Being avid golfers, it’s impossible to keep our minds off of this year’s US Open held at Bethpage Black, even as the players are kept from the green due to heavy rain.
People who don’t play golf always ask us why anyone would bother picking up the sport. Is it a status thing? Is it just for business networking? Perhaps for some people these are the reasons, for us they are entirely different.
Golf, to us, is an incredible sport because it has a built in equalizer called the “handicap” which allows people of differing abilities to play against one another evenly. No other sport has such a thing. Secondly, the game is always different, no matter how good you get at it. While a seasoned player can expect to play a decent game every time he or she picks up a tennis, badminton, squash racket or kick a soccer ball, with golf, the terrain, the weather, and especially your mental state, determine how well or how badly you’re going to do that day. You can be very terrible and you can be very good, it’s never a sure thing, just like business.
While other sports strive for predictability (well oiled lanes, same ball, no wind, etc.), golf is always better when it is new and you have to strategize every hole in your mind when you can’t see the pin or what lies beyond the initial turn. Which club do you use? Just because you can hit 180 meters doesn’t mean you should given the strong winds that day, or rain, or even just how you’re feeling. Conversely, you could be doing well, better than ever before, so maybe there’s no better time to take the risk. Again, a lot like business.
And don’t just take it from us either, as BT Frontline’s CEO, Lim Chin Hu, so eloquently put it, “In both golf and business, you need to have the right vision, strategy and the ability to execute. In golf, you envision where your ball is going to end up, and develop a course strategy. But just like in business, the execution phase – where the clubhead strikes the ball- counts the most. In golf, you can get into difficult situations- in the rough and having to take a 200 meter shot across the water. Do you take the risk and hit it with a wood or do you use an iron and lay up? There are similar decisions in business, you have to take risks, but only calculated ones where you have a fair chance of winning.”
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