Joel Dahmen and I had known each other for only a few minutes, and he could already smell fear. It was just after dawn in the Arizona desert, and the PGA Tour veteran and I were standing back-to-back for a photo before teeing off on video.

“I can feel Sam’s heart beating through his shirt,” Joel said.

It wasn’t quite a competition, and even if it was, Dahmen was more like my partner. We were there to resurrect an idea Golf Digest had executed three decades earlier between writer Peter Andrews and Mark O’Meara. Dahmen and I would play 18 holes of stroke play with one notable twist: I would tee off from the 7,165-yard tips, and Dahmen would play out the hole from my feeble drive; I’d get to play the ball miles ahead that Dahmen would launch from the 6,246-yard members tees. The question we sought to answer was how much the distance between a winner on the PGA Tour and a light-hitting golf editor (a 10.8 Handicap Index the morning of the experiment) was really about that—distance. Otherwise, weren’t we essentially playing the same game?