She's Doing It: Women’s Golf Evangelist Joan Cavanaugh

By Gloria Feldt | August 8, 2012

I get the power of golf.  That’s why I took it as my physical education in college. And I garnered the only “C” in my life. I’d have failed had it not been for the written final exam that brought my dismal playing score up from the tank.

So I chuckled when I received this e-mail from Joan Cavanaugh, former Dominican nun, creator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recorded tours, teacher, entrepreneur, and the founder of the Boardroom Golf Institute:

“I listened to you on the Takeaway and thought this is a woman who should and would enjoy the benefits of the golf game…I would really like you to join me next Thursday at the business golf workshop. Golf is a great strategy for making new business relationships with men as well as women. It will be a fun packed day and you will go away educated about the game, elevate and empowered to play the game.”

Oh, if she only knew, I thought. I politely declined and thought that would be that.

Instead, she wrote back, and I discovered one of the most fascinating women around.

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Her second epistle began cheerily, “I just opened a fortune cookie at lunch and I think the message has always been my mantra. ‘Enthusiasm is the greatest asset in the world. It beats money, power, and influence.’”

Her enthusiasm infuses everything she says.

She’d ordered No Excuses because she connected its messages with her motivation to help women grasp the importance of “getting out on the playing field where they will be visible to gain status and power.”

Golf, she declares over and over, is not an end in itself but a means to an end.

“The hub of American business is the golf course. It is not a game for women who like golf, it’s a game they should and could play to take them to parity. It offers limitless opportunities to rise to the top.

Granted it’s not the only way but I find women are intimidated by this simple game by the very excuses you speak of. They are afraid to be front and center with men.”

Joan grew up on the south side of Chicago in an Irish Catholic family with three brothers, which forced her to learn how to hold her ground early in life.  When I asked when she knew she had the “power to,” she launched into describing her “skinny 6-year-old” self.

Her father nurtured her love of reading by taking her to the public library each week. She especially loved biographies and was inspired by reading about people like Susan B. Anthony, who accomplished great things. So she created a lending library in the family’s basement, charging children a penny a day to borrow a book.

A take-action kind of natural leader, she noticed stars in windows of some homes at the end of World War II. When she learned this represented families that had someone fighting in the war, she organized neighborhood children to ring doorbells of homes with stars and say how happy they were the soldiers would be coming home.

Moved by the gesture, people gave her money. This scandalized her mother, but reinforced for Joan the value of reaching out and making community.

Going straight from high school to thirteen years as a Dominican nun, she was propelled always by her joyous sense of community and responsibility.

Then she left the order and moved to New York.

“I was married young and naive at 30 and it only lasted three years because of the infidelity of my then husband. I spent thirteen years as a potential candidate for “Sex in the City” although the producers were unaware of my existence. I started a successful publishing company, met my soul mate (an avid golfer) and helped raise his three teenagers.”

That’s when she discovered the benefits of golf to herself as a business owner and soon became passionate about promoting the game to other women to help them rise to the top “where they should be.”

Women, Joan believes, have the very skills that make them excel at what golf is really about.

Ten percent of its value has to do with skill. The rest has to do with building relationships, communicating in a key social environment where you see personalities and learn to trust other players. You bond in a way that doesn’t happen in any other format in the business world.  “You’re branding yourself, networking, decision making.”

Women, she says, must understand that anyone looking to promote someone is looking for more than skills; he or she is looking for what you can see on the golf course–strategy, humor, personality.  And the proximity to powerful people in a golf game setting makes it more likely that you will be the one chosen.

Quoting Plato, Joan says, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation. And I say to women, your next up is not who you work with but who you play with.”

Now a widow with five grandchildren, Joan presents golf workshops to give women her E-Z Business Golf method.  She’s writing a book entitled The Game of Business, Ascent to the Boardroom to get the message to more women.

“When I see the research that says women are still not in the inner circle, I say the inner circle is available to you. Now let me tell you why it’s so important for you to be there, and how playing golf can help.  Women offer excuses. It’s not as difficult to play the game as you think it is.  Get in the game and then change the game, move up the ladder. Go where things are and make them yours.”

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