GG Mäkelä

Maria Mäkelä manages a course outside the capital, a former junior tennis player whose real talent turned out to be running things: the greens, the calendar and the long-standing feuds all answer to her. She picked the board up in the clubhouse and it has become where disputes get settled. Two members who will not address each other have both, separately, played her about it, and she gave each of them a game and an opinion. Years of that have quietly made her stronger than visitors expect, which they discover with their guard already down. Whoever loses sets the board up for the next one. It sounds like a forfeit and does the opposite: a man with his hands full of checkers has agreed to another game before he has noticed.