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Tony Romo Takes a Break From Golfing to Discuss His Golf Game
There’s nothing new about Tony Romo hitting the links during the offseason. The Dallas Cowboys quarterback has been doing that for years and doing it at a high level. This year, however, he had to mix in the leadership role of coordinating some offseason workouts with his teammates. By all accounts, Romo, who has taken all sorts of criticism for just about anything and everything over the years, spearheaded those efforts as coaches could not have contact players during the lockout. DeMarcus Ware said in an interview during the past week that he thought Romo took a big step in terms of leadership thanks to his efforts.
But don’t think for a minute that Romo’s efforts distracted him or hindered his golf game. Romo, who has attempted to qualify for the U.S. Open, shot a 66 in a round recently and finished second this weekend at the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship. And he finds a way in the following interview to relate his golf game with that of football. Tony Romo joined 105.3 The Fan in Dallas with Gavin Dawson to discuss how the lockout helped him develop as a leader, if he could learn anything from Dirk winning a championship, if he’d be better at football if he golfed less and if he learned anything by playing golf with Michael Jordan.
Did the lockout help you develop as a leader?:
“I don’t know. That’s not anything that I can debate or even talk about, really. Anybody who talks about themselves in a leadership quality, in some ways almost minimizes it. From my perspective, you do what you’re supposed to do. My job is to lead this football team on the field. In a lockout situation, my job is to get everyone together, make sure they’re bought in, have people show up and make sure they’re committed to getting better as players in the offseason. It’s hard enough to come out there every day when you have coaches out. … Now take the coaches aside, we’re still going to commit to that.”
Can you learn anything from what Dirk Nowitzki accomplished with the Mavericks?:
“I think that any time you see someone, the mental approach of that, Dirk has gone through all the stuff that you want to say about him that people have come up with throughout the years. From my perspective, Dirk was a guy who just kept trying to get better and he finally achieved that individual success in the sense of, he’s gotten to a point where he’s so good at what he does that he was allowed to bring his team with him and take them to that next level.”
Do you think you could be better at football if you gave up golf?:
“Anybody who plays professional sports knows it’s fun to compete on a daily basis and I get that with football all the time. But in the offseason, I don’t get that, ‘I won or lost today,’ so I try and do that in other fields sometimes and golf just happens to be like that. Saying that, if you were to be around me for the next seven months, you’d probably see me pick up a club maybe one time. I put the clubs away from July 22 until probably February-ish. I might play once during the bye week when my dad comes to town.”
Did you take anything away from playing in a recent golf tournament with Michael Jordan?:
“He has a great mind for both games. When you watch him play golf, he understands how to win. He obviously doesn’t possess the same abilities that he had in basketball, but he’s smart. He doesn’t do anything but be himself and he doesn’t think about the other person. … I try to tell people that when you’re playing golf, it’s a great tool for your brain. … In football, I throw an interception or two and I’m the reason we’re losing and we’re trailing by four with two minutes to go and you’re just emotionally feeling terrible, you’ve got to be able to suck it up, come right back out and take your team down the field and win the game. … In golf, you make two bogies on 15 and 16 and you just had the lead and now you’re down two or one and you have to come back and make a birdie, you have to mentally come back and overcome that.”
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