Life and Sport
Stress, what Stress?
Author: Bryan Davies
I do not often reach for my trusty Oxford English Dictionary of Etymology while taking in a golf telecast, but the CBS commentary at this year's British Open drove me to it.
The announcers were making their usual fawning references to Tiger Woods, a peerless athlete, and the pressures that he faces every week in competition. The stated combination facing Woods was a three headed dragon of tension, stress, and nerves – the broadcast crew repeated these words with an peculiar reverence. Woods' father died this past spring time and the understandable grief at his father's passing was seen by the television experts as an additional pressure point for the world's greatest player.
I am not a huge fan of televised golf, although golf is an excellent sport. My own credentials for expert golf commentary are as compelling as those for any layman; my infrequent and generally terrible play never gets in the way of my opinions about the game. Bad golf in the open spaces has its own natural joys (with my game, it often takes on the additional element of a jungle safari). Watching golf on television has a numbing sameness to me – if the helpful experts did not tell you the nature of the course and the yardages, delivered against a backdrop of computerized mockups that look suspiciously like the graphics of a video game, who could ever tell a good player from a poor one by simply watching them swing the club?
The Chartered Accountants of the Sporting World
Golfers are not the most galvanizing of subjects either – these are the chartered accountants of the sporting world. A change in wind direction of more than one mile per hour, a 30 per cent chance of a gentle rain shower, or a gallery nimrod bellowing 'Yer the man!' a nanosecond too early for the liking of the course marshals will each yield the fodder for several minutes of broadcaster observations. Tee to green, to next tee, all supported by polite applause or an occasional ovation. Televised golf has the zip of a United Church strawberry social.
You can judge a person by their paradoxes, me included – I am transfixed when one of golf's four major tournaments is on the air. Golf seems to rise to the occasion then, at places dripping with history like Augusta or Carnostie, where each event spawns a hundred tiny dramas all played out on a four day installment plan. The glue of any great golf drama is the sublime pressure of a major, not the predictable and slightly insipid brew made from the weekly golf tour grind.
Tension, Stress and Nerves
Tension, stress, and nerves were used interchangeably by the CBS team to define the pressures that weigh upon Tiger Woods; the Oxford editors tell us that each of these nouns has a distinct Latin origin that reinforces subtle but powerful differences in meaning. Tension is the stretching, stiffness or strain produced in an object. Stress is a constraining force that places a demand upon our physical or mental energies. Nerves are an exaggerated sensitivity that renders the subject timid or fearful. The commentator, in seeking to simply fill air with supposed synonyms for the pressure experienced by Tiger Woods, provided the ingredients of an extremely incapacitating and destabilizing athletic mixture. I wondered then if this supremely talented and successful golfer faced a different demon than that depicted by these experts.
My thoughts turned from the dry analysis of word roots to the true pressures of big time golf and Tiger. His is the ever present and never ending burden of performance. He is likely the greatest ever to play the game, and as he sets up over a six foot putt to clinch the prestigious British Open, Woods must feel the inexorable squeeze of expectation.
How many touring professional golfers are truly set for life? Tiger Woods will make $100 million or more in the next five years even if he never swings a golf club because the photogenic and record smashing Tiger has lucrative and guaranteed commercial endorsements. There are less than a handful of golfers in his economic strata. One of the enduring beauties of professional golf is that for most competitors it is a sport without a safety net. Prize money is just that – the spoils of victory.
An NHL player who performs indifferently during year two of a four year, $12 million contract will collect his remaining six million dollars, one way or the other. Professional basketball renders hockey salaries to the level of chump change; in 2005 the Toronto Raptors paid Alonzo Mourning $10 million not to play for them, to free up salary cap space that they could pay to someone else. Basketball economics and a train wreck have their similarities.
Golf Economics
A golfer who fails to make the cut at an individual tournament receives nothing; he must pay his caddy and his traveling expenses whether he wins, finishes in the money, or loses. If the golfer fails to finish among the top 125 players on the yearly money list maintained by the American professional tour, the golfer will likely fall from the top echelon into the netherworld where clambering back to the elite is more difficult than getting there in the first place. There is no in between. For every player on the exalted money list, there are a thousand slavering to take his place.
And back to the triumvirate of tension, stress, and nerves – where is the ground zero of pure gut twisting, soul crushing pressure to perform in professional golf? Does it detonate closest to Tiger Woods? Or, like a man working near the door to a blast furnace, does a ceaseless heat blister the golfers trying to stay alive week to week in a remorseless competition that incinerates all but 125 who can stand it? To me, that is true and perfect pressure. Tiger Woods, a rich man and a consummate golfer, feels the pressure to compete and to perform; the lesser talents face the extinction of their professional beings if they fail.
Survival in the Golf and Business World
The business world is a perfect mirror of the stresses of competitive golf in one aspect, and is its antithesis in another. The business news media will often examine the pressures faced by the leadership of a multinational company like Inco or Molson Breweries when confronted by a hostile takeover bid. They are the "boardroom Tiger Woods" who are competing in an environment where they are near the top of a long food chain, where their corporate existence will not die if they fail now. For pure, unvarnished business pressure, a new hire making their first presentation to company management is battling as desperately for a success as the golfer seeking to stay on the money list – both are playing for their survival.
Golf is rhapsodized as the great business game, where friendships are forged and relationships are built during and after a round. Golf is a game of honesty, where at every level – from my own expeditions into the wild and into the PGA Tour – the players are required to enforce their own rules. In the face of ceaseless competitive burdens, cheating in professional golf is unheard of. The players may have rivalries and dislikes, but they treat one another as sportsmen. True personal conflict between these athletes is very rare, engaged as they are in what for most is an all or nothing enterprise. In contrast, the positive effect of golf upon general business ethics likely ends at the clubhouse door.
One will occasionally find a sports report concerning a player that reads:
After attempting to hit out of the thick sage grass rough at the 14th fairway, Daly brought to the attention of the course marshals that he had inadvertently moved his ball prior to striking the ball with his club in his swing. Daly took a further one stroke penalty and eventually double bogeyed the hole to fall out of tournament contention.
I suppose that the business equivalent would be something like this:
After reviewing the offer to purchase its North American subsidiary made by ZS Inc of Austria, Veritas CEO William Honore informed ZS that their offer was too generous when assessed against 2007 internal Veritas projections. Honore stated that his company would instead accept a $10 M reduction on the purchase price as submitted.
Please contact me at ACQYR if you ever see anything approximating my second example. I may be delayed in my reply... I will be on the professional golf tour, teeing it up with Tiger.
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Published: August 17, 2006
