What’s more important talent or compete?

⛳️ What Andrew Rice taught me about the one thing talent can’t buy 🔥

Andrew Rice grew up playing junior golf in South Africa against Ernie Els and Retief Goosen. Today he’s a Golf Digest Top 50 teacher. So when he sat down with me on The Golf Parent podcast, I asked him what actually separates young players.

His answer stopped me: talent is everywhere. The competitive spirit is not. The kids who go furthest aren’t always the most gifted, they’re the ones who hate losing and channel it into getting better.

And the part that got me as a golf dad: that spirit can be nurtured. It’s not fixed at birth.

From conversations like this one, three things keep coming up:

1. Let them lose. Don’t rescue the moment or rush to fix the feeling on the car ride home. Sitting with a loss is where the drive comes from.
2. Compete at home. Putting contests, chipping games, anything with a scoreboard. Low stakes, high reps of winning and losing.
3. Praise the fight, not the finish. “You grinded on the back nine” lands differently than “you shot 78.”

I’m not a coach, just a dad with a microphone. But the pattern keeps showing up: the kid who competes beats the kid who’s merely talented, more often than you’d think.

Full conversation with Andrew Rice on The Golf Parent podcast, one of our very first episodes and still one of my favorites.

What have you noticed with your own junior? Does the fire get taught, or is it just there?