Identifying your identity
Jared Nemitz, who you saw on the cover of this magazine and know by now as the winner of the 2016 Herb Graffis Businessperson of the Year award, told me that he was miserable in his first couple of months as an assistant superintendent. Here’s a guy who, as his general manager says, “lives, eats and breathes agronomy.” Or as Nelson Caron told me, “he was one of those interns you had to ask to go home.”
That guy was miserable?
It was because Nemitz hadn’t yet figured out his own identity. He was young and still trying to find his way. “I tried to be every assistant superintendent I had seen before,” Nemitz told me. “I was trying to mimic the other guys on staff.”
Three months into his job, Caron pulled him aside and gave him some advice. “Stop being those guys and be yourself. Go after your strong points. Be who you are and just go get it.”
That’s when Nemitz found his way. He told me he learned from others, while at the same time developed who he was. He knew he loved Excel spreadsheets, so he started using them to help him identify what he was seeing in the field.
It took three months for Nemitz to figure that out. I’m impressed. It took me about three years.
When I started working at GCSAA 17 years ago, I was paranoid about my lack of golf experience. I didn’t grow up living on a golf course, I didn’t have a turf degree. My first round of golf was at age 20.
All I had was a degree in journalism and a love for sports and sports reporting.
I remember attending seminars at the Golf Industry Show and asking dumb questions. I took a job working weekends on a maintenance crew and sustained dumb injuries. (Nothing serious, but it’s amazing how much sharp debris flew off my string trimmer.)
It took me years to realize that my weakness also was my strength. Rather than struggling to learn the science of turf, I simply took my love for sports journalism and applied it to my job as a reporter covering the turfgrass industry. So what if the questions I asked were dumb? The answers I got back were not.
That led to better and better stories. First it was unique golf operations and personality profiles, then it was Old Tom Morris Award winners (Greg Norman, Nick Price), then it was a string of dozens of celebrity golfer interviews (Yogi Berra, Charles Barkley, Samuel L. Jackson.) All that led to this job and holding a position once held by World Golf Hall of Famer Herb Graffis.
Jared talked to me about one of the skills he believes makes him an asset to the members at The Peninsula Club: his ability to take pages and pages of data and boil it down to something members—who are not turf experts—can understand. He takes soil pHs, clipping yields, fertility programs, and puts it in golfer terms.
He starts from a high level and brings it down.
I’m the opposite. I start from a low level and work up. Instead of pages and pages of data, I take pages and pages of interview transcripts (for this story, there were 63 pages of transcribed interviews, all in my own shorthand) and try to make the best story—for turf experts—out of it.
This is the fifth Graffis Award we’ve given, and it was, again, a fun experience. I think after reading his story you’ll agree that Jared is deserving of this award. You might not go out and start weighing your clippings, but Jared’s story is a good one.
I hope my dumb questions did it justice.