Andrew J Lewis
I. A Continuing Education Program
I have many interests. Money and finance are not among them. Which has become increasingly inconvenient.
As I embark on professional reinvention number eight-ish, well-meaning friends and advisors keep telling me I need to ’learn finance.’ Fair enough. They aren’t wrong. If I’m going to build companies, raise capital, hire people, and avoid becoming one of those founders who accidentally sets fire to perfectly good businesses through enthusiastic ignorance, I probably ought to understand the lingo.
Look, I have more than tried. I enrolled in two online accounting courses. I finished them both with certificates of distinction. Unfortunately, I remember substantially more about the historical origins of double-entry bookkeeping than I do about… the bookkeeping. Ask me about Luca Pacioli and I become strangely animated. Ask me to reconcile a balance sheet and I’ll begin looking around the room for someone competent.
This is neither ideal, nor is it changing.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was approaching the problem incorrectly. Why was I, humanities-guy, trying to become interested in finance when I already knew several people who genuinely were? Better yet, they all played golf. If I assembled the right foursome and simply listened carefully for four hours, surely one of them would eventually reveal the Secret of Finance, some magical sentence that suddenly unlocked the entire enterprise.
So, I organized my continuing education program.
First was a former colleague who had built a career in mergers and acquisitions. He likes numbers, deals, and golf with a quiet intensity that suggests he’s perfectly content spending a weekend evaluating either companies or three-wood flight trajectory.
For our purposes, we’ll call him The M&A Guy.
Then there was a young wealth advisor. Which, if you stop and think about it, is a wonderfully improbable job description. Most twenty-somethings are still trying to accumulate wealth. Somehow this young fellow had already become responsible for helping other people preserve theirs. He had survived a spell on Wall Street with both his humanity and golf swing intact and now, among other things, was helping steward part of my son’s college fund while quietly mentoring him through the early stages of a business career.
He’ll be The Young Wealth Advisor.
His father rounded out the foursome. After a career in investment banking, he’d wandered into the far less glamorous world of industry regulation. Calm. Observant. A dangerous putter. The sort of man who gives the impression that markets, bond crises, and impossible downhill six-footers are all best handled by slowing down rather than speeding up.
Naturally, he became The Regulator.
Then there was my son. A rising junior business student at Wake Forest University (Go Deacs!) trying to figure out finance alongside his father. He possessed one overwhelming advantage. He likes this stuff.
Which left me. The wheelchair user. The narrator/storyteller. The birder. The assistant to the caddie. The person sincerely hoping that somewhere between the first tee and the eighteenth green someone would accidentally explain why I should care about the architecture of the modern financial system.
I listened with uncommon intensity. Yield curves. Hold periods. Municipal bonds. Private credit. ‘The sickness is private credit!’ I nodded solemnly throughout, hoping enlightenment might arrive by osmosis. It did not.
II. Investments
I had another reason for assembling the foursome. The M&A Guy had been mentoring my son for years but had never met him.
It started innocently enough. My son had been bitten—hard—by the golf bug just before the pandemic. Like many parents, I did what parents do when their child suddenly becomes obsessed with something beyond my own expertise: I asked around.
The M&A Guy happened to know golf. Really know it. Not just the golf swing, but the ecosystem. Clubs. Teachers. Equipment. The pathways. The sort of accumulated knowledge that never appears in instruction manuals because it’s acquired one recommendation at a time.
Every so often I’d report back. ‘He shot 83 today.’ ‘He made the high school team.’ ‘He won a little tournament.’ That sort of thing. Then one afternoon he paused. ‘You know… there’s this junior membership over at Argyle. I’ve heard the serious kids are starting to gravitate there.’ That single sentence changed the trajectory of my son’s golf life.
A few months later came another. ‘No,’ he said after hearing where we’d been taking lessons. ‘That’s not the coach.’ A couple of days later, ‘This is the coach.’
If you’ve never wandered into the strange ecosystem of competitive junior golf, those two conversations probably sound entirely ordinary. Looking backward, however, they feel absurdly consequential. One introduction leads to another. One club exposes a young golfer to a different standard. One coach notices something another never did. The path appears inevitable retrospectively. Living it, however, consists entirely of casual conversations that don’t seem especially important until years later.
The coach rebuilt my son’s golf swing. Not overnight. Not magically. Just correctly. Within a year his golf swing looked different. Within two, the scores started to follow. His range game improved dramatically. The golf course, being golf, remained considerably less cooperative. Course management, patience, emotional discipline, and learning when not to attack require their own graduate degree.
So, this round wasn’t merely an opportunity to play golf. It was an opportunity to say thank you. Not awkwardly. Not ceremonially. Just… ‘Come see. Remember that skinny kid I kept telling you about? This is what your advice became.’ I don’t recall saying much more than, ‘thanks for helping my son out,’ at one point.
Sometimes gratitude walks beside you for eighteen holes while trying to beat you.
III. Pairings
One of the peculiar virtues of walking golf is that nobody stays in the same conversation for very long. Dinner parties have seating charts. Conference tables have assigned places. Golf has tee shots.
The moment four golf balls scatter across a fairway, so do the conversations. Somebody outdrives everyone by thirty yards. Two players wind up on opposite sides of a bunker. Someone stops to rake. Someone else heads straight for the green. The pairings reorganize themselves every few minutes with no apparent system beyond geography.
My son would disappear over a rise with The Young Wealth Advisor. I could hear fragments floating back on the wind. Summer internships. Resume strategy. Wall Street. Wake Forest. Some discussion of Whoop recovery score, spin rates, and launch angle lasting just long enough for me to remember modern golf has become indistinguishable from aerospace engineering.
A few holes later, The M&A Guy and The Regulator would be fifty yards ahead, walking shoulder to shoulder. I never caught more than snippets. ‘…holding period…’ ‘…buying the business instead…’ ‘…that’s the sickness…’ ‘…private credit…’ I leaned in as discreetly as one can while driving a powerchair across Bermuda fairways. Nothing. The Secret of Finance is not discussed loudly enough for humanities majors.
Every so often I’d find myself beside one conversation or another, contribute something that seemed socially acceptable, and then watch the groups reshuffle again after the next tee shot. It struck me that the golf itself was organizing the afternoon silently. Nobody had planned these conversations. The course had. Every few minutes someone found themselves walking beside precisely the person they hadn’t expected to spend the next three hundred yards with.
I suspect this is one of golf’s forgotten functions. Not competition. Conversation. And not uninterrupted conversation. Interrupted conversation. Just long enough to ask one interesting question before the geography insisted everyone rearrange themselves again.
IV. Veteran Guile
By the fifth hole, my continuing education program appeared to plateau. I still didn’t understand yield curves. Private credit sounded contagious. And I had begun to suspect that people who understand finance simply stop defining terms somewhere around age thirty and assume everyone else will never catch up.
The par 3 fifth at Argyle is one of those holes that looks considerably more dangerous than it is. Roughly 150 to 165 yards. Downhill. Water in front. Nothing especially heroic is required. Just enough commitment to prevent your brain from noticing the water.
A few years ago, the club renovated the green complex, adding several shaved collection areas and assertive sloping around the putting surface. The hole had become more forgiving, if you were lucky. Or, if you were The Regulator.
By then the afternoon had settled into that lovely middle rhythm of weekend golf. The snack shack sits nearby, everyone had replenished their sugar levels, and nobody appeared especially concerned with the score, despite everyone knowing it exactly.
The M&A Guy hit first. Middle of the green. Professional. Reliable. The sort of shot that causes nobody to say anything because there is nothing to discuss. The Young Wealth Advisor finished just off the putting surface, leaving himself an uncomplicated chip. My son got away with one and golf occasionally rewards honest intentions. He finished twenty feet above the hole with a challenging but not impossible birdie opportunity.
The Regulator hit last. The ball left the clubface and immediately headed too far right. Not disastrous, just too far right. Then, before the ball had even reached its apex, I heard myself say, ‘Oh…watch this.’ This wasn’t clairvoyance. It was predictable architecture.
The ball landed on top of one of the more distant newly shaved slopes. For just an instant it appeared to stop, as though the earth itself had absorbed enough momentum to reconsider the situation. Then gravity quietly resumed the conversation. The ball began creeping, then rolling.
It gathered just enough speed to continue ten feet. Then another ten, and another descending the slope almost thoughtfully before settling four feet from the hole. Complete luck, obviously.
I’d begun developing a working theory, however. Certain golfers accumulate the sort of good fortune that eventually ceases feeling random. Not because probability changes. Because memory does. You stop remembering the unlucky bounces. You remember the ones that somehow fit the golfer. The Regulator’s golf ball had no business finishing four feet from the hole. Yet somehow…it felt entirely in character. The Olds, as they were rapidly becoming known, looked ready to take the hole.
Then my son rolled in one of the prettiest downhill twenty-foot putts I’ve ever seen him make. No celebration. Just that deeply satisfying moment when the ball loses its final revolution and quietly disappears into the center of the cup. Momentum restored.
The Young Wealth Advisor let out an involuntary yawp. The Regulator simply laughed. It was my first glimpse of who he really was. Competitive, certainly. But never hurried. Never flustered. Patient enough to let the round come to him, quietly confident that eventually there would be a moment when he was needed.
V. An Unexpected Curriculum
By then I had stopped trying quite so hard to understand finance and begun noticing something more interesting. Finance, at least from a respectful distance, had always seemed like a profession populated by people attempting to outsmart one another. Every article I read seemed to involve somebody discovering an edge, exploiting an inefficiency, or inventing a new acronym. The foursome wasn’t like that.
The conversations wandered the way conversations do when nobody has an agenda. Internships became private equity holding periods, which somehow became a discussion about buying one good business instead of acquiring thirty-four for somebody else. A tee shot later everyone was discussing golf swings. Then children. Retirement. Where somebody hoped to live in ten years. Then we’d all stop talking because somebody had left himself an awkward six-footer.
The Young Wealth Advisor’s advice to my son was mostly practical—the sort of thing that rarely appears in career guides because someone must live through it first. Every so often the M&A Guy or The Regulator would add something that had obviously taken years to learn, then pick up a tee and walk away as though he’d said nothing particularly important.
Nobody announced any of it as wisdom. Perhaps that was why I almost missed it.
VI. The Long Return
Nobody who watched my son roll in that putt on the fifth green had witnessed the hundreds of thousands of swings that made it possible. The four to five caddie loops every week, carrying two bags through four Maryland summers. The practice rounds. The range sessions. The tournament rounds. The days when nothing seemed to improve and the occasional afternoon when everything suddenly did.
His golf swing looks different now. A few years ago, he hit the sort of towering iron shots that seemed determined to remain airborne indefinitely. Lately I’ve noticed the trajectory changing. The ball leaves lower, then climbs. The flight looks older somehow, efficient and patient. Almost boring.
The M&A Guy’s two casual recommendations had helped start all of this. Then came the coach, the lessons, the tournaments, the buckets of balls, the caddie loops, one summer accumulating on another. No single investment explained the result.
By the back nine, another difference had become visible. The older men were slowing down. My son wasn’t. Nothing remarkable had happened that afternoon to make him stronger. He’d simply spent the summer walking golf courses, carrying two bags, practicing, playing, then getting up and doing it again. Some returns take a while to show themselves.
I still couldn’t have explained a yield curve if my life depended on it. But long horizons? Those I was beginning to understand.
VII. Dividends
By late afternoon the golf course had become calm and quiet. Not literally. Golf balls were still flying. Somebody was forever yelling, ‘Nice one!’ or ‘Good ball!’ A mower hummed somewhere beyond the trees. But the conversations had settled into that comfortable rhythm where nobody feels obliged to fill every silence.
It was also getting late enough that I had become increasingly conscious of my battery. Powerchairs and golf courses negotiate an uneasy truce. Every hill has a cost. Every unnecessary detour spends something you’ll eventually want back. So somewhere on the back nine I stopped trying to accompany every shot and conversation. I found a perch where I could watch several holes at once and let the golfers wander off.
At first, I watched golf. Then I noticed the insects. Thousands of them. The late-summer air above the fairways was thick with life, made visible by the lowering sun. A few moments later I observed Purple Martins swirling amongst the bugs. I’d seen Purple Martins before. Or, more accurately, I’d acknowledged their existence. Large. Dark purple. Not swallows, which had caused me to regard them with mild ornithological suspicion.
This time I watched them. They weren’t hunting. Not really. Harvesting is the better word. The air itself a crop. They moved through it in great sweeping arcs—banking, rolling, climbing—each pass collecting another invisible dividend produced by an entire summer’s worth of insects.
For a while, the golf disappeared. I noticed a foursome waiting on another. Someone hit an approach. A putt somewhere drew a cheer. The martins kept working. Then something quietly clicked. The Purple Martins weren’t the investment. They were the return.
By the time I noticed them, almost everything required to produce this moment had already happened. A golf club created. Someone else had built the martin house on Bel Pre Creek. Grounds crews had tended the turf. Water had moved through ponds and creeks. Trees had leafed out. Insects had emerged. An entire summer had accumulated one almost invisible day at a time. Now the sky was full of the result. I looked back toward the golfers.
The M&A Guy had once made two casual recommendations about a kid who liked golf. The Young Wealth Advisor was spending an afternoon answering questions from someone five years behind him. The Regulator was still out there somewhere, waiting patiently for the round to require him. And my son kept walking. Maybe finance wasn’t going to be so difficult after all.
VIII. The Walk Home
By the time we reached the eighteenth green, the match had arranged itself into one final problem. My son had a putt, perhaps nine feet. Long enough that everyone was paying attention. He rolled it in. Cleanly.
The boys had done their work. The Olds, it seemed, had finally run out of holes. Except The Regulator still had a putt. Twenty-five feet, give or take. The sort of putt you don’t expect anyone to make but watch closely anyway. He rolled it. Halfway there, I had the distinct impression it wasn’t slowing down. Then it disappeared. Right in the middle. The Regulator looked at his son and started laughing. Not triumphant. Not surprised, either. Amused.
The Young Wealth Advisor stared back at his father with that wonderful mixture of admiration and exasperation available only to adult sons. The match was a draw. Nobody experienced it that way. The Boys felt like they’d lost. The Olds knew they’d escaped. Golf keeps two scorecards: the numerical one and the one everyone remembers.
We lingered briefly over a hurried lemonade, replaying a few putts and near misses. Nobody stayed long. Everyone was already late for dinner. ‘Let’s do this again’ was the general agreement and no attempt to find a date. Some investments require less due diligence than others. We headed for our cars.
I had spent an entire afternoon with three and a half finance professionals and remained unable to explain a yield curve. I was still unclear on precisely what had become diseased about private credit. And if someone handed me a balance sheet, I would continue looking around for The M&A Guy.
But I knew what a return looked like. I’d been watching returns all afternoon.