The golf career also required skill. You cannot be an assistant pro at a country club without being able to play at a level that commands respect from members, some of whom are quite good. Conrad was, by all accounts from people who knew him in Massachusetts, a genuinely excellent golfer. The charity event where he beat Johnny Miller—a Hall of Fame professional who won multiple major championships—was not a fluke. It was the demonstration of a skill that had been built across years of genuine practice.
Bob Van Wert, who golfed with Randele and later worked with him at a car dealership, described his playing style as calm. He “rarely drank, never made side bets, stayed calm on the course.” These are the attributes of a player who competes within himself rather than against the external pressure of what’s at stake. For a man managing a fifty-two-year secret, the psychology of staying calm under the appearance of ordinary pressure—the golf round, the dealership floor, the dinner with friends—was presumably practiced enough to become second nature.
The transition from golf management to automotive sales in the 1980s or 1990s made professional sense for someone whose primary assets were interpersonal. Car sales, especially luxury car sales—Land Rovers and Volvos are not mass-market vehicles—requires the ability to build rapport, understand what a customer wants, and maintain relationships across the time between a vehicle purchase and its replacement. Randele was apparently excellent at this. Matt Kaplan, who managed two dealerships where Randele worked, described him as “a gentleman” in terms that suggested not merely personal courtesy but professional effectiveness.