Each day, Barry H. Bass commutes from his home in Potomac to his job as chief financial officer of First Potomac Realty Trust in Bethesda. On Monday nights, he trades in the dress shirts for a warm jacket, his briefcase for a broom, and heads for the National Capital Curling Center.
During the work week, Mike Canney, 46, runs Intelligence Data Systems Inc., a systems and communications engineering firm in Reston. On weekends, he carts a $200,000 Chevy Corvette with him to road courses around the country.
Barry H. Bass, right, crouches on the ice at the National Capital Curling Center in Laurel. With him is Michael Fry. Mike Canney, above, competes in a race at Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania in August. Canney finished third.
(Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post (top) And Barb Protos)
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_____Special Report_____
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Metro Business: Coverage of Washington area businesses and the local economy.
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While Bass slides granite across a sheet of ice, and Canney hits the accelerator, their Washington peers are practicing their golf swings. Of about 90 local senior executives surveyed for this story, 80 percent said they participated in a team or individual sport on a regular basis. But this being Washington, the not-so-extreme sports capital of the free world, golf is the most popular, with running second and tennis third.
Business executives have long waxed poetic about the bonding powers of golf. "Golf [gives] us intervals [f]or exchange of mutual thoughts which strengthen the ties between us. We rejoice to see that our chums are playing well and applaud their success," Andrew Carnegie wrote in 1911. "Golf is a game entirely free from . . . [physical] struggles over opponents -- the ineradicable root of evil in football."
In today's era of emotional intelligence, executives and management consultants place an even greater emphasis on golf, not as a way to channel competitive urges but as a method for honing people skills. In business golf, your handicap is less important than how well you can host someone.
"It's not as if I go to the first hole without a deal and land a deal on the 18th hole," said R. Ray Pate Jr., 44, chief executive of health care company NCRIC Group Inc. in Washington. "It's about getting comfortable with each other."
Golf smoothed the way for Kerry B. Skeen, 51, chief executive of Flyi Inc., the parent company of Independence Air. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, while he was building regional carrier Atlantic Coast Airlines, Flyi's predecessor, Skeen made frequent trips to Scotland, the birthplace of golf.
"[W]e were operating airplanes made in Scotland by British Aerospace," Skeen said. "And you don't do business with anyone in Scotland without being passionate about golf. So if you were going to do business with British Aerospace you definitely had to be comfortable with conducting business on the golf course."
Flyi still pays for his annual membership at the golf club at Lansdowne Resort in Loudoun County.
Doug Peterson, president of Going for the Green, a golf-based management seminar, makes his living teaching executives to be "the best partner they can be" on and off the green. Peterson said companies such as Accenture Ltd. and Guidant Corp. have paid him thousands of dollars to teach their top guns how to use golf to gain insight into the character of potential clients, business partners and employees.
