Leadership Quote by Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

A politician admitting he has “just picked up golf” sounds innocuous until you hear the soft machinery of image-making whirring underneath. Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s line is almost comically plain: it’s not a flourish, it’s a request. “Give me a chance” isn’t about a tee time; it’s the language of mandate and patience, smuggled into leisure. The phrase positions him as approachable and newly initiated, a leader still learning, still settling in, asking the public (or party, or press) to ease up and let him find his rhythm.

Golf is the real subtext. In many postcolonial, status-conscious political cultures, it’s a coded setting: where elites network, where deals are lubricated by “casual” conversation, where belonging is signaled without saying so. By stressing he “just picked it up,” Badawi frames himself as a late entrant rather than a born-to-it aristocrat, a way of deflecting the sport’s class associations while still claiming access to its social capital. It’s an attempt at balance: I’m one of you, but I can also play in the rooms where power consolidates.

Context matters because Badawi’s premiership was often read through the lens of temperament: softer, more consensus-oriented, sometimes criticized as hesitant. This quote functions like a miniature manifesto for that style. Golf rewards patience and control; it’s governance as a long game. The modesty is strategic, and the humor is accidental - which, in politics, can be its own kind of authenticity.