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Opinion & Analysis

The Next Great Olympians

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By Jamie Katz
GolfWRX Contributor

We piled out of the car, grabbed the bags and hit the course. I had five lads with me, all between 16 and 20 years old. We didn’t know it then, but it was the beginning of our strenuous training for golf’s newest, biggest prize: an Olympic medal. In 2016, golf comes to the Olympics in Brazil and with persistence, effort and a bit of luck, my boys will be there, representing what we hope will be a newly-great golfing nation: Ethiopia.

Okay, so what if the course we were going to was on an indoor simulator? And so what if the Ethiopian guys I had with me knew only one thing about golf: that Tiger Woods played? And so what if I’d never taught anyone, other than my daughter, a damn thing about golf? The quest was on.

A bit of background. My family is, in itself, a rainbow coalition. We adopted my daughter from China. I have one surfer-dude, California nephew; a niece born in the great state of Massachusetts; and three nieces and two nephews born in Ethiopia adopted by my sister, a single mom.

The boys, Amanual and Dawitt, are natural athletes and good runners. Skinny and strong, they played lots of soccer as kids, mostly because there weren’t a lot of other sports for them. In the US, they picked up basketball, football, dreams of making money and girls along the way. We live in the Boston area, so they’ve become Boston sports fan, with a particular passion for the Celtics.

Ethopian 2

I live in the same town with Amanual and Dawitt. I’m 60 years old. Where they are lean and fast, well, I’m neither. Not even close. I can beat them in swimming, skating, tennis and other sports they didn’t play in Ethiopia, but they’re catching me in everything else.

We live within a half-mile of a driving range that also has a pitch and putt course. In the vain hope that my daughter might like golf, I took her to the driving range a number of times when she was younger and had her take a few lessons from a good pro there — that’s a story for another day. I brought Dawitt along for a couple of the lessons. The pro loved his smile and his enthusiasm for trying to hit golf balls, though Dawitt didn’t have much early success at it. He and my daughter, who is about four years younger, trash-talked each other as they wailed away, balls going in many directions, while they tried to follow the pro’s instructions.

I played with the two of them once on the pitch and putt. Dawitt loved the fact that I only beat him by six shots. Of course, I didn’t explain to him that on most holes, we kept my score from the first shot but didn’t start keeping his score until he’d taken two or three shots off the tee and had one that was playable. The highlight for all of us was when my daughter hit a beautiful 9 iron about 90 yards. Trouble was, the hole was only 30 yards long and beyond it was a fence, then a road. She missed a car driving past by about two yards.

Back to my Olympians. When late November hits Boston, it’s time to take the clubs to indoor simulators. So one weekend afternoon a few years ago, I told Dawitt and Ahmanual to grab a couple of their friends so we could play golf indoors. At first, they didn’t understand what I was talking about. But since so much of the lives of teenagers is spent online or on video games, a golf game on a simulator is just as real to them as a real golf game. But they were still thrilled to play — if they could play Tiger Woods on Xbox, they figured they could play with real golf clubs.

The owner of the golf facility gave me a quizzical look as we approached the simulator. I’d been there a number of times, but always on my own to use the practice bays or occasionally to use the simulator to work with specific clubs.

“Who you got with you?” the owner asked me.

I was stymied for a moment, but then it hit me.

“The Ethiopian Olympic team.  Training starts today,” I said.

He laughed, but in that moment, I realized I’d found my destiny.

In that first session, only two of the guys had had golf lessons. The other three had never used a club before. That did not stop them, of course, from assuming that since they were all good athletes — all of them some were some combination of runners, basketball, football or soccer players — they would easily master golf. And, of course, they would beat me.

Ethopian 3

The simulator, thankfully, was like hitting into a cave. It had heavy vinyl curtains all around and on top, except for the front. Nobody could see in and no balls could get out. But, of course, other golfers could hear the sounds of balls hitting everywhere but the screen, along with a heavy dose of trash-talking that came in English and Umparik, the Ethiopian national language.

I gave the kids quick lessons in the grip, the stance and the swing, and had them take practice swings with balls off the tee to start. Very few of their shots went straight or far, but they kept bashing away. I did my best to instruct, but they were too busy dissing each other to pay much attention.

Then we started on the course. I picked the easiest course, with wide open fairways, and I put them on the shortest tees. I let them play the first couple of holes themselves. Nobody hit the ball more than about 70 yards towards the hole, a 300-yard par four, though one hit a long out-of-bounds slice. They all took between six and nine shots to get on the green. They gave the most verbal abuse to the youngest player, who hit the shortest, but straightest shots. When he managed to sink about a 30-foot putt, against all odds, the trash-talking actually stopped for a moment.

At No. 3 hole, I let them all hit first. Somebody had a drive close to 100 yards, but again balls were splayed all over the place and multiple mulligans were taken. Then I stepped up to the tee. I played from the back tee and hit a good drive for me, about 250 yards down the middle. For the second time, silence, but then, “Oh, my God, that’s like Tiger Woods,” “Look how far that is,” and a bunch of Umparic comments that were probably along the lines of “How did an fat, old guy do that?”

We finished the day a slight bit more polished than when we started. But only a slight bit. We’ve gone back a number of times since and will be back there this winter. I figure we’ll ramp up the training this year. More balls go straighter now. Guys are now getting out there close to 150 yards. The guy who owns the indoor range welcomes us with a smile on his face, knowing he’ll have a bunch of happy, enthusiastic golfers, even if their shots don’t quite yet merit the enthusiasm.

Despite the grueling training I put them through, the young men all have fun. I figure that after this winter’s intense training, I’ll get them on golf courses next summer at least a few times. We have to step it up — I have three years to whip them into shape.

You’re skeptical, I know, I can read it in your eyes. But hey, I believe in these guys. And as for their places on the Ethiopian Olympic team, I figure we’re in pretty good shape. Last time I looked, Ethiopia had one nine-hole golf course and a six-hole course at the British Embassy. How good can their competition be? And after all, we’re getting better and playing a harder course — Pebble Beach on a simulator. What could be tougher training?

GolfWRX is the world's largest and best online golf community. Expert editorial reviews, breaking golf tour and industry news, what to play, how to play and where to play. GolfWRX surrounds consumers throughout the buying, learning and enrichment process from original photographic and video content, to peer to peer advice and camaraderie, to technical how-tos, and more. As the largest online golf community we continue to protect the purity of our members opinions and the platform to voice them. We want to protect the interests of golfers by providing an unbiased platform to feel proud to contribute to for years to come. You can follow GolfWRX on Twitter @GolfWRX and on Facebook.

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Charles Brown

    Jan 23, 2013 at 10:37 am

    First class teacher means first class student-there is no other logical way.

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Opinion & Analysis

The 2 primary challenges golf equipment companies face

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As the editor-in-chief of this website and an observer of the GolfWRX forums and other online golf equipment discourse for over a decade, I’m pretty well attuned to the grunts and grumbles of a significant portion of the golf equipment purchasing spectrum. And before you accuse me of lording above all in some digital ivory tower, I’d like to offer that I worked at golf courses (public and private) for years prior to picking up my pen, so I’m well-versed in the non-degenerate golf equipment consumers out there. I touched (green)grass (retail)!

Complaints about the ills of and related to the OEMs usually follow some version of: Product cycles are too short for real innovation, tour equipment isn’t the same as retail (which is largely not true, by the way), too much is invested in marketing and not enough in R&D, top staffer X hasn’t even put the new driver in play, so it’s obviously not superior to the previous generation, prices are too high, and on and on.

Without digging into the merits of any of these claims, which I believe are mostly red herrings, I’d like to bring into view of our rangefinder what I believe to be the two primary difficulties golf equipment companies face.

One: As Terry Koehler, back when he was the CEO of Ben Hogan, told me at the time of the Ft Worth irons launch, if you can’t regularly hit the golf ball in a coin-sized area in the middle of the face, there’s not a ton that iron technology can do for you. Now, this is less true now with respect to irons than when he said it, and is less and less true by degrees as the clubs get larger (utilities, fairways, hybrids, drivers), but there remains a great deal of golf equipment truth in that statement. Think about it — which is to say, in TL;DR fashion, get lessons from a qualified instructor who will teach you about the fundamentals of repeatable impact and how the golf swing works, not just offer band-aid fixes. If you can’t repeatably deliver the golf club to the golf ball in something resembling the manner it was designed for, how can you expect to be getting the most out of the club — put another way, the maximum value from your investment?

Similarly, game improvement equipment can only improve your game if you game it. In other words, get fit for the clubs you ought to be playing rather than filling the bag with the ones you wish you could hit or used to be able to hit. Of course, don’t do this if you don’t care about performance and just want to hit a forged blade while playing off an 18 handicap. That’s absolutely fine. There were plenty of members in clubs back in the day playing Hogan Apex or Mizuno MP-32 irons who had no business doing so from a ballstriking standpoint, but they enjoyed their look, feel, and complementary qualities to their Gatsby hats and cashmere sweaters. Do what brings you a measure of joy in this maddening game.

Now, the second issue. This is not a plea for non-conforming equipment; rather, it is a statement of fact. USGA/R&A limits on every facet of golf equipment are detrimental to golf equipment manufacturers. Sure, you know this, but do you think about it as it applies to almost every element of equipment? A 500cc driver would be inherently more forgiving than a 460cc, as one with a COR measurement in excess of 0.83. 50-inch shafts. Box grooves. And on and on.

Would fewer regulations be objectively bad for the game? Would this erode its soul? Fortunately, that’s beside the point of this exercise, which is merely to point out the facts. The fact, in this case, is that equipment restrictions and regulations are the slaughterbench of an abundance of innovation in the golf equipment space. Is this for the best? Well, now I’ve asked the question twice and might as well give a partial response, I guess my answer to that would be, “It depends on what type of golf you’re playing and who you’re playing it with.”

For my part, I don’t mind embarrassing myself with vintage blades and persimmons chasing after the quasi-spiritual elevation of a well-struck shot, but that’s just me. Plenty of folks don’t give a damn if their grooves are conforming. Plenty of folks think the folks in Liberty Corner ought to add a prison to the museum for such offences. And those are just a few of the considerations for the amateur game — which doesn’t get inside the gallery ropes of the pro game…

Different strokes in the game of golf, in my humble opinion.

Anyway, I believe equipment company engineers are genuinely trying to build better equipment year over year. The marketing departments are trying to find ways to make this equipment appeal to the broadest segment of the golf market possible. All of this against (1) the backdrop of — at least for now — firm product cycles. And golfers who, with their ~15 average handicap (men), for the most part, are not striping the golf ball like Tiger in his prime and seem to have less and less time year over year to practice and improve. (2) Regulations that massively restrict what they’re able to do…

That’s the landscape as I see it and the real headwinds for golf equipment companies. No doubt, there’s more I haven’t considered, but I think the previous is a better — and better faith — point of departure when formulating any serious commentary on the golf equipment world than some of the more cynical and conspiratorial takes I hear.

Agree? Disagree? Think I’m worthy of an Adam Hadwin-esque security guard tackle? Let me know in the comments.

@golfoncbs The infamous Adam Hadwin tackle ? #golf #fyp #canada #pgatour #adamhadwin ? Ghibli-style nostalgic waltz – MaSssuguMusic

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Podcasts

Fore Love of Golf: Introducing a new club concept

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Episode #16 brings us Cliff McKinney. Cliff is the founder of Old Charlie Golf Club, a new club, and concept, to be built in the Florida panhandle. The model is quite interesting and aims to make great, private golf more affordable. We hope you enjoy the show!

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Opinion & Analysis

On Scottie Scheffler wondering ‘What’s the point of winning?’

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Last week, I came across a reel from BBC Sport on Instagram featuring Scottie Scheffler speaking to the media ahead of The Open at Royal Portrush. In it, he shared that he often wonders what the point is of wanting to win tournaments so badly — especially when he knows, deep down, that it doesn’t lead to a truly fulfilling life.

 

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“Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf? Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it because I’ve literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport,” Scheffler said. “To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think, is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world, because what’s the point?”

Ironically — or perhaps perfectly — he went on to win the claret jug.

That question — what’s the point of winning? — cuts straight to the heart of the human journey.

As someone who’s spent over two decades in the trenches of professional golf, and in deep study of the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the game, I see Scottie’s inner conflict as a sign of soul evolution in motion.

I came to golf late. I wasn’t a junior standout or college All-American. At 27, I left a steady corporate job to see if I could be on the PGA Tour starting as a 14-handicap, average-length hitter. Over the years, my journey has been defined less by trophies and more by the relentless effort to navigate the deeply inequitable and gated system of professional golf — an effort that ultimately turned inward and helped me evolve as both a golfer and a person.

One perspective that helped me make sense of this inner dissonance around competition and our culture’s tendency to overvalue winning is the idea of soul evolution.

The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies has done extensive research on reincarnation, and Netflix’s Surviving Death (Episode 6) explores the topic, too. Whether you take it literally or metaphorically, the idea that we’re on a long arc of growth — from beginner to sage elder — offers a profound perspective.

If you accept the premise literally, then terms like “young soul” and “old soul” start to hold meaning. However, even if we set the word “soul” aside, it’s easy to see that different levels of life experience produce different worldviews.

Newer souls — or people in earlier stages of their development — may be curious and kind but still lack discernment or depth. There is a naivety, and they don’t yet question as deeply, tending to see things in black and white, partly because certainty feels safer than confronting the unknown.

As we gain more experience, we begin to experiment. We test limits. We chase extreme external goals — sometimes at the expense of health, relationships, or inner peace — still operating from hunger, ambition, and the fragility of the ego.

It’s a necessary stage, but often a turbulent and unfulfilling one.

David Duval fell off the map after reaching World No. 1. Bubba Watson had his own “Is this it?” moment with his caddie, Ted Scott, after winning the Masters.

In Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, reflecting on his 2011 Super Bowl win, Rodgers said:

“Now I’ve accomplished the only thing that I really, really wanted to do in my life. Now what? I was like, ‘Did I aim at the wrong thing? Did I spend too much time thinking about stuff that ultimately doesn’t give you true happiness?’”

Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

Eventually, though, something shifts.

We begin to see in shades of gray. Winning, dominating, accumulating—these pursuits lose their shine. The rewards feel more fleeting. Living in a constant state of fight-or-flight makes us feel alive, yes, but not happy and joyful.

Compassion begins to replace ambition. Love, presence, and gratitude become more fulfilling than status, profits, or trophies. We crave balance over burnout. Collaboration over competition. Meaning over metrics.

Interestingly, if we zoom out, we can apply this same model to nations and cultures. Countries, like people, have a collective “soul stage” made up of the individuals within them.

Take the United States, for example. I’d place it as a mid-level soul: highly competitive and deeply driven, but still learning emotional maturity. Still uncomfortable with nuance. Still believing that more is always better. Despite its global wins, the U.S. currently ranks just 23rd in happiness (as of 2025). You might liken it to a gifted teenager—bold, eager, and ambitious, but angsty and still figuring out how to live well and in balance. As much as a parent wants to protect their child, sometimes the child has to make their own mistakes to truly grow.

So when Scottie Scheffler wonders what the point of winning is, I don’t see someone losing strength.

I see someone evolving.

He’s beginning to look beyond the leaderboard. Beyond metrics of success that carry a lower vibration. And yet, in a poetic twist, Scheffler did go on to win The Open. But that only reinforces the point: even at the pinnacle, the question remains. And if more of us in the golf and sports world — and in U.S. culture at large — started asking similar questions, we might discover that the more meaningful trophy isn’t about accumulating or beating others at all costs.

It’s about awakening and evolving to something more than winning could ever promise.

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