learn something about golf and life.

Pat Loftus, 69, is a senior executive with Ping. He’s climbed four of the World’s Seven Great Summits—Denali in Alaska, Elbrus in Russia, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Aconcagua in Argentina—but still dreams of reaching Everest in the Himalayas. “I would love to do it in retirement,” he says, and I think to myself that sounds nuts.

Pat first told me what not to ask. He says when someone’s climbing a mountain you never ask two things: You don’t ask him how he feels, because he feels crappy. You always feel crappy when you’re climbing a mountain. You’re not eating or sleeping. You’re lying on the ground and you’re cold. You need a shower. You don’t have enough oxygen. You feel isolated. So, of course, you feel crappy. Don’t ask that.

He says the second thing you never ask is how far you’ve got left to go, because you’ve always got a long way to go. When you’re climbing a mountain, you just put your head down and keep going. People think it’s about tenacity and determination, but it’s all about patience.

Nobody wants to hear that.

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I tell Pat, OK, I get the degree of difficulty, but our friend already climbed his mountain. What do I ask him? Rhett Evans, the 56-year-old CEO of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America—golf’s No. 1 greenkeeper— took a sabbatical from his job and spent 50 days this past spring climbing Mount Everest (29,035 feet), the world’s tallest summit. What Pine Valley is to golfers, Everest is to mountain climbers, times 100. About 6,600 individuals have done it since Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, but Rhett’s the only one I play golf with.

Loftus looked at me and said one word: “Why? That’s really the only question.”

Back in May, the climber in a group ahead of Evans died in the snow right in front him before reaching the summit. His Sherpa borrowed Rhett’s spare oxygen bottle and failed to revive him. The same day another climber died on the descent. This is known as the Death Zone, where your body deprived of oxygen is dying by the minute. Why the hell do golfers climb mountains?

Carnoustie is hard. Shinnecock and Oakmont can be impossible. But nobody dies playing them. So I flew from visiting Pat in Scottsdale to Kansas City and drove another 50 miles to Lawrence, Kan., where the GCSAA is headquartered and where Rhett works when he’s not climbing mountains. There’s a life-size bronze of Old Tom Morris, the original greenkeeper, standing outside his office. I asked Rhett one question, sat back and listened.

“Why? I thought a lot about that,” he began, “As humans we have an innate desire to improve ourselves. We’re innovators as a species. If we’re not extending ourselves, we’re stagnant. If we’re not reinventing ourselves, we become average. I have a deep belief that we’re all better than average if we push ourselves.”

(This made me laugh. I thought of A Prairie Home Companion, when Garrison Keillor lived in another small midwestern town where all the children were above average.)

“We’re so much more capable of what we think we can do,” Evans kept going. “Everybody doesn’t have to climb Everest. But we each stand to gain so much from doing something out of our comfort zone. No matter our health or disabilities, we push ourselves to get out of bed in the morning. Each one of us has something we’re dealing with—a fear of failure, inadequacy, lack of confidence. We all want to become a better person. Isn’t that why we do it?”

Stuart Franklin

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Most of the 2,000 golfers I know are double-sportsmen: They fish and golf or they ski and golf or they sail and golf or they play tennis and golf. But they’re not putting their lives at risk. I ask Rhett how he gets the fear of death out of his head. “You don’t,” he says. “I think all the time about those climbers who died, what were their regrets, what would they have changed?” Then he shows me a passage from his diary on the mountain: “The unforgettable faces of those who had perished just hours before loom over me. I had witnessed first-hand one of them take his last breath. It was a stark reminder how fragile life is. We never know when it will be our time. The memory of the climber’s final moment spurred me to maintain a hyper-focus and meticulous placement of each footstep. I ensured my crampons were securely embedded in the ice before taking my next step.”

The golf part of our brain doesn’t dwell as much on the why; it’s more thinking about the how.

How did Rhett get to the top of the world? He says he overcame three adversities, but I count a lot more. He dreamed for years and trained for months before he even got to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, about 4,600 feet above sea level. From there it’s about 14 days of climbing through the Himalayas to get to Everest Base Camp. Three days in, he ate some bad yak, got food poisoning and became so sick he thought his trip would end abruptly—the first adversity. But he made it to Base Camp, 17,500 feet, where he began to practice expeditions going higher and higher to acclimatize himself. On a climb up Lobuche Peak (20,075 feet), he fell and hurt his shoulder, wrist and leg—the second adversity. Again he thought it might be the end of the journey. He had to be helicoptered back to Kathmandu for treatment.

“You have plenty of time,” his Sherpa, Chakra, told him. “The mountain will be there waiting for you and we will climb her.”

Rhett returned and had to learn a modified climbing technique for his injuries. (When I saw him, he was still recovering and hadn’t been able to play golf.) The third adversity, he says, was the overall deterioration of his body—lack of oxygen, dehydration, weight loss, sleep deprivation, fatigue. “It just felt too big, too ominous,” he says. And then there were the false summits. Everest has several illusions where you think you’ve reached the top, but you haven’t. The Southern Summit, Hillary Step, the summit ridge, and only then the True Summit. He finally made it on May 23, looked around for 15 minutes and saw the curvature of the earth.

“A wave of emotions washed over me,” he wrote in his diary the next day. “I felt a sense of relief, accomplishment, a closeness to God. I had never before felt such a profound connection. Overwhelming gratitude.” Then he began what he learned would be the hardest part—more than half of deaths occur on the descent. “Getting to the summit was optional,” he says. “Getting down was mandatory—one of the axioms of mountaineering.”

“There are no secrets to success,” one diary entry read. “It’s simply a matter of methodical preparation, relentless hard work, and the resilience to rise after each fall. Chance truly favors the prepared.”

These are the words of a man who leads 20,000 hard-working golf superintendents fitting our game into the outside world. Their caring for the ecosystem of golf today is challenged by frequent extreme weather events and a growing climate crisis. It’s not enough to maintain green speeds and fairway conditioning. The GCSAA bears the responsibility to balance government regulation with environmental stewardship and wildlife preservation. The only person in the golf industry who’s climbed Everest seems like the man for the job.

What else has Rhett learned on the mountain? “You can’t give your life more time, so give your time more life,” he says now. “Be in the moment. Appreciate the present.”

Why, I ask him one last time. He quotes that other mountain climber, Ben Hogan: “The most important shot is the next one.” The next shot is our why.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com