Blake Griffin played his final NBA game in April 2023 but didn’t take long to produce a different kind of athletic highlight a few months later at Brentwood Country Club. The six-time NBA All-Star used a 7-iron to make a hole-in-one on the 187-yard second hole and started leading another fast break.
“I threw my club and took off running, and then my buddy’s like, ‘I haven’t hit yet,’ ” Griffin says. “I just ran back, and then, of course, I immediately blasted one out of bounds on the next hole.”
The experience was exhilarating, Griffin says, which is how basketball fans often felt after watching him play throughout his decorated college and pro career. The high-flying forward put more opponents on posters than possibly anyone in basketball history. Now he’s arguably prouder of the framed display of his ace hanging in his house. All the more impressive, the hole-in-one came in Griffin’s first few years of playing the game.
The COVID pandemic led to a well-documented golf boom that may have hit NBA players more than any other cross-section of people. Many of those playing in the league’s Orlando “bubble” in 2020 picked up the game for the first time given that they didn’t have much else to do between games. Griffin’s Detroit Pistons were one of eight teams not invited to Orlando due to their poor record, but the experience wound up having a trickle-down effect, creating a “bigger contingency of golfers in the league” and influencing him to pick up the game the following year.
As he got into his 30s, Griffin realized he was eventually going to need to find something to replace basketball in his life. The former mayor of “Lob City”— the name given to his highlight-reel Los Angeles Clippers—turned to lob wedges for both fun and sport.
“It’s a good, competitive outlet for me,” says Griffin, who the Clippers selected with the No. 1 pick in the 2009 NBA draft after Griffin swept the national player-of-the-year awards as a sophomore at the University of Oklahoma. “I always make these stupid mistakes, and then you learn from it, and you move on. That’s what I absolutely love about golf. It’s a mental battle between your ears.”
Griffin has whittled his handicap down to an 11 at Brentwood Country Club and Lakeside Golf Club in the Los Angeles area, getting help along the way with lessons first from Matt Parkovich at Urban Golf Performance and now Tanya Dergal at Brentwood. Not surprisingly, the 6-foot-9 Griffin has some serious pop off the tee, but unlike when he was throwing down ferocious dunks, he plays his best when he tries to take “70 percent” swings, especially with his driver. Griffin has also lowered his scores by treating 18-hole rounds like 48-minute basketball games and waiting to evaluate a performance until the final buzzer sounds.
“That’s the thing that I carry over,” says Griffin, whose career-best score (so far) is a 78 at Gozzer Ranch Golf & Lake Club. “It’s never as good as you think; it’s never as bad as you think. [It’s about] staying even and not trying to get outside of yourself.”
Griffin isn’t dunking on opponents on the court anymore, but he says he experienced a golf equivalent of that recently when he went one-on-four with his buddies during a game of Wolf—and made a 30-foot birdie putt to win the hole. “That was incredible,” Griffin says. “To take them all on, that was a pretty fun feeling.”
Like many athletes, Griffin knew he needed to find something active to fill his days in retirement. Unlike many players, however, he was able to walk away on his own terms. “It was time for me. My body was telling me,I think we’ve had enough,” Griffin says of retiring at 35. “I had a decent amount of injuries in my career and, thankfully, got to play with some awesome guys and have some great memories. I always said when that time came, I’m gonna try to retire as gracefully as possible. It’s been great, a whole new world has opened up: a lot more golf, a lot more time with family.”
NBA stars are playing longer these days—notably LeBron James and Griffin’s former Clippers teammate Chris Paul, who are still playing at 40—but Griffin has been happy to relinquish the day-to-day grind of professional basketball. “There’s some aspects of basketball I definitely miss, but, thankfully, I had a decently long career,” Griffin says before breaking into a smile, “and my body hurts a lot less.”
That doesn’t mean Griffin’s basketball career is over. Earlier this year he was named one of Amazon’s Prime Video studio analysts for when the streaming service starts its NBA coverage in the fall.
“I’m very excited,” Griffin says about his new gig. “I think there’s a disconnect between NBA fans and the NBA organizations and maybe some players right now. I think celebrating how good these guys are and what they’re able to do and highlighting how hard it is to actually do this sport could be good for basketball.”
It’s a role that seems perfect for Griffin, who has long been entertaining fans with more than his incredible aerial performances like the time he jumped over a Kia car to win the 2011 NBA Slam Dunk Contest. Griffin’s hilarious deadpan delivery has made him a popular pitchman (his Red Lobster commercials are currently getting as much air as he used to get on the court) and even led to him hosting a reality TV show for a year and dabbling in stand-up comedy.
Griffin’s golf game—and humor—were on display in 2024’s The Match: Superstars. A pairing with fellow funnyman Nate Bargatze didn’t play out well on the course, but Griffin provided the most memorable moment from the two-day event by delivering a clever line about a sweaty Charles Barkley changing shirts mid-round. “I’ve never heard a shirt audibly sigh,” Griffin quipped.
He’s also been busy hitting the celebrity golf circuit by playing in the American Century Championship at Lake Tahoe and the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions, so I asked him what shot he’d feel most comfortable hitting in front of a crowd. He grinned and quickly responded, “A one-foot putt would be great.”
Amazon hopes that Griffin will blossom into the next Barkley, the NBA Hall-of-Famer whose legend has grown over the past couple of decades for his witty and candid commentary on TNT’s “Inside the NBA.” In the meantime, Griffin is certainly on pace for a better golf career than Chuck—not that Griffin seems too concerned about that.
“I don’t need to be able to say I’m a single-digit handicap or anything; it’s just golf,” Griffin says. “Even when I’m playing badly, I’m like,this is still awesome. I still get to hang out with some friends or some guys that I just met. It just brings perspective to my life that I maybe didn’t always have before.”