Issue No. 412 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a laugh-out-loud Kindle book on how to find lost golf balls—and why “golf hawkers” are so passionate. LOL! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and check out this page for recent book reviews including StrategyMan vs. the Anti-Strategy Squad (another must-read!).
Summer Reading List #5:
Anything for a Golf Ball: The Art of Finding Lost Golf Balls
Before summer evaporates here in the Northern Hemisphere and you’re overwhelmed with strategic plan deadlines, carpool juggling, and reattaching those winter storm windows, let’s squeeze in some golf.
There are three ways to have fun with golf:
#1. Q SCHOOL. Invest several thousand dollars in fees and enter the Professional Golf Association’s qualifying school. A few years back, I reviewed a fascinating book about the agony and the ecstasy of “Q School.” Read: Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major, by John Feinstein.
#2. WIN THE PGA FEDEX CUP. If you’re one of the Top-30 golfers on this planet this weekend, you have a shot at pocketing the first place prize money of $15 million. Imagine! More info here.
#3. OR…BECOME A GOLF BALL HAWKER. What could be more fun and fulfilling than finding lost golf balls—and being officially declared a “Professional Golf Ball Hawker”? John Vawter shows you how in his laugh-out-loud Kindle book, Anything for a Golf Ball: The Art of Finding Lost Golf Balls.
In introducing the “Fine Art of Golf Ball Hawking,” Vawter (author, pastor, coach to pastors, and very funny guy) reports that American golfers lose 300 million golf balls per year. And noting that 75 percent of those balls are found, he asks, “Do you know how many that means are yet to be found? So why is there any question about why hawkers hawk?”
He begins with important definitions:
Nomenclature: “Hawking, ball hawking, fishing, golf ball hawking, retrieving… all these words are interchangeable. Rawker is the person who rides in the cart but does not golf; but they hawk. Rider plus hawker = rawker.”
Ball hawking: “The fine art of finding a golf ball that the normal person cannot find or has no interest in finding. The Hawker Litmus Test: If you have bought a golf ball in the last two years you are not a real hawker.”
Hawker Logic: “A form of logic known only to hawkers. It does not have to be consistent with other forms of logic. It is a logic known only to hawkers… but it is clear and it makes sense to the hawker.”
Captain Ball Hawk: “The highest compliment a hawker can be paid is to be called, ‘Captain Ball Hawk.’ The hawker is motivated by these words: Anything for a golf ball.”
John Vawter is no armchair hawker. He’s the real deal and finds about 2,000 balls a year as he, apparently, also golfs. (Read this Oregon newspaper’s interview with Vawter.)
His short book is a joy to read—whether you golf or just know someone who golfs. Examples:
• “A gentleman hawker does not pick up a ball until it stops rolling.”
• “A gentleman hawker—after slicing a ball into the living room of a house on the course—will always ring the doorbell and remove his shoes before entering the house to get the ball.”
• “The same person who would criticize the ball hawker probably does not like professional wrestling.”
Vawter even invokes psychiatry to prove his point: “There is a certain amount of joy the hawker experiences when he sees a friend who used to ridicule his hawking but is now out in the rough looking for balls and yelling, ‘I found one’ when he makes the discovery of a ball in the wild.
“Ball hawking is the tonic for physical and mental deficiencies that preclude the ball from going straight down the fairway. The confident ball hawker is doing what all other golfers secretly want to do but are too shy, weak or cowardly to do. Any golfing psychiatrist knows this to be true.”
Dare one hawk at exclusive golf courses? “New private clubs—still open to the public until membership is closed—are great places to find balls. Rich guys do not slow down to look for golf balls. If you are playing a public course and a guy from the exclusive private course you want to play happens to be put in your foursome, it is okay to downplay your hawking skills that day so as not to hurt your chances of his inviting you to his course.”
Green golfers. “The ball hawker stands secure in the smug awareness that he is environmentally correct since the retrieval and reuse of lost golf balls is one of the planet's highest forms of recycling.”
Brotherhood and sisterhood! “Turning off the highway to drive the road next to a fairway where you find lots of balls and seeing someone else already making the ‘hawking’ drive does not make the genuine hawker angry. He thinks to himself with great pride, ‘He ain't stealing, he's my brother.’”
Nostalgia. “Great hawkers will fly home from a golf vacation in Hawaii and remember the great hawking holes more than their first time back-to-back birdies."
Umm…who is demented? “Golf course designers who design the ponds with steep slopes so that balls hit into the water go to the deep bottom in the middle only to be found by scuba divers are a special breed of the demented.”
Vawter (the Rev. Vawter) could not resist the temptation to justify his hawking ways—with fresh theological commentary:
• “Pope John Paul the Second was not a ball hawker. This is not due, however, to Catholic theology. It has to do with the limitations and lack of versatility of the Popemobile on golf course terrain.”
• “Billy Graham [was] a ball hawker. He says it is a direct practical carryover from his life's spiritual mission ‘to seek and save that which is lost.’”
• “Those who believe in reincarnation actually make the best ball hawkers because they are not just looking for lost balls... they are looking for their lost uncle.”
• “New Agers do not make good ball hawkers because once they get in tall grass they lose sight of their mission of finding lost balls and start communing with the tall grass.”
• “If Jesus were walking the earth today, He would add the parable of the golfer searching for his lost golf ball to the story of the poor widow searching for her lost coin, since both parables contain profound spiritual lessons.”
“Hawkers are like priests... they know golfers' sins,” adds Vawter. “The golfing/hawking preacher is a fisher of men and of golf balls. Billy Graham told the story of a man with whom he golfed. The man had not had a good day hitting the ball or finding any balls in the weeds. At the end of the round Billy Graham asked if he could comment on the man’s golfing and hawking game. The man said yes. Billy Graham said, ‘All day long you have been asking God to damn your ball and all day long He has been answering your prayer.’”
Conversion: “When a golfer who used to make fun of you for hawking says, ‘This course has so many places to find balls, I would walk it without clubs just to find balls,’ you know you have made a convert.”
This is the perfect book when you need a break from your serious summer reading. Enjoy!
To order from Amazon Kindle, click on the title for Anything for a Golf Ball: The Art of Finding Lost Golf Balls, by John Vawter.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) What avocation are you so passionate about that—someday perhaps—you might write a book about it?
2) You are the PGA’s FedEx Cup 2019 winner and they just handed you a check for $15 million. After taxes are deducted, what will you do with the remaining funds?
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Spontaneous Soaking!
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook
One of the big ideas in the Hoopla! Bucket, Chapter 10, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to create spontaneous hoopla! for your team.
One year I set up an 8-foot golf putting green in my office and invited team members to drop by anytime to practice their putting skills. The big idea: take a break to reduce the stress. Then at our next weekly staff meeting, I gave every team member $5.00 to buy their own stress-reduction devices for their own cubicles. "So when we drop by, you've got something whimsical or fun to distract us for a moment."
The creativity was mind-boggling! One guy installed a Nerf basketball hoop. Others featured twirly gizmos on their desks and dart boards on their walls. Someone else had a Slinky®. (When was the last time you chased a Slinky down the stairs?)
The hoopla! prize went to Jimmy Mellado, now president of Compassion International. Feigning disinterest and procrastination, he waited for two weeks and then at the end of a staff meeting, asked people to remain for one more agenda item. "I completed my assignment," he smiled, and then sprayed every surprised team member in the room with his bright orange Super Soaker® squirt gun!
For more resources from the Hoopla! Bucket, including links to more books and resources on team spontaneity and affirmation ideas, visit the Hoopla! Bucket webpage here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? And are you working with a partner that adds Hoopla! to the mix? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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