I Grew Up on Cricket. Golf Is Teaching Me Something Completely Different.

I picked up a golf club for the first time a few weeks ago and I want to be honest about what happened.

Nothing went where I wanted it to go.

I am a cricket man. Have been my whole life. I understand the crack of a well-timed cover drive. I understand the pressure of a last over, the electricity of a packed stadium, the way a team can lift you when your own legs have nothing left. Cricket is in my blood in the way that certain things just are, not because you chose them but because they chose you somewhere around the age of seven and never really let go.

Golf is something else entirely.

There is no crowd. There is no team. There is no one to look at when something goes wrong. Just you, a club that feels slightly ridiculous in your hands, a small white ball that has apparently decided to do whatever it wants, and an enormous amount of quiet.

The quiet was the first thing that surprised me. I did not know what to do with it.

Cricket taught me to play fast. Golf is teaching me to play my own game.

In cricket, pace is everything. The game moves. The crowd responds. You read the ball, you react, you adjust in real time. There is a rhythm to it that feels almost biological once you know it. You do not think your way through a cover drive. You feel it and you execute.

I tried to bring that energy to golf. I stood at the tee, locked in on the target, and swung with everything I had.

The ball went approximately forty five degrees to the left and disappeared into something I can only describe as nature.

The man next to me, a patient soul who had clearly watched this happen many times before, said something I have been thinking about ever since. He said: the harder you try to control it, the less control you have.

Golf does not reward the person who tries hardest at the moment. It rewards the person who has built the right habits over time and then trusts them completely when it matters. There is no shortcut available. No teammate who can cover for you. No crowd that can carry you through a bad patch of pure adrenaline.

It is just you. And whatever you have actually built. Not what you think you have built. What you have actually built.

I have never felt more alone on a sports field in my life. I mean that as a compliment to the game.

Cricket rewards aggression. Golf punishes it every single time.

This was the lesson that hit me hardest and earliest.

I am, by nature, an aggressive decision maker. I back myself. I go for it. In cricket this tendency has served me reasonably well. The bold shot, the unexpected move, the decision that surprises everyone including you sometimes. Cricket has room for that. Cricket occasionally rewards it spectacularly.

Golf looked at my aggression and quietly, consistently, sent my ball somewhere unhelpful.

Every time I tried to hit harder, I hit worse. Every time I muscled through a shot, the ball laughed at me. The swings that actually worked, the ones that felt almost effortless, were the ones where I slowed down, trusted the form, and stopped trying to force the outcome.

I have been running businesses for over twenty years. I cannot tell you how many times I have tried to force an outcome that was not ready to happen yet. How many times I have swung harder at a problem that needed patience rather than power. How many decisions I made at full aggression that would have been considerably better at half the speed.

Golf is teaching me this in real time, on a golf course, with immediate and humbling feedback. It is the most efficient business school I have ever attended and it charges green fees instead of tuition.

I had no idea how impatient I actually was.

Cricket has patience in it, but it is patience with an escape hatch. The batsman waits for the right ball. The fielding captain waits for the right moment. But there is always movement, always something happening, always the possibility that the next delivery changes everything.

Golf is four hours of patience with no escape hatch whatsoever.

You cannot rush a golf course. You cannot intimidate it. You cannot outwork it on the day. You either bring the right mental state to every single shot across every single hole for the entire round, or the course finds out very quickly that you did not.

I realised somewhere around the seventh hole of my first proper round that I had been confusing urgency with impatience my entire career. They feel identical from the inside. They produce very different results on the outside.

Urgency is knowing that something matters and moving with purpose. Impatience is moving fast because stillness makes you uncomfortable. One of them builds things. The other one just creates the feeling of building things, which is considerably more dangerous because it is so easy to mistake for the real version.

Golf showed me which one I was defaulting to. I did not entirely love what I saw. I am working on it.

In cricket a bad over is forgotten. In golf a bad hole follows you around.

This might be the lesson I am still sitting with most.

Cricket is forgiving in a particular way. A bad over happens and then the next over begins and the scoreboard moves and the game continues and nobody, including you, has to carry it very far. The structure of the sport gives you natural resets. The next delivery is always coming.

Golf does not offer resets. You carry your score from the first hole to the eighteenth. A bad hole does not disappear. It sits in the card, visible, following you around the course for the rest of the round.

What changes is not the hole. What changes is how you decide to carry it.

I watched a man in my group take a seven on the fourth hole, which is not ideal on a par three, and then proceed to play the next fourteen holes as if nothing had happened. Clean. Focused. Completely unbothered. He finished respectably. Better than someone else in the group who had a clean card through five and then let one bad shot on the sixth unravel everything that came after.

The bad hole was the same for both of them in terms of score. What differed was the weight they chose to assign it.

I have been in enough board meetings, enough difficult quarters, enough moments where something went wrong at exactly the wrong time, to know that this is the real leadership test. Not whether you avoid mistakes. You will not. Not whether the bad hole happens. It will. But whether you have the discipline to put the card down, step up to the next tee, and play the shot in front of you as if the previous one never existed.

Cricket gave me the love of the game. Golf is giving me something quieter and considerably more useful.

I am still terrible at it. I plan to keep going anyway.

Regards,
Rupesh