How To Be A Champion

Is it just me or does your dad send you tons of email forwards? I don’t know how he has time for golf or gets anything done in retirement with all the email forwarding he does. The good news is he finally learned to cut and paste and bcc…

I cannot lie I hit delete more than I read them but this forwarded email with a quote from Jordan Speith’s caddy, Michael Greller, caught my eye and is a keeper.

Jordan’s Speith’s spectacular meltdown at this year’s Masters Touranment was breaking, headline news (“shocking!”), but in case you missed it:

Jordan Speith is a 22-year old professional golfer from Texas, all around nice kid, former number one in the world and was the defending champion of the Masters going into this year’s tournament.

These things take days and he “owned” the tournament from day one up until the 12th hole of the final day. Then he took a quadruple bogey 7 and that weird sound you heard was the collective gasp around the world.

It was downhill from there (you can read a hole by hole account here) Sadly very few will remember that Danny Willett won. Everyone will remember that Jordan Spieth lost.

That’s because I believe he will be back.

Along side every great golfer is a great caddie. Michael Greller is no exception:

“But don’t feel sorry or sad for us. We won’t get stuck in this moment, nor should you. We will work harder, fight harder and be better for it. We will bounce back as we have done many times. A wise coach reminded me recently, winning shows your character and losing shows ALL your character. Jordan continues to model grace and humility through wins and especially losses.” – Michael Greller via WeiUnderPar

In short: Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.

It’s a constant good reminder in our crazy mixed up world – because I’m a shortie – my body size lends itself to crawling into a ball and hiding under the covers.

Resilience:

  1. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity
  2. the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

‘Real champions use losses to make themselves stronger’ – Simon Marcus #1 ranked light heavyweight Muay Thai fighter