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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday July 22, 2002 Volume IV Number 29 |
FOCUS - Storm at Muirfield
What is it like to be the best in the world? I’ll never know, really. I can only guess. But sometimes, you can wake up thinking you’re in pretty good position to take it all home, and then the bottom falls out.
No one is exempt.
Friday, all day long the numbers on the ticker crossing the bottom of my computer monitor were red. It was another stock market sell off. It appears as though the prevailing investor psychology is fear of loss. So a good many folks are locking it in, bailing out, in a flight for some alternative that will bring back the hope of gains. But where might that be? By the end of the day, the market could not keep up with the sell orders. As you read, you know what this Monday morning holds. We all expect more selling.
Saturday’s performance by the best golfer in the world mirrored the performance of Wall Street on Friday (and maybe Monday, too).
Most everyone agreed, Tiger Woods was the heavy favorite coming into the British Open this weekend. This year, he seemed unbeatable. He’s been in the zone. Overcoming all the odds. And then the North Wind picked up off the North Sea and the gray skies darkened and the summer temperature dropped and the rains came and the chill kicked in and Tiger’s game tanked.
A major event in golf tournament places heavy demands on the best golfers in the world. It’s not just a single stroke or a single hole or a single round. It is four rounds. And if you falter on any one day, you are out of the running. The winner is the survivor of four full days of relentless challenge; against the best of the best. To finish in the top ten is a major feat. To win the championship - extraordinary.
By the time Tiger finished the front nine,
fifty other golfers knew the trophy was up
for grabs. As he battled the high winds and the driving rain, he missed the
fairways, dropped into the rough and the hay, dribbled into the bunkers (which
in Scotland are potholes, encircled by high walls) and rolled puts just outside
the cup. By the time he finished, he posted the worst round of his
professional career. Ten over par.
Golf is a game of self-control. Self-talk becomes self-fulfilling prophesy. If you tell yourself that you are no good, you will be. If you decide you can’t hit a straight shot, you won’t. In this sense, golf is a little like poker. The winner must maintain his game face. He is unaffected by his mistakes. He is muted about his triumphs. He holds on to his belief in his abilities, no matter what. He remains cool.
No one seemed better able to keep control than Tiger Woods, until the third round at Muirfield. Finally, the frustration made its way to the surface, and the young veteran was annoyed. At the foreboding skies through wind and rain, he shook his fist. He slammed his club back at the ground. He wagged his head in disgust. He cursed. It was a champion losing his hold on a record he’d claimed as his own; but now slipped away out of reach.
The world of Golf, up until today, has been all abuzz over the Grand Slam. Until this morning, Tiger Woods was in a position to do the impossible – win all four major tournaments of the professional Tour in a calendar year. The US Open. The Masters. The British Open. The PGA. Tiger has won them all, but never consecutively in a single season. To date, he won the first two, and had he won the British this weekend, he would be in line to do what few golfers have ever done. The Grand Slam of Golf.
When Tiger arrived this week in Scotland and he was welcomed like Royalty. He’s taken a few weeks off from the tour, and when he deplaned from his corporate jet, he sported a goatee and mustache. That became news. He played his first two rounds with panache, posting respectable scores, recovering from bad shots, saving par, lipping birdie putt after birdie putt, barely missing makable strokes that would otherwise have put him way into the lead. But when he completed his second round a mere two strokes out it simply meant that Tiger remained the undisputed favorite.
By the time Tiger hit the end of this third round, he knew. A man who aims for six or eight or more birdies in a round had more than that count in bogeys. Instead of five or six under par, he was eleven over. Chilled, soaked, Muirfield beat him up, left him shivering.
My former partner called golf a humbling game. Indeed.
The fans weathered the storm. For a chance to see Tiger Woods in person, record crowds remained, bundled in layered clothes, holding oversized umbrellas against the wind, leaning into the force of it. By now, Tiger’s anger subsided. He turned philosophical. The game got him. Like it does all of us.
The legendary Jim McKay of Wide World of Sports fame quoted Jack Nicklaus. “Golf is not fair – you take is as it comes.”
Some people call it luck. Or karma. Or providence. Some call on the gods of golf - who either smile or frown. Some call it fate. Good or bad fortune. Destiny. It’s the recognition that the game is a combination of both skill and chance. “It was my day, I guess.” Or, “It just wasn’t my day.” No matter what the preparation, the native ability, the honed skills, the practice, the deliberate strategies, the game plan, there remains the mysterious element of the unpredictable. The unanticipated. The unwelcome distraction. The uninvited intrusion. The bad bounce.
So at the end of the round, Tiger gave in to the disappointment, embraced the hard reality, and let it go. It had been Tiger’s first birdieless round. He stepped up to the tee on the seventeenth hole, relaxed, nothing more to lose than what he’d already lost. He hit an effortless birdie. At last. One under par. Just like the Tiger Woods everybody knows. And as the ball dropped into the cup, the crowd exploded in applause, Tiger raised his hands as though he’d won the championship, flashed that Tiger smile and the crowd roared again.
But victory was not to be.
* * * * * * *
Tiger’s best friend on the tour is Mark O’Meara. Both of them have won the British Open (Woods, 2001; O’Meara, 1997). Both came to Muirfield with an equal measure of desire to win the silver claret jug.
It was something of an irony that Tiger would be paired with his close friend on Saturday’s round. If the other players had an advantage on the day of the big storm by start time (the storm seemed most severe during Tiger’s eighteen holes), it certainly didn’t help Mark O’Meara. They battled through the wind and the rain together.
Like Woods, O’Meara played spectacular golf on all three rounds – the first, the second and the fourth. All under par. Seven under par for his three rounds. (For the same rounds, Tiger was eleven under.)
But O’Meara’s third, paired with Tiger on the day of the storm, was an abysmal six over par (seventy-seven). So, for the record, he beat Tiger that day (eighty-one). But it was hardly an occasion for celebration.
The two will commiserate over the third round of the British Open for many years to come. They’ll quote salient passages from the Book of Lamentations.
But when Tiger gave the proverbial interview at the end of his historic (the worst ever) round, he was gracious. Philosophical.
“I birdied seventeen,” he smiled.
On Sunday, he hit an amazing sixty-five.
For a twenty-eighth place tournament finish.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday Morning. You are a leader.
For some of us, it feels like the North Wind blowing at Muirfield. The relentless bad news on Wall Street, the corporate shenanigans, the political positioning, all seem to be tearing away at investor confidence. People’s nest eggs are under attack.
And maybe for you, too. The dog days of summer are just around the corner. It feels like a storm is brewing, calling your goals and your abilities and your hopes and dreams into question… filling you with doubts about yourself and about your future.
Sometimes even champions falter. Sometimes the bright and bold predictions of the best analysts around fail to materialize. Sometimes it’s just two old friends bundled up against the cold and the wind and the rain, and plain survival becomes more important than breaking records.
I’d like to listen in on that private post-third-round battle weary conversation between Tiger Woods and Mark O’Meara. They were there, when disappointment after disappointment and trouble in the rough and in the bunkers, when their world-class level of play felt amateurish in the face of the storm; they were there, against the wind, together.
Maybe they are even closer friends now than ever before.
But neither of them is finished chasing after the win.
And neither are we.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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