Indiana Jones, TaylorMade Burners and Holding On
- PG Geldenhuys
- Apr 30
- 6 min read
This week, I found myself standing on the 17th tee at Plettenberg Bay Country Club. It was the kind of late afternoon that reminds you why you love this game. The wind had finally dropped, the ocean air was still and heavy, and the hills beyond the fairway were slowly folding into gold as the sun dipped behind them. It was that kind of light – the warm, glowing, lingering kind – that makes you want to slow everything down, to stretch the moment out forever, to swing easy and never leave.
In my hands, though, was something that didn’t feel easy at all: a brand-new driver, a majestically large Srixon ZX7. It had a stiff shaft, different weight, unfamiliar everything. It felt foreign. And it wasn’t just the newness of it that unsettled me – it was what it represented. New tech. More distance. The promise of staying relevant? Admitting that I was no longer young, and I was grasping at straws to retain my edge?
For over twenty years, I had played with the same TaylorMade Burner driver, a club that wasn’t just equipment but a part of my story. When my dad gave it to me as a gift in my mid-20s, I was still trying to find my rhythm in both golf and life. That club was imperfect, and in the years when I neglected golf, it was always a constant. I whipped a huge draw with consistency, and on my good days, it helped me tame impossible holes. On good days, I could drill it almost 250 metres, not bad for an old guy, right?
But more than all of that, it was a connection to my late father Matie. My dad, who in his own way taught me what it meant to show up, to keep trying, to honour the tools and the traditions that shape you. It was his birthday last week. Maybe that’s why the thought of setting that club aside – even temporarily – felt less like upgrading equipment and more like letting go of something much harder to name.
And yet, there I was, facing the long 17th, the new driver in hand, trying to talk myself into trust. It was a loaner from the chaps in the pro shop, mine if I wanted it. And for the eight preceding holes, I couldn’t be sure. I took a deep breath, let the evening air settle around me, and swung.
The ball exploded off the face, a rising bullet that barely wavered before it settled 278 meters away, dead centre of the fairway. No spectators. No applause. Just me, in the fading light, and a realisation. I needed to own this club. It was clean. It was effortless. It was undeniable. Every rational part of me knew it immediately: this was better. This was the right move.
Still, it wasn’t logic that had held me back for so long. It wasn’t about stats or swing speed or even performance. It was something deeper and older – what Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, calls Level 1 thinking: instinctive, emotional, designed for survival more than for success. That part of the brain clings hard to the known, not because it’s always better, but because it’s safer. Familiar. Trustworthy. It doesn’t run risk calculations; it runs protection programs.
And in a way, it made perfect sense. That club wasn’t just metal and graphite to me. It carried memories. It carried emotion. It carried the idea that something, at least something, could remain steady when everything else in life shifted. When I gripped it, I gripped two decades of history – rounds played in the misty cold, the searing heat, with friends who had come and gone, in tournaments I barely remember and in quiet, solitary evenings where the only competition was myself. Letting it go felt almost like a small betrayal.
But standing there on that tee box, feeling the newness hum in my hands, I realised something else. Keeping the old driver wasn’t about loyalty to my dad. It wasn’t about respect for the past. It was about fear – fear that moving forward might somehow erase what had come before, that changing tools might mean losing touch with the deeper parts of myself.
Yet that isn’t how legacy works.
Legacy isn’t a thing you hold onto so tightly that your hands cramp. Legacy is something you carry inside you, woven into your muscle memory, into your instincts, into the way you stand at address and trust the swing to come. It's not the club that keeps you connected to the people you love. It’s the lessons, the laughter, the days you spent together building something far more durable than equipment.
I realised that honouring my dad doesn’t mean playing with an old club forever. He was ok with letting go, with embracing the changes. If I truly want to honour his memory, so should I. It means showing up with the same grit, the same joy, the same willingness to take a risk even when you can’t see the bridge beneath your feet yet. To channel your inner Indiana Jones and walk towards your personal Holy Grail.
In many ways, it’s the same principle that Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke pointed to in his famous Lazy/Smart leadership matrix. Progress belongs to those who are smart enough to keep challenging their assumptions – and just “lazy” enough to relentlessly simplify systems for greater effectiveness. It’s not enough to trust what has worked in the past. You have to interrogate your processes, your technology, your structures. You have to ask whether they are still serving you – or whether they’ve quietly turned into relics you’re too sentimental to abandon.
And that same pattern holds true in business. Jim Collins, in Good to Great, found that the companies that made the leap weren’t the ones who blindly chased every shiny piece of technology. They were the ones who carefully embraced "Technology Accelerators" – tools that amplified their core purpose, their Hedgehog Concept. They didn't adopt technology for the sake of modernity; they adopted it when it could turbocharge what they were already built to be the best in the world at.
The great ones weren’t afraid to evolve their tools, because they understood something critical: you don't honour your mission by staying stuck in old ways. You honour it by building on it – wisely, strategically, fearlessly.
Golf, like life, demands that you keep adapting. What served you beautifully at one stage may not serve you forever. The real loyalty is to the spirit, not the form. The real tribute is to keep swinging, to keep stepping into what’s next, carrying all the old wisdom with you, but not letting it chain you to the past.
I’ll still keep that Burner. It’ll stay in the corner of my office or maybe in the back of my car, ready for a range session when I want to feel the old rhythm again. It’ll still be there to remind me where I came from. But it won’t be my excuse not to move forward anymore.
Because sometimes – maybe always – the bridge doesn’t appear until you take the step. You don’t get to see the whole arc of it. You don’t get guarantees. You get a swing and a moment and the choice to trust.
This Monday, standing on that 17th tee in the golden light, I swung. I trusted. I moved forward. And somewhere in that motion, I felt my dad with me – not in the club, but in the courage to take the shot.
PG’s Pro Tip:
Respect the tools that brought you here. Remember the people who shaped your journey. But don’t confuse loyalty with inertia. Systems, technology, and processes must always be interrogated. The world moves forward – and so must you. Like the companies who made the leap from Good to Great, use technology to accelerate your core mission, not distract you from it. The best way to honour your past isn’t to stay frozen in it – it’s to build something new with the same spirit, the same heart.
Because some bridges only appear once you take the step.
🚧 Want to take the next step in your own game? On 13 May, I’m hosting a virtual workshop that dives deep into identifying and breaking through the bottlenecks that are holding your business back. Using Barrett Ersek’s X-Factor framework (taught at MIT’s Entrepreneurial Masters Program), we’ll unpack your industry’s constraints and help you design a 30-day roadmap to test real breakthroughs. If my tee box moment taught me anything, it’s this: progress demands courage, clarity, and the right tools. Join us. It might just be your swing.
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