I’m to blame

A foul in an NBA game.
Couldn’t find any pictures of an NBA player raising their hand to acknowledge a foul though!

I played a LOT of Basketball for about six years through university and directly afterwards. When I played, the rule was that you raised your hand to acknowledge when you had committed a foul. It was part of a sense of self-responsibility in that team sport.

I also played a lot of golf in my teens growing up in the Scottish Borders. Golf is the only game where you call your own “fouls”, often taking place where nobody else would see them. Again self-responsibility.

I then picked up golf again in my 30s in Cayman, only to find that this sense of honesty was not present anywhere near consistently among people who took up golf later in life.

In fact, I nearly fell out with a dear friend at one point as an employee in his firm (where I was a board director) tried to argue his way around a clear rule infraction in a golf match I played in. it was a real affront to my sense of integrity, it really shook me.

I do believe you can learn a lot about someone by playing golf with them. What I learned was that I would not trust the integrity of that individual in any space, as “how you do anything is how you do everything”, so I wanted my fellow director to, at the very least, discuss this with the employee, yet they thought it was “no big deal”. Hmm.

These memories and thoughts were spurred from a blog recently from my dear friend…