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Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
We’re a Lot Closer to Being a Decent Golfer Than We Used to Be 8-2-25
00:03:51
In this episode, Scott Becker shares a humorous and honest reflection on his ongoing quest to improve at golf.
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This is Scott Specker with the Becker Business podcast, the Becker Private Equity Podcast. And today's discussion is we are a lot closer to being a decent golfer than we were some time ago. So. So here's the discussion on this. At the end of the day, my golf game, in the big scheme of things, still sucks, and it's all a matter of who you compare it to and what you think about. But we are seeing some progress. Just to give some people some detail on this who are truly golfers and understand these numbers, my index is down to a 12.7, which is okay, other than the fact that just a couple years ago, it was down at about 10.2, 10.3, 10.4. So moving in the wrong direction index for those that are not regular golfers is sort of the amount of the sort of handicapping you get if you're a good or bad golfer based on what is par for the course. So if you're a great golfer, your index is down at, like, zero or better than that because you're so good, you don't need any handicap strokes. If you're a horrible golfer, like a couple of the guys I golf with regularly, your handicap index is closer to 18 to 20, which means on every single hole, you're essentially getting what's called a handicap stroke. Now, now, for me, when I first started just taking lessons again and started to get serious about golfing again, I went to go see this pro, and he would off, off, actually laugh at me as to how I tried to describe what I'm doing, right or wrong. He would essentially say, I've never heard anybody explain it so poorly. And my explanations would be along the lines of, you know, I just am all over the board. I'm hitting left, I'm hitting right. I've had too much coffee. I'm not concentrating. I'm not patient. I'm taking wrong club choices. And all those things, and all of them, I think are true. But he essentially said, look, I can't work with that. You got to tell me specifically, are you hitting the ball to the right or to the left? And let's cut out one of those two sides that then let's sort of measure when you're on the course how many sort of horrific shots you have what he would call a penalty shot, what either goes out of bounds or you've got to sort of punch back in, that you've sort of given up a stroke because you're just a bad shot. The second concept is how many two chips have you had how many times you're chipping out of the green, do you not get on in one and have to redo it again? And that is, again, you know, if you could get rid of the two chips, you help yourself. The third thing is the putting. How many three putts you have. So the concept being to actually sort of look at data as to what are you doing right, what are you doing wrong. Like, if your ball is going all over the place, you got to fix that. So it's really only going one regular error, one either left or right. It's not going all over the place because then you're trying to correct too many things at one time. Second is, you could analyze how many bad shots you had, like penalty shots where they caused you to actually lose a stroke versus how many two chips you have for somebody. Three putts you have. If you just get rid of those and focus on those making less bad shots, getting your chips on and not three putting, then all of a sudden you're scoring at a place that's much closer to a single handicap, a single digit handicap, which, of course, has always been my dream as a golfer. Now you have to remember I'm still terrible, but When I started 10 years ago, I was awfully terrible. So now I'm just terrible again. That's a story of making some improvement in golf. I've got a long way to go. It is what it is. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business Podcast, the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Thank you very, very.