The Reality Check

Nish: 0:01

Every story has an ending. Does our quest to play the top 100 courses in 10 years have a good ending? This is the Top 11 Golf Podcast, episode 4. The Reality Check it’s your reaction to adversity, not the adversity itself, that determines how your story will develop. Today I’m talking about a bump in the road and the reality check.

Nish: 0:32

Now, we both love a spreadsheet. There is some comfort in a plan. It’s a plan that’s backed up in numbers. It’s the ability to manipulate those numbers to suit your narrative. We had one, as you already know, with all the distances on it, so we could see where was close by.

Nish: 0:54

But how about the costs? I hadn’t even thought about the costs of all of this. If I’m perfectly honest with you, the average golfer is probably used to playing £20 to £40 a round. Sillith was something that Chris pushed and it was one of the cheapest at £95. But I hadn’t really let that sunk in just yet. So I got on to chat GPT, as any sensible person would do, and it churned out a load of costs that I could start putting into the spreadsheet. The problem with golf course costing is you can have peak time, which is obviously the summer. That’s when most people want to play. You can also get the kind of shoulder period it’s called, which is just at the end of the summer and just at the start of the summer, and then you get the full on winter off-peak. So planning on playing these courses at different times is going to wildly make the cost different.

Nish: 2:00

So me and Chris are having a few more chats about how we’re going to approach this challenge and he starts enhancing the spreadsheet with a few costs on there, more filtering available, because we need to start clustering this by distance and then also locality. So we’ve got Ireland to contend with. We’ve got a little cluster in Wales, obviously a lot in Scotland. But as he’s done that and I start filtering in my chat GPT data, I start doing the sums in my head and it does look like we could be in from anything from about £120 around average to maybe £250 around average and over 100 courses we could be looking at £25,000 there. That’s quite a significant investment, albeit spread over a 10-year period.

Nish: 3:06

In anybody’s book that is a hard sell we have to bear in mind. We set a really important rule for ourselves right at the start, and that was rule number one, and that this wasn’t going to impinge on family life and I’d only really considered the time that it was going to take and not really the cost. So I have brought this up to this challenge up to quite a few people and a lot of people have responded with saying it’s wonderful. But they have brought up cost and sort of wished us well in that endeavor and I remember thinking about it through real, real rose-tinted spectacles, thinking it’s only 100 courses, you know if we can play it 95 pounds around, that’s okay, that’s not too bad over 10 years and it was only really when we started enhancing this spreadsheet that that kind of reality started started sinking in and it is a hard sell, I think, figuring out how to to fit this in.

Nish: 4:17

So I suppose I’m a little bit of a low at this point trying to work all this out. But maybe we just need to book another one and just get over with it. Get it over with, because I think those doubts might start to disappear. But right now I do feel a little bit low, probably need a little bit of reassurance from probably Chris primarily, you know, I’m trying to feel him out a little bit on where he is with the challenge. He sort of set it.

Nish: 4:45

We did it, as we all know. We did it drunkenly one night on a Saturday. We convinced ourselves that it was a brilliant idea. We just need to try and see how we can make that a reality. And I don’t know where his head is at with that commitment or, um, if, after all this trouble that we’re going to now with documenting it all, I’ve got a podcast, we’ve got a website, we’ve told everyone that we’re doing it. If he’s having any regrets as well. So I don’t know all of that, but I think perhaps I just need to get over that by booking the next one. Or I think chris drove sylith and the booking of sylith. It was a really good first one to do because, of course, it was close to his heart. But I think maybe I should just drive the next one. Let’s get get it booked, let’s see what happens and if nothing else, we’ll have played, hopefully, two really really good golf courses.

Nish: 5:45

So I’m interrogating our spreadsheet using all of our filters to try and make some sense of which one to book. I’ve got to consider budget. I’ve got to consider distance from where we are. I’ve got to consider that we’ve got to try and fit it in with weather and how that might be. And it’s just starting to turn and I have to tell you it was quite a long task trying to figure out which course to book next when we didn’t have an obvious link to the next booking. It was just a matter of picking one out and booking it. So I think it took me probably about two hours, and that included verifying all the chat GPT information which, by the way, was wildly inaccurate. Um so, since checking all of that, trying to update the spreadsheet on a few of the nearer courses so that the information was correct, so we could make a better informed decision, um, all of a sudden I had a bit of a bolt out of the blue.