18 HOLES WITH: DOUG LEBDA CEO. LENDINGTREE INC.

AuthorPurkey, Mike
PositionNC TREND: On the links

Doug Lebda appears in the locker room at Quail Hollow Club holding a Ziploc bag filled with eight or nine golf balls and a couple of gloves. He's still wearing the gray slip-on canvas shoes he arrived in.

"I'm demo-setting it today," Lebda says with a smile. "My clubs are in the trunk of my car, which had a flat at the airport, and I had it towed in."

Most golfers, about to play a round to impress, would come unglued if they had to go out with an unfamiliar set of clubs and no golf shoes, which Lebda couldn't wear because of a foot ailment. The CEO of LendingTree had immediate perspective: "I already have a good excuse if I don't play well," he says.

Anyone who has caught Lenny, the wisecracking, green LendingTree spokespuppet, on TV knows it's a company that doesn't take itself too seriously. Lenny pokes fun at consumers who don't shop around for the best mortgage rate. LendingTree gets the last laugh: Revenue jumped 62% in the first half of 2017 versus the year earlier.

But if there's a sport to keep a player humble, golf can make you self-conscious the fastest. One bad swing that leads to a bad shot can leave you looking for a tree to hide behind. Lebda is in the trees plenty during this round, but he isn't trying to shrink from view. He's happily trying to find his ball and get it back to the fairway on a gorgeous fall morning.

Lebda, 48, has a 15.3 handicap index at Quail Hollow with a golf swing of a player with half that handicap. He is tall, lean and athletic, owing to his participation in Ironman triathlons, marathons and ultramarathons. On the golf course, he has a wide stance and an equally wide arc with his driver. But with this demo driver, he is high and low, left and right, which leads to a number of bogeys and double bogeys. But never a cross word is spoken nor epithet hurled. And when we decide to walk instead of riding in a cart, he says, "Now we can call it exercise."

Lebda does have his moments. He gets up and down from the front left bunker for a par at the par-3 13th. On the par-4 16th, the beginning of the difficult Green Mile at Quail, he blasts a drive and gets to within 20 feet with his 6-iron second shot. He two-putts for a routine par on one of the hardest holes on this year's PGA Championship course.

"You can't get hung up on your good ones or your bad ones," he says.

Lebda is not a weekend golfer with a regular group. He likes to play nine holes in the evening, sometimes with his wife, Megan Greuling, and...

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