The Long Game

LIV is a Saudi-backed professional golf league launched in 2022 to challenge the established PGA Tour and D P World Tour. Its closure is a striking reminder that the resources to disrupt an industry do not automatically provide what is needed to sustain an institution.

A professional pathway cannot appear suddenly when a player decides to turn pro. It has to start much earlier, with children given the opportunity to discover golf, learn its fundamentals and receive the coaching and competition they need to improve.

Any golfer understands the temptation to practise what already feels good. If your driver is behaving beautifully and your short putting is a small humanitarian concern, hitting another basket of long, straight drives is satisfying.

Golf has a way of turning innocent ambitions into personal obligations. We want to improve our handicaps, break scoring barriers and demonstrate that all those hours of practice have achieved something.

Reading a green demands a different temperament from striking a powerful drive. The drive rewards confidence, coordination and commitment. Putting demands those qualities too, but adds patience, observation and sensitivity to influences that are not immediately obvious.

Markets move, technology advances and customers develop new habits. Sometimes, despite all the planning and experience we bring to the first tee, we discover that the course is no longer playing the way we prepared for it.

A dancer who ignores a change in the beat may still move with great confidence but soon looks as though they and the drummer came to different celebrations.

There is a useful distinction between deliberation and indecision. Deliberation happens before the decision: gathering information, considering alternatives, testing assumptions, and understanding consequences.