After I wondered why the wile excitement of the Ryder Cup wasn’t translating into more people playing golf, Azinger looked at me like I’d ask him to explain nuclear fission.
Before he delivered his keynote address at the Golf Industry Show in New Orleans last month, Paul Azinger sat down for an informal chat with some editors of golf-industry publications, including me.
Most of the discussion centered around the thrilling victory at Valhalla GC last fall by the underdog U.S. Ryder Cup team that Azinger captained. The man known on the Tour as “ ‘Zinger” got visibly pumped, as if it had just happened the day before, as he described how his U.S. players fed off the energy of the big, vocal crowds to pull off the upset win.
So I felt I had to ask him, in light of our recent story on “Golf’s Future” (“How Clubs Can Help Save the Game,” C&RB, January ‘09): “Paul, why doesn’t that kind of wild excitement about the game translate into more people playing more rounds of golf?”
Azinger looked at me like I’d asked him to explain nuclear fission. “Oh, I don’t know, I’m not an economist,” he said. “Golf’s an expensive hobby. People are cutting corners and it’s getting tougher to afford it. Maybe we need to find ways to give out more free golf balls or something.”
Then Azinger quickly swung back to a topic he was clearly more comfortable with (and in fact will soon write a book about): the philosophies he used to create and manage the various four-man “pods” that he put into successful competition against the Europeans. There was the “aggressive” pod, with hard-chargers like Phil Mickelson; the “steady” pod, with unflashy but reliable players like Stewart Cink; and then the third group, affectionately named the “redneck” pod, with free-swinging characters like Boo Weekley and J.B. Holmes (this pod would have also included Tiger Woods, Azinger said, if he hadn’t been injured).
“We put the pods together not based on their games, but on our observations of personalities,” Azinger said. “The idea was to create ‘bands of brothers’ and ‘teams within a team.’ Once the pods were formed, I sold all the players on the concept, which was almost militaristic—I said I’d never break them out of the pods and that I wanted them to have ownership in them, be invested in and committed to them, and sell out for each other.”
Azinger went on to connect the dots between how this approach led to such a successful result. For someone who downplays his insights off the golf course, he sure seemed to have a lot of good ideas that could be applied to not only growing the game, but running more effective club management teams. He won’t be the captain of this year’s Ryder Cup team, so his schedule might be a little more open; maybe it would be worth trying to get him to come play at your club and talk to your “pods”?
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