2013-06-18T17:35:08-04:00 Michael J. Critelli http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=michael-j-critelli Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Michael J. Critelli Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.859571 2011-05-09T16:27:01-04:00 2011-07-09T05:12:01-04:00

Michael J. Critelli http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-critelli/
In fact, when we were trying to decide on a title for our feature film From the Rough, I read an interview with Ballesteros in the New York Times last July 11. In that article, when asked what he would like to have been different when he was a professional golfer, he gave an answer that was only half-kidding. He said that he would have preferred narrower and shorter fairways because, as he put it, everyone would have to play from the rough as often as he did.

Although the comment was humorous, the real underlying message was that he was more comfortable than other golfers playing from the rough, and, for that matter, from any difficult location or lie. A contemporary of his, Ben Crenshaw, said that Ballesteros had the ability to design and execute on shots that most golfers could not imagine. In an article in the Sunday, May 8, 2011, New York Times by Larry Dorman, Jack Nicklaus was quoted saying:

"He was able to create shots, invent shots, and play shots from anywhere. When he won at Royal Latham in 1979, he played the 16th hole from a parking lot. I have watched him play 1-irons out of greenside bunkers, when just fooling around. He could get up and down out of a garbage can."

Another pro Butch Harmon said: "The more trouble he got into, the more comfortable he felt in the situation."

Being able to hit from the rough or other difficult lies and locations not only is important for getting out of trouble. It also enables a golfer to attempt to reach the green through shorter paths, rather than following the path prescribed by the fairways. This is particularly the case with holes laid out like doglegs.

In the stories about his death, Tom Lehman, an American golfer, remembered a competitive Ryder Cup match in which Ballesteros was spraying the golf ball all over the place on his drives -- into wooded areas, roughs, bunkers, and the far edges of fairways -- but he somehow managed to stay in the match and battle Lehman, who was described as a highly efficient golfer. Ballesteros lost, but he inspired his teammates to a come-from-behind victory.

Why does Ballesteros inspire us? Most of us who aspire to a better life are not efficient like Tom Lehman, but have erratic paths to success. We only succeed by experimenting, making mistakes, and recovering from them. Biographies sometimes get it right in portraying the lives of individuals whose paths to the top are filled with setbacks, such as David Truman's biography of Harry Truman, Truman, or Doris Kearns Goodwin's profile of Abraham Lincoln's presidency Team of Rivals. Ballesteros' father was a peasant farmer; he did not come from a wealthy family. His exposure to golf was as a caddy. In fact, as we created our fictionalized golfers, we realized that Ballesteros had bits and pieces of the qualities that caused us to position them as having come "from the rough."

Their biographies, like Seve Ballesteros' life and his path from the tee to the green through roughs, trees, and bunkers, are more realistic role models for us to than those who achieve early success like Bill Gates, or those with unbroken careers of achievement like many of the athletes who play professional sports today.

Golf is a metaphor for life, because it is a highly unforgiving sport in the scoring system used in most golf tournaments. In baseball, a batter who swings and misses gets charged with one strike, and can step up to the plate and have another chance for glory. In golf, one very bad shot puts the golfer in jeopardy for the next shot and can create a very bad score on a hole that follows the golfer through the whole tournament. The ability to recover from a bad shot is essential.

Seve Ballesteros built a career on his remarkable ability to recover from hitting drives not dissimilar to what many of us would hit on a course, but then demonstrating his brilliance by what he did after that. For that, he has inspired us, and we should remember not only what he accomplished, but how.
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Michael J. Critelli http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-critelli/
Ability to secure a global audience

Film studios have concluded that the majority of their target audiences are outside the U.S. The film genres they will finance are action films with special effects, films featuring comic book characters, horror films, and cartoons. They also will finance sequels or remakes of successful films.

A focus on escapist content

The most popular studio-financed films present characters and situations not found in everyday life. They often present unrepresentative populations in atypical life situations. This is especially true of people of color, who see either heroic figures, such as Ray Charles (Ray), Malcolm X or Jackie Robinson, or their population's most isolated and criminal members. Tyler Perry is a notable exception. His films deliver a predictably large audience every single time, even though film critics, including African Americans, disagree about the quality of his production, direction and acting. His films attempt to present real people in real-life situations.

A focus on younger people

From ages16 on, young people make their own film-going choices. Adults above age 35 are perceived to be too busy to be attracted to high-value, low-priced entertainment like film. Studios target today's 26-35-year-old frequent moviegoers, not those who could become frequent moviegoers with content that appeals to them.

A focus on content attractive to males

Studios assume that because men earn more than women, they make entertainment choices for a couple or family, and that, among teenagers, more males than females will attend movies unaccompanied by adults. Accordingly, content is targeted at males, the leads in most stories are male, and the portrayal of women often fits young male stereotypes, as opposed to more accurate and complex portrayals.

A focus on white lead characters

Much has been written about the underrepresentation of people of color in lead roles in studio-financed productions. Studio perceptions are that white people have more disposable income for film entertainment and greater likelihood of patronizing a film if the lead character is white, rather than a person of color. They also believe, incorrectly in my opinion, that white lead performers have broader global appeal.

A focus on thrills and special effects

Thrills and special effects translate well across borders and cultures. Studios believe that the attention span of the younger target audience is low. They believe films need a thrill or special effect frequently throughout the film to retain interest and attention.

Why this narrow-gauged vision presents tremendous opportunity

I gave up trying to persuade studios or large independent production companies that feed their produced film content to studio-managed distribution systems to finance the production of our film From the Rough. The film was not of a genre believed to have global appeal, it was targeted at entire families, and to individuals across the entire age spectrum, not just 16-35-year olds, and featured a black, female lead actress and a diverse, multicultural cast. It also did not feature special effects.

Why do I believe the studio-financed film model only captures a small portion of the available market?

• The themes of aspiration to a better life by leaving a person's country of origin, adapting to a strange culture, learning to relate to diverse teammates and housemates, overcoming economic disadvantage, and achieving a seemingly impossible goal are universal and completely understandable to non-U.S. audiences.

• While women already purchase over half of all U.S. movie theater tickets, even more of them can be attracted to movies and to attend more films.

• Young people at all socio-economic levels are smarter and have a potentially longer attention span than studios believe them to have. Give them engaging content, and they have exceptionally long attention spans. Films do not need continuous action and special effects to engage them.

• Women and people of color are passionate consumers of great entertainment content targeted at them.

• Finally, as someone who ran a company with direct operations in 31 countries on every continent, I am convinced that aspirational and inspirational entertainment content travels well across borders, especially in major urban areas in which over half the world's population now lives.

I have been successful finding opportunities in "blue ocean" spaces, that is, markets, career choices, products and services, and entertainment choices that are less crowded and subject to competition. The market for intelligent films directed at broad audiences is tremendous and should stimulate more filmmakers to create content for them.
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Michael J. Critelli http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-critelli/ From the Rough for theatrical release, one question many people have asked is: why do a film about golf? Over 27 million Americans play golf, 1.3 million of them, African Americans. However, compared with the other issues African Americans have faced, golf would not be near the top of the list.

However, golf is symbolically very important to every disadvantaged population. If golf were only a recreational activity, we would not care enough to do a film about it. Golf transcends its recreational boundaries, partly because it brings people together for several hours in a relatively relaxed setting, and is often played at private clubs that assemble wealthy and powerful people. Business relationships, coaching and mentoring, and even business transactions are enhanced not just during rounds of golf, but in clubhouses, locker rooms, and dining areas. In many towns and cities, the country club is the center of social activity.

Golf is an inherently exclusive sport, because it can only be played on large patches of real estate by very few people. In fact, as golfers and their equipment have improved, the courses are longer, which increases the amount of real estate dedicated to each golfer.

Golf originated in low-maintenance natural settings in the British Isles called "links" courses. The willingness of golfers in these communities to play on links courses enabled more land to be devoted to golf and more people to play.

As golf migrated outside the British Isles, golf courses became less natural and more custom-designed. The cost of transforming and maintaining natural settings became prohibitively expensive. While golf can be played on public courses, the cost of maintaining courses and competing uses for public land have caused more privately owned courses to be built in recent decades, many of which have been built in resort or luxury planned communities.

When private courses set aside acquired land and invest significant money to build and maintain a golf course, inevitably, course access becomes very contentious. More people want access than can have it. Country clubs have attempted to organize their facilities, their amenities, their social services, and their acceptance of new members around the preferences of existing members. As a result, changing the imbedded practices of country clubs is difficult at best.

Although overt discrimination against women and people of color has ended in most clubs, the combination of low membership turnover and membership limits that enable golfers to have an enjoyable golfing experience makes the transition to more diverse memberships very slow. However, even as membership barriers disappear, cultural barriers take an agonizingly long time to go away.

The solution is not to obliterate current admissions policies or to require private clubs to put existing members at risk of losing their memberships. Club members have often invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in dues for improvements for which they deserve the opportunity to benefit. We also must honor our deeply held values of freedom of association.
However, there are creative ways to increase golf access and to the coaching, mentoring, and relationship-building benefits golf provides without upsetting existing club rules and processes.

Golf is finding ways to expand into communities in which it has not been played, such as the three-hole course in an industrial section of Cleveland in which the First Tee Foundation has created an oasis of natural beauty. There are great opportunities to reclaim vacant city land and dedicate it to teaching young people the sport's fundamentals.

Academic business programs need to find creative ways to recreate the informal coaching and mentoring for women and people of color that the country club provides to wealthy white males. Today's country clubs also have created far more affordable social memberships than a full golf membership, and can provide much of the social relationship building formerly limited to golf-based interactions.

Let's take the best of what golf offers, figure out how to break it into bite-sized pieces, and deliver it to a broader population. As our film project progressed, we realized that it had to focus on the aspirations of people who had not been given an opportunity to succeed to take full advantage of the chance that participating in a college golf and academic program would give them. It is not about golf excellence, but about being given access to what matters for life success.
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Michael J. Critelli http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-critelli/
Commercialization enables many people to participate in otherwise unaffordable recreational sports. Local businesses like the Baskin & Robbins store and Dunkin' Donuts franchises have long enabled young people to secure uniforms and be part of sports teams.

Commercialization enables retired, but still famous, athletes to supplement meager post-career earnings. I was thrilled to meet Lee Elder, the first black golfer invited to participate in the Masters Tournament and one of the most inspiring and courageous athletes in the 20th century, at the NAACP Celebrity Image Awards Golf Challenge at which we showed clips of From the Rough.

I do not begrudge professional team owners or athletes the economic rewards they have secured. Professional sports are of high quality and are great entertainment.

However, commercialization has many ugly sides, some old, some new. Sports betting is more financially lucrative than the sports themselves. We will never eliminate its lure. The use of performance-enhancing substances has always been with us, and probably always will be: Too much money is at stake. I support efforts to curb cheating through substance abuse, because it does permanent damage to users, but eliminating performance-enhancing substances is unlikely.

Sadly, violence is also likely to remain a permanent part of the sports landscape, although we can make rules changes that, over time, reduce its severity and frequency. While most publicity is about concussions, with baseball recently creating a 7-day disabled list for concussion victims, the cumulative impact of years of violence to athletes' bodies is a more serious issue. I directly support research to enable us to understand the multiple causes of neurological damage from violent hits to the head.

The commercialization that troubles me is what has crept into youth and college sports. In recent years, ESPN has broadcast the Little League baseball playoffs and World Series. It spotlights young pitchers who throw curve balls that significantly increase the risk of permanent arm and shoulder damage. Commercialization radically changes the economic benefit of winning for the young athlete, the coaches and parents. An adult can decide to risk injury to his or her body; an 11-year-old should not be pushed to use athletic techniques that create injury risks he does not understand.

College basketball and football, both revenue-producing sports, effectively rent star players for one year, secure significant revenues for college programs, showcase players for professional teams, and help coaches secure multimillion dollar salaries. They do not secure educations, as evidenced by the University of Connecticut men's basketball team's 30% graduation rate. Michael Sokolove wrote about this in a recent article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, entitled "Is It Dunk and Done for Perry Jones?," in which he said that college basketball may not matter any more. Great college basketball players like Bill Bradley of Princeton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of UCLA, and Pat Riley of Kentucky, who got college degrees, had great professional basketball careers, but had even better post-basketball lives due to their education.

George Dohrmann recently wrote about basketball's commercialization for boys as young as 9 years old in his book Playing Their Hearts Out. He followed a cohort of 20 boys and their families and coaches in Southern California over eight years. Some boys ended up having great college experiences, but there were avoidable tragedies, including one boy who was housed with a pedophilic coach and became a convicted criminal because of the commercial opportunity his mother found too good to pass up.

One characteristic of creeping sports commercialization among young athletes is that it distorts, or even destroys, people and institutions it touches. College admission programs select poorly educated athletes who stay in college for 1-2 years, instead of highly qualified students who could help us overcome our global competitiveness gaps in science, business, and education. Organized youth sports programs displace more broadly based recreational sports programs. Adult-led commercialization exacerbates the competitive tendencies of young athletes to risk injuries by raising the economic stakes of success.

This is a time to celebrate great athletic performances; it is also time for reflection on sports' roles in young peoples' lives.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.833773 2011-03-09T18:08:32-05:00 2011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00

Michael J. Critelli http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-critelli/
First Tee is one of many programs formed to enable golf skill development to help young people build life skills. There are many other great programs, such as Midnight Golf in Detroit, Sticks for Kids, the National School Golf Program, the PGA Junior Golf Program, and the Urban Youth Golf Program. Like other sports, golf teaches discipline, self-reliance, emotional maturity, and a high degree of fine motor skills control. However, golf has the added dimensions of requiring players to respect nature, to play with integrity, to play with what they've got, and to recover from adversity.

This last point particularly attracted us as Pierre, my son Mike, and I crafted the screenplay that became From the Rough. As I thought about what golf teaches, I was reminded of the humorous exchange several decades ago between Sam Snead and Ted Williams.

Williams focused on the skill required to hit a ball thrown toward him at 90-100 miles per hour by a pitcher whose goal was to get him to miss contact. However, Snead got the last laugh by pointing out that, in golf, players have to "play the foul balls." Snead noted that, whereas, in baseball, every pitch, at-bat, and game is largely independent of every other, golf, like life, requires us to grapple with the consequences of previous failures. If we mishit a baseball into foul territory, we get a new pitch. If we mishit a golf ball, we must work ourselves out of trouble.

Golf implicitly teaches young people to be resilient in working themselves out of tough situations into which their previous decisions or actions have put them. Life works that way, and the emotional maturity required to do that makes everything young people do in adult life a lot easier.

Playing from the rough also requires other life skills. For example, the Bermuda grass prevalent in the Southeastern U.S. courses on which Coach Starks' Tennessee State teams competed in From the Rough is so hard and thick that the golfer must sacrifice distance to insure a more playable lie. Playing golf from the rough requires patience and planning, in addition to emotional resilience.

Sometimes, when we hit a difficult point in life, we have to slow down, regroup, accept more modest forward progress, and even take significant time to reinvent ourselves before we can move forward. In all our lives, we are figuratively hitting from the rough at times. Internalizing this lesson in youth golf programs is an extremely valuable attribute of these programs.

Playing from the rough also requires creativity. Elite golfers change their swing and their plan of attack. They might have to hit a shot higher in the air, to hit a shot that hooks or slices around an obstacle in order to cope with the consequences of hitting from the rough toward the hole. This requires a more creative assessment and execution than would be the case if everything went well. This, too, is a valuable life skill.

What I most like about engaging young people in golf programs is that they are more likely to stay with the sport as an adult, and to be able to take advantage of the relationship-building opportunities it will give them. Hanging out with a playing partner or a foursome for 4-5 hours is a great way to get to know people in ways unlikely to be duplicated outside the golf course. We may not choose to use golf as a relationship-building mechanism, and, indeed, I have used it that way relatively infrequently, but having it available is vital for certain situations, particularly in bonding with non-U.S. business executives. I built a strong relationship with a business partner in India in 1999, and ultimately effected an acquisition of his company by playing golf with him at the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, the oldest country club outside the British Isles.

The time to teach these values is when people are young, less fixed in their life path, and more receptive to teaching and mentoring. I commend those members of the golf establishment who are providing these opportunities.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.826761 2011-02-22T16:34:54-05:00 2011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00

Michael J. Critelli http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-critelli/ The Triumph of the City, which concludes that cities are one of humankind's greatest inventions. I agree.

I love living in cities, the bigger the better, for many reasons:

Cities confront unique challenges that spawn innovative solutions.

Cities' unique challenges arise from their population density, traffic congestion, diversity, cost-of-living, competitive populations, and smaller living spaces, compared with suburban and rural areas. These challenges spawn innovative solutions.

For example, cities like New York invent retail services that recognize that apartment refrigerators and countertops are too small to store more than 2-3 days worth of foods and beverages, particularly perishables. As a result, green grocers who are open 24x7 and are conveniently located for almost everyone in New York, become secondary food storage areas for apartment dwellers.

Cities make better use of normally unused living and exterior spaces. My wife had a Murphy bed (stored in the wall during the day) in her Chicago apartment. I had modular clothing bins stored under the bed. Our New York rooftop, like many city rooftops, had a first-class pool, restaurant and health club, open almost every day. On winter days, we could still swim in a heated pool under a retractable dome. Cities have created opportunities to practice sports normally played in suburban or rural areas. New York's Chelsea Piers created a space in which golfers could hit drives into the Hudson River. A company called Adventure Golf Services converts rooftops into golf practice areas. Cities use commercial lobbies as revenue-producing public plazas. IBM, and Sony now have Manhattan public plazas which are great meeting places.

Cities provide sports bars initially because people watch major sporting events and recreate the experience of having a beer and eating burgers, potato chips, and popcorn in front of multiple TVs too big for their apartments.

Cities draw vital work from diverse populations.

Since 1979, I've lived in New York for 10 ½ years and spend significant time in Boston, Washington, D.C., and LA. I enjoy visiting New York, Boston, and Washington because I get around there via taxicabs and other forms of public transportation. New York cab drivers typically come from whatever part of the world is undergoing political turmoil. I learn things from cab drivers that give me great insights and never appear in mass media.

Boston and Washington tend to have more stable cab driver populations. Boston has many drivers from Morocco and other North African countries. Washington draws drivers from Sub-Saharan African. Both cities give me most interesting conversational opportunities.

In Los Angeles, I get the most insight from the Hertz rent-a-car people who take me to and from Hertz's lot. They are from Latin America, and I get a great understanding of what life is like for them.

In New York, specific ethnic groups target certain service areas. Koreans developed expertise in small grocery and produce stores, flower distribution, and nail salons. Indians dominated the news stands. Of course, Greeks dominated the diners.

These immigrants are ambitious and want to assimilate into America, but probably like my grandparents more than a century ago, they are between two worlds, America and their country of origin. They clearly understand the global political system and economy far better than even the most well-educated Americans because they are integral to global commerce. Especially when sending money back home.

Cities empower people.

Cities attract people who escape stifling environments elsewhere. Young people, specifically young women, move to cities to have freer, more anonymous lives. However, they learn about others who start businesses, create innovative products, and succeed at the highest levels of the entertainment world.

They also live out dreams. Our older son tested his stand-up comedy skills at Caroline's on Broadway in New York. Our younger son became a great chess player at New York's Marshall Chess Club. Our daughter got the chance to record a track for our film at Paramount Studios' music record studio in Hollywood. Each of them fulfilled a dream in an urban environment.

As we move forward with Gyre Entertainment, and our feature film From the Rough, we want to celebrate the successes of people who live in cities. We need to applaud their resourcefulness, energy and passion, and empowerment. It's time to celebrate urban opportunity, not just danger.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.823398 2011-02-15T10:43:21-05:00 2011-05-25T18:30:24-04:00

Michael J. Critelli http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-critelli/ From the Rough, in golf, a competitor plays with integrity and with what he's got. However, there are certain values associated with all sports. Those values help sports succeed for participants, spectators and investors. When we think of great leaders and teams today, we do not think of great political figures, but of legendary coaches like John Wooden of UCLA, Vince Lombardi, Eddie Robinson of Grambling, or Joe Paterno of Penn State, and their teams.

Why do government, health care, education, and most other businesses fail to measure up to the performance excellence, the economic performance and entertainment value of sports?

Professional and college sports are true competitive meritocracies.

We demand excellence from sports, and the owners of sports franchises feel pressured to deliver excellence. As a result, most sports franchises take decisive action when their team loses consistently.

Teams fire non-performing managers and coaches. They create highly competitive processes to source and test talent, and get rid of even beloved underperforming players. Athletes do not promote a seniority system, because they recognize that performance excellence makes the overall product viable.

Unfortunately, the common thread running through government, health care, education, and many businesses is that they function to enable employees to stay employed, not to deliver excellence, In government, health care, and education, collective bargaining agreements make reducing non-performers extremely difficult. Closing poor quality, high cost organizations is very difficult because politicians, business leaders, and labor unions lobby to preserve jobs even bad ones deliver.

Sports is data driven and transparent.

As a child, I collected and traded baseball cards, and have always been a sports statistics junkie. Baseball embraced publicly available statistics almost from the beginning, as Alan Schwartz's pointed out in The Numbers Game. Bill James revolutionized baseball's statistical reporting systems with his Baseball Abstract series. Michael Lewis transformed baseball as a business with Moneyball. Beyond periodic statistical reporting, daily sports team performance is reported everywhere. Moreover, statistical reporting keeps improving to insure accuracy.

In government, education, and health care, there is ferocious resistance to any data analysis or reporting that would tell the public how service is being delivered. Governments are in deep financial trouble because the true retirement benefits costs were hidden for so long. Teachers unions strongly oppose any actionable performance reporting. Our health care system's best kept secrets is that over 200,000 people die unnecessarily in hospitals annually.

Business performance reporting is better, but the average person has an easier time figuring out how a favorite team is performing than figuring what's going on with even a public company. Misguided government regulation, accounting-driven reporting diverging from economic reality, and business executives who, for competitive reasons, try not to be transparent, have made individual investing riskier than necessary.

We understand sports better than other sectors.

Most of us have played sports and understand how athletes, coaches, and general managers do their jobs. What we do not learn as a participant, we learn in 24x7 media discussions.

Few of us had granular exposure to business when growing up. We pay a lot of attention to health care, education, and local government, but their complexity makes understanding challenging, a complexity driven by government laws and regulations. Federal government school bus regulations span 300 pages. While driving a school bus is simpler than hitting a golf ball, running a school bus service is exceptionally and probably unnecessarily complex.

Sports have transcended local, regional, and national barriers to become global.

The market for sports talent sourcing and for marketing outreach is global. Every sport has sourced talent outside its borders, and every major sport originating in one country has exported its entertainment to many others. Baseball, basketball and ice hockey have broadened their reach far beyond their regions of origin since 1975.

Sports know no boundaries in improving. Governments, health care systems, and school systems are highly localized and isolated. Some innovation occurs because small units of government experiment, but our governments, health care systems, and educational establishments are often untouched by global marketplaces and competitive standards. We do not know enough to demand that our schools be as good as those in Singapore, or that health and life expectancy should be comparable to Norway's, or that governments should complete big projects as efficiently as China does.

I long for the time when we demand as much of service sectors that matter deeply for global competitiveness as we do of our athletes and sports franchises.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.818629 2011-02-04T10:58:26-05:00 2011-05-25T18:30:24-04:00

Michael J. Critelli http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-critelli/ From the Rough, the feature film my partner Pierre Bagley and I are producing, is "playing with what you've got." The tagline reminded me both of the fun of playing sports as a child and how youth sports today are severely lacking in fun. I particularly thought of it when attending the recent PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, where we previewed some of our scenes from From the Rough.

There was outstanding technology from well-respected brand name manufacturers like Calloway, PING, and Titleist. The technology available for avid golfers is more amazing than ever, as is true for serious competitors in any equipment-intensive sport. However, for me, the most interesting exhibitors were companies trying to change the paradigm of how people experience golf.

I loved visiting the SNAG booth ("Starting New at Golf"), which sells soft plastic clubs and balls to help people learn golf fundamentals anywhere. Adventure Golf Services has created "The Golf Court," a practice area of tennis court size installable in most urban settings. Even the "Chicken Stick," a club attached to a TV remote control, turns a TV set into an inexpensive golf simulator. I also enjoyed hearing about almost Golf, which provides equipment and supplies for playing simulated golf in small spaces quite affordably.

These are all attempts to make golf more fun, more accessible and affordable, and more subject to the innovation and resourcefulness we associate with upwardly mobile and highly energized people.

Golf and other sports were quite different experiences when I was growing up. Athletic competition was more informal. The equipment was less expensive, of inferior quality, and not subject to much year-to-year improvement. Instruction was more informal, and was delivered, more often than not, by parents or older boys with whom we played, rather than professional instructors.

While technology, facilities, instruction, and equipment are far better today much has been lost. Only wealthy people can afford the requirements for competitive sports excellence. However, the greatest loss is the resourcefulness needed for sports and games. Decades ago, the iconic baseball image was not an organized game on a manicured field, but Willie Mays creating a makeshift baseball field on the streets of Harlem which he used to play stickball with local kids. The iconic basketball venue was the asphalt-paved playground court, not a fancy arena.

Great athletes honed their skills by using what was available to them, rather than having access to the best equipment at the best athletic venues. Golfer John Daly increased his short-game precision on an underused Little League field. The pitching mound, bases and foul lines were markers, and he hit from near home plate. Jackie Robinson honed base-running skills as the dodge ball champion of his Pasadena neighborhood park. Mariano Rivera, the great Yankee pitcher, created twine balls from fishing nets and developed his pitching skills heaving a twine ball.

The PGA vendors I mentioned above, SNAG, Adventure Golf Services, Chicken Stick, and almostGolf, as well as those who offer similar services, are consistent with the innovative traditions of Mays, Daly, Robinson, and Rivera by creating tools to help people play with what they've got.

Much of life's fun is successfully using limited resources creatively. Turning a rooftop tennis court into a golf practice range, using a Little League field to practice golf, making a baseball from fishing nets, or using a street to play stickball remind us of the resourceful joy of sports we must recreate.

Why does this matter? Aside from the important roles that sports and informal games play in our lives, we live in a time of resource scarcity. The ability to make better use of what we have and to combine our assets and resources in new ways is what innovation is all about. Steven Johnson's great book Where Good Ideas Come From uses the term "bricolage" to describe the random and often undervalued raw material from which innovations are crafted. Americans need to understand that the innovation, resourcefulness, and fun they had a generation ago in learning how to play sports and games with limited resources will be needed again to help us navigate successfully in increasingly competitive global markets.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.815201 2011-01-27T21:21:19-05:00 2011-05-25T18:30:24-04:00

Michael J. Critelli http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-critelli/
My parents had been direct victims of discrimination when they were younger. Even in my generation, attending schools dominated by members of other ethnic groups, I experienced more subtle forms of discrimination, including degrading ethnic jokes from some classmates.

I spent 30 years at Pitney Bowes, 11 as CEO, because Pitney Bowes welcomed all kinds of people. Walter Wheeler, its longest serving CEO, had been a National Urban League board member, because, like Pitney Bowes, the NUL invited everyone, black, white, young, old, male, female, Democrat or Republican, to aspire to the American dream. I accepted the NUL's invitation to join its Board in 1997, became its chairman for five years, and served for 13 years. Both organizations created and celebrated success stories for women and people of color.

In 2004, I discovered such a story. My younger son's white Swedish chess coach told me he had secured a golf scholarship to Tennessee State University, a historically black college. The coach was a black woman, Dr. Catana Starks. When she began coaching in 1988, she fielded a black golf team, but she was forced to recruit mostly or all white non-U.S. golfers after the mid-1990's.

Two insights came together to make me passionate, even obsessive, about making a film about her story:

• Golf had evolved from a relatively inexpensive sport open for elite competitive access to most young people of most income levels to an extremely expensive sport which required a great deal of wealth. Young black people did not have access to private country clubs, although I encountered some of them on the public course on which I played, but they found a way to excel at golf. Becoming a caddy was how young black people got access to golf instruction, equipment and facilities to achieve elite performance levels. Country clubs phased out caddies, because they saw more profit potential renting golf carts. Coach Starks recruited abroad, because middle-income young people were more likely to learn golf through caddying or government-subsidized golf academies.

• Although Title IX had opened up big opportunities for girl athletes, the financial and competitive pressures of coaching had shrunk the number of women coaches. Coach Starks, who had grown up in the Jim Crow era in Alabama, and whom I met in 2006, reminded me of my late mother: short and soft-spoken, but very tenacious, inspirational, caring, competitive and visionary woman. She coached golf successfully for 18 years, although the financial wear and tear of coaching and travel caused her to retire from coaching at age 60 in 2006. Her most famous golfer was Sean Foley, who has recently coached Tiger Woods, but she developed other golfers, like San Puryear, Michigan State University's golf coach, and Robert Dunwiddie, who is a European tour player.

I was determined to make a film about her life to prove that women like my mother and Coach Starks deserved to prove their ability to succeed in a man's world. Why a film? Entertainment is the most powerful medium for changing minds. After all, I was inspired to be a lawyer because I watched Perry Mason when growing up.

In November, 2009, I asked my son Mike, who had graduated from the University of Southern California in 2008, to write a screenplay about the Coach Starks story. In March, 2010, I contacted Pierre Bagley, an African-American filmmaker, whom I met when serving as the Chairman of the National Urban League Board of Trustees. We decided to form Gyre Entertainment, a firm with a mission to create film and other entertainment content of strong interest to contemporary urban audiences, with the Coach Starks film as our first project.

The film, called From the Rough, stars Taraji P. Henson, an Academy Award nominee for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, as Coach Starks. Tom Felton, from the Harry Potter series, Michael Clarke Duncan, an Academy Award for The Green Mile, are other members of an outstanding cast. We are targeting a Fall 2011, theatrical release.

Our Gyre team is attending the PGA of America merchandise show in Orlando, Florida. We share an interest in expanding access to golf for African Americans with the PGA and the merchandisers attending the show. However, I will also think about my mother, Coach Starks, and countless other heroic women.]]>