Good is No Good

At the risk of alienating some of my friends and colleagues, I am going to admit to a self indulgence that I finally succumbed to last weekend. I went to The Masters at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia! After more than 50 years of watching the tournament on TV, I accepted the kind invitation of a friend and attended the final round on Sunday. And I’m glad I did because I learned a great deal. I didn’t learn much about golf since it quickly became evident that they are not playing the same game that I am playing; no, I learned what it takes to be GREAT at whatever you do.

Here’s what happened. I was in the grandstands watching the players warm up on the practice tee before starting their rounds. All were hitting crisp iron shots and towering drives, including Tiger Woods. After a while I moved to a more private practice area nearby where the players could hit pitch shots away from the huge crowds. As I stood by myself near an isolated green with absolutely no one else around I noticed one of the players approaching with a bag of practice balls. He stopped immediately in front of me, dropped the balls at my feet and began pitching them onto the green while he chatted with his swing coach, Hank Haney. It was Tiger! For several minutes it was just the three of us and I got to watch the greatest player in the world hone his game.

As I watched, Haney suggested that he hit some full wedges. Tiger hit four of them in a row, each one about a hundred and forty yards down the fairway, all within an area that could be covered by a blanket. Then the unthinkable happened! He hit the fifth shot a bit offline…..about ten yards to the left. He stopped and looked at his coach. As Tiger reconstructed his follow through, Haney took the club in his hands and made a slight adjustment to the swing plane, then stepped back to watch. Tiger dutifully struck the next five balls with a slightly extended follow through, just as his coach had suggested. It was a minor adjustment, of course, almost imperceptible, but it made a measurable difference. Each of the five shots landed in a tight grouping no larger than a beach towel.

Of course, within five minutes the spell was broken and there were two TV cameras and about three hundred people gathered to watch as Tiger chipped and pitched a few more shots, then left for the first tee. But, I had witnessed firsthand what few people are ever privileged to see: greatness in the making.

In design, as in golf, to be truly great at what we do we must continue to learn from others, no matter how experienced or talented we may be. Good is simply no good.