The Turn

This episode we hear from Fred Ridley, a well-recognized partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner LLP. He is also the current chairman of Augusta National Golf Club and its annual tournaments, which includes The Masters in April.

Fred is also well known for being the last US Amateur champion not to turn pro - having won in 1975. He grew up in Lakeland, Florida, learning to play golf on municipal courses. He went on to play collegiate golf at the University of Florida on a team that eventually won a national title, played once and served twice as Team captain in the Walker Cup, and played once and served as team captain once in the World Amateur Team Championship. He has also served in various executive roles for the USGA including President in the mid-2000s.

So - incredible record - why not turn pro? Fred made a firm decision at a young age to work toward a career in law, and points to his role model and Augusta National founder, Bobby Jones, as his inspiration. After graduating from Stetson Law, Fred went to work for IMG, Mark McCormack’s sports agency in Cleveland. Eventually, he came back to Tampa - in that transition he stopped playing competitive golf, dug into work, and found his way to Foley & Lardner where he has been since 2001.

Fred and I discuss his foundations in golf, his transition from being known as a golfer to becoming known as a working professional, the commonalities in his executive roles on and off the golf course, and his definition of “grow the game.”

S2 Ep. 5

This episode’s guest is my friend from high school, Doug Yass. Doug and I played golf a few weeks ago with his brother and my classmate, Robbie, and they shared with me their passion for sports gambling and how it’s become their full-time pursuit. They started referencing relatively unknown players by their odds for the upcoming tournament, and backing them up with shots gained stats and recent trends in their games. I was interested in that level of detail and knowledge, and how they were applying it to gambling, so Doug agreed to talk about it on here.

Prior to Covid, Doug was based in Ireland working for Nellie Analytics, the sports gambling division of Susquehanna International Group. Doug’s dad - Jeff Yass - is one of Susquehanna’s cofounders and is known for his prolific poker skills. Doug discusses how that influenced his journey into professional sports gambling, how he calculates player odds in an effort to gain an advantage on betting exchanges, and what our horizon in the U.S. looks like for legalized gambling.

S2 Ep. 4 (almost over)

Mac played collegiate golf at High Point University in the mid-80s. After college, he worked in the airline industry before taking a position at Pros Incorporated, a legendary agency created by Vinny Giles that represented the likes of Tom Kite, Lanny Wadkins, Davis Love the third, David Duval, and Justin Leonard.

Pros Inc. was purchased by Octagon in the late 90s, and in 2003 Mac left to be Davis Love’s full-time agent and create his own agency, Crown Sports Management. Mac also helped establish Sea Island as an epicenter for Tour pros and attracted talented players such as Jonathan Byrd, Lucas Glover, Brandt Snedeker, and Brian Harman.

In 2013 Crown merged with Lagardere Sports. Since leaving Lagardere in 2018, Mac has set out to reinvent the sports management approach with his new company Rock Sports by helping professional golfers maintain purpose, focus, and balance both on and off the course.

This episode’s guest, John Brooks aka Brooksz, has had a profound impact on many collegiate golfers.

In 2003, John left coaching to establish his consulting business, Red Numbers Golf, to assist junior golfers and their families navigating tournament golf and college selection. I worked closely with John throughout high school, when he helped me institute effective practice routines and goals, organize my national tournament schedules, pinpoint colleges where I could have fulfillment both on and off the golf course, and ultimately he guided me through the recruiting process at UVA. He’s worked with over 600 players and their families in his 18 year span as a consultant, is an Advisory Board Member for the Titleist Performance Institute aka TPI, and is an advisor to the American Junior Golf Association.

John identified a need and built a product to cater to a demographic. John and I discuss that, along with how he started down the path of coaching and why, approaching his coaching career as a business development opportunity, and what it’s like to work with players during the formative years of their lives to set them up for long term success in life beyond golf.

This episode's guest, Mark Flaherty, is a stock market and trading guru who currently serves on the Boards of Goldman Sachs and the PGA Tour.

Mark grew up in Massachusetts, and started caddying at Mt. Pleasant Country Club nearby when he was 9 years old. Caddying became building blocks for opportunities in Mark’s life as he learned to appreciate meritocracy and hard work from a young age. Mark attended Providence College where he was on the JV basketball team. After Providence, he learned about options trading at a manufacturing company that made products out of gold and silver - at one point their inventory was 2 million ounces of gold, and he was the largest market maker of gold options in North America. Mark then went to Aetna to serve as their director of equity trading, and then went to Standish Ayer and Wood to serve in the same position as a Partner. Eventually he went on to Wellington Management and became Vice Chairman of Global Investment Services.

Mark retired from Wellington in 2011, and has served on the Board of Director for Goldman Sachs since 2014 on the Audit, Risk and Governance Committees. In 2020, Mark was named to the Board of Directors for the PGA Tour.

You’ll learn about Mark’s concept of “getting out of the way,” why the number 15 is Mark’s anchor, how always being accessible was the key to his successful growth, and why he believes the PGA Tour’s future is more exciting than ever.

Season two of The Turn is here. We start with Will Zalatoris and Scott Fawcett.

Will is ranked 43rd in the world golf rankings, is the 2014 U.S. Junior Amateur champion, and 2017 ACC player of the year. That same year, he was a member of a victorious Walker Cup team that featured Cameron Champ and Collin Morikawa. Will earned his way onto the Korn Ferry Tour in 2019 through Monday Qualifiers and finished #1 on the KFT’s money list last year.

Will earned an exemption into the U.S. Open at Winged Foot where he tied for 6th. 14 PGA events, five top-10s, and $1.8M in winnings later, Will has ascended the world rankings. He has more worldwide top-10s than any player since the start of 2020.

Scott founded the DECADE scoring system, which solves golf strategy by combining shot distribution patterns and PGA Tour scoring statistics to optimize target selection. In 2014, Scott caddied for Will in the Texas Amateur, which he won by three shots. Three weeks later Will won the U.S. Junior Amateur.

Scott and Will share their history through stories of tournaments, applying their findings over time, how those findings helped Scott shape his theories for DECADE, and we discuss Will’s REAL practice of meditation and how it’s helped elevate his game.

This episode’s guest, Dennis Satyshur, is a legendary club professional and the director of golf at Caves Valley golf club outside of Baltimore, Maryland.

Dennis was born and raised in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he learned the game of golf through caddying for his dad at an early age. Eventually he won the Pennsylvania high school state title before heading to Duke University as a dual athlete playing on the varsity golf team and as the quarterback of the football team. For those of you who know Dennis, his nickname “Football” comes to mind.

He came to know one of his now longest friends, Tom Kite, during a short stint as a playing professional after college. Dennis then went on to serve under some renowned head professionals around the country at clubs such as Pinehurst, Pine Tree, and Baltimore Country Club, but the most impactful mentor he encountered was Bill Strausbaugh at Columbia Country Club.

Dennis became the head pro and director of golf at Caves Valley in 1991 when it opened - during his 30 year tenure there, he’s developed 25 assistant professionals on his staff to become head professionals at other clubs, served as an assistant captain on the 1997 Ryder Cup team, and has overseen many prestigious events at Caves Valley including next year’s FedEx Cup playoff event the BMW Championship. Dennis’ attention to detail has cultivated a culture of excellent service and experience that has helped create the brand of Caves Valley - we talk about his upbringing, fostering that culture as a team player, and how he’s approaching his final year at Caves Valley before retiring after the BMW Championship next season.

The eighth episode’s guest, Tom Fazio, is well known as one of the most renowned and prolific golf course architect’s to ever exist.


Tom has designed over 200 courses, most of them in the United States. He has more courses on the Golf Digest top 100 courses list than any other architect in history and several of those courses are ranked in the top 50. He’s designed the course for the 2021 Olympics in Japan, is Pine Valley and Augusta National’s go-to guy for additions and renovations, and my favorite fact is that the Best Modern Day Golf Architect poll was discontinued entirely after Tom claimed the award three years in a row.

Back in 2008 for my senior project in high school, I had the opportunity to shadow Tom and his team at Shooting Star in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, while it was rock and gravel being shaped by bulldozers - they were still using spray paint to map out each potential hole! 

Here’s a handful of courses Tom has renovated, restored, or redesigned:

Augusta National, Bel-Air, Butler National, Caves Valley, Congressional, Firestone, Inverness, Jupiter Hills, McArthur, Merion, Oak Hill, Oakmont, PGA National, Pine Valley, Quail Hallow, Riviera, Sea Island, Shadow Creek, Shooting Star, Whisper Rock, Winged Foot

Goes without saying Tom has played a large part in the evolution of golf and course architecture over the past 40 to 50 years. We cover a range of topics from how he got started in his profession, what it’s turned into, how he approaches custom crafting each course, and his thoughts on players hitting the ball further than ever and what that means for the future of course design.

This is our seventh episode of The Turn. Welcome to a different side of golf.

This episode’s guest Doctor Bob Rotella is well known as one of the most renowned golf and sports psychologists to live. The golfers he’s consulted for have won over 700 Tour events and 82 majors, by his estimate. He’s published 18 books and has another one om the way. One of those books, Golf is Not a Game of Perfect, is the best-selling sports psychology book of all time. Doc and I started working together when I was 14 years old and then we worked closely when I was at the University of Virginia, as he lives nearby in Keswick a few miles from the University grounds.

Bob Rotella was an incredible athlete before he became Dr. Rotella. He played every sport growing up, and eventually basketball and lacrosse at the collegiate level. Doc has coached just about every sport at every level, too - grade school, high school, college, and professional, both teams and individuals - and his expertise is not limited to sports! He’s consulted for leaders at companies such as AT&T, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, GE, and many more. Though the most impactful experience for Doc was when taught swimming to special needs students at the Brandon Training School in Vermont.

What struck me throughout our whole interview is that Doc has never treated what he does as work. It’s never been a job, and you’ll understand why the business side of it has never been a concern or a focus of his. He figured out early on he could make money from helping others, and that was never a motivation before or after that realization.

Bob's books - https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B000APQFXQ?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

Caddyshack to Corner Office - www.caddyshacktocorneroffice.com/stories/…-stasior

This week’s guest, Bill Stasior, is quite literally the inspiration for this podcast.

Bill and I were partners at a tournament three years ago, The Stocker Cup, and were stuck with each other in a cart for four days. We shared so many good moments over our mutual love of golf, our appreciation for the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, and I learned from Bill what great leadership is, what it can do for an organization, and most importantly what it can do for the individuals around you.

Bill and I spoke in late August during the first round of the BMW Championship in Chicago which does have some significance. Bill grew up as a caddy in Chicago at Onwentsia Golf Club, and attended Northwestern University as an Evans scholar. If you didn’t know, the Evans Scholar Foundation has helped more than 12,000 caddies graduate from college since its creation in the 1930s, and directly benefits from the BMW Championship, the FedEx Cup playoff event.

Bill then spent his career at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he was named chairman and CEO in 1991 and led massive growth through organizational change - the company’s annual revenue grew from $400 million to $1.6 billion under his leadership.

After vacating his role at Booz Allen Hamilton, Bill became the chairman of the United Negro College Fund, which funds college scholarships for more than 65,000 black students each year. He still sits as Chairman today.

You’ll hear great stories about Bill’s upbringing through golf, mentors in his life like Onwentsia pro, Hubby Habjan, and how he always benefited from doing the right thing.