Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
We’re a Lot Closer to Being a Decent Golfer Than We Used to Be 8-2-25
01 Aug 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker shares a humorous and honest reflection on his ongoing quest to improve at golf.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business Podcast, the Becker Private Equity Podcast. And today's discussion is, we are a lot closer to being a decent golfer than we were some time ago. So here's the discussion on this. At the end of the day, my golf game in the big scheme of things still sucks. And it's all a matter of who you compare it to and what you think about
Chapter 2: What progress has Scott made in his golf game?
but we are seeing some progress. Just to give some people some detail on this who are truly golfers and understand these numbers, my index is down to a 12.7, which is okay other than the fact that just a couple years ago it was down at about 10.2, 10.3, 10.4. So moving in the wrong direction.
Index, for those that are not regular golfers, is sort of the amount of sort of handicapping you get if you're a good or bad golfer based on what is par for the course. So if you're a great golfer, your index is down at like zero or better than that because you're so good, you don't need any handicap strokes.
If you're a horrible golfer, like a couple of the guys I golf with regularly, your handicap index is closer to 18 to 20, which means on every single hole, you're essentially getting what's called a handicap stroke. Now, for me, when I first started just taking lessons again and started to get serious about golfing again,
I went to go see this pro and he would off off actually laugh at me as to how I tried to describe what I'm doing right or wrong. He would essentially say, I've never heard anybody explain it so poorly. And my explanations would be along the lines of, you know, I just am all over the board. I'm, hitting left. I'm hitting right. I've had too much coffee. I'm not concentrating. I'm not patient.
I'm picking wrong club choices and all those things. And all of them I think are true, but he essentially said, look, I can't work with that. You got to tell me specifically, are you hitting the ball to the right or to the left? And let's cut out one of those two sides. Then let's sort of measure when you're on the course, how many sort of
horrific shots you have, what you would call a penalty shot, where it either goes out of bounds or you've got to sort of punch back in that you've sort of given up a stroke because it was just a bad shot. The second concept is how many two-chips have you had? How many times when you're chipping onto the green do you not get on in one and have to redo it again?
And that is, again, if you get rid of the two-chips, you help yourself. The third thing is the putting, how many three-putts you have.
So the concept being to actually sort of look at data as to what are you doing right, what are you doing wrong. Like if your ball is going all over the place, you've got to fix that so it's really only going one regular error, one either left or right. It's not going all over the place because then you're trying to correct too many things at one time.
Second is you can analyze how many bad shots you had, like penalty shots where they caused you to actually lose a stroke versus how many two-chips you have versus how many three-putts you have. If you just get rid of those and focus on those,
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Chapter 3: How is a golf handicap index calculated and what does it mean?
Thank you for listening to the Becker Business Podcast, the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Thank you very, very much.