“Calm, optimistic and curious” smiles Steve Lai when I ask him to describe himself to me in three words. These qualities shine through not just in his professional life, but in his approach to a sport that has weaved its way through different chapters of his life.

The London-born, Brunei-raised, UK- educated and Singapore-based BBC Chief Presenter first took up golf in Brunei in his early 20’s. “I was still playing a lot of sports like football, rugby and rock climbing,” Steve explains. “I’ve always been very active. Golf was more of a social thing, just for fun. I didn’t have any formal lessons, I got hold of a second-hand set of clubs and played on weekends if someone needed me to make up a flight. I didn’t take it too seriously then and figured I’d get to it when I was older”

While golf would later become a serious pursuit, Steve’s journey first took him through the halls of academia and into the corporate world. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Business and Marketing Management from the University of Gloucestershire, he joined the Brunei Economic Development Board where he spent a number of years working in marketing and investment promotion.

Steve’s path to journalism, however, was influenced by an encounter during his school days that would plant the seeds for his future career. Justin Webb, a veteran British BBC journalist, gave a talk on journalism at Steve’s school back in the 1990s. “What he said during his talk about journalism really sort of stuck with me,” Steve reveals. “He talked about the responsibility journalists have to the people in the stories.

If you’re covering a war zone or you’re in a natural disaster, people are suffering and they’re at their lowest ebb and you have a responsibility to be respectful of their story and to treat them as such. But you also have a responsibility to the audience to inform them of the whole picture, to be fair and balanced and to not over sensationalize and to be true to what has happened. That stuck with me.”

Those words about journalistic responsibility would resurface years later when Steve found himself with an unexpected opportunity to enter the world of broadcasting. He and his lawyer wife Wei Wei left Brunei for Singapore when he was in his early 30’s after she accepted a job offer at a US Law firm here.

“I came along as a trailing spouse and I knew having come from working at the Economic Development Board, I wanted to try something else other than the corporate world.” He entered and won an online competition where the first prize was to ‘close out’ a show on ESPN’s SportsCentre programme and basically preview what was coming up on the weekend.

“You download a widget and it was a tie-up between Sky and Star Sports at the time and you choose your subject – F1, cricket, football, whatever – and a little widget like an auto queue appears below your webcam,” Steve recalls. “It starts scrolling and you present to the webcam like you’re a sports presenter. I got invited back for a screen test and an interview and was offered a six-month contract which got extended.” Steve, now 47, then made the switch to broadcast journalism after reaching out to Channel News Asia’s (CNA) Managing Director on LinkedIn and the next 12 years saw him front a number of daily programmes including Primetime Asia, Between the Lines and Asia First.

While building his broadcasting career at CNA, another passion was quietly rekindling through the relationships he formed in the newsroom. “I took golf really seriously starting about a year and a half ago, primarily because of Julie Yoo, my former colleague at CNA,” Steve chuckles. “She is completely responsible for getting me back into the game. So I took loads of lessons, was hitting the driving range a couple of times a week and playing as often as I could.”

Signing up for lessons, after a few social swings in a golf simulator, was a real step in the right direction for Steve as far as identifying weaknesses. The lessons were with Jamie Whenman, husband of another CNA colleague Olivia Marzuki, who is a golf pro at GOLFTEC Singapore.

“Suddenly my ball started flying straight or even had like a little baby draw and suddenly it was like a light bulb went off,” relates Steve. “We’ve spent quite a bit of time together playing and also gone together to Forest City in Johor Bahru. So now Olivia’s a bit jealous that I spend more time playing golf with her husband than she does!”

So what’s the best part of his game and what still needs work for the current low 20s handicapper? He admits his second shot – seven or nine iron – works well for him but off the tee and his short game are areas he needs to improve. “The most satisfying is when you hit a really good tee shot straight down the middle and really far. And that’s what keeps me coming back at the moment. But the frustration is that my game off the tee is quite erratic. So I’ve been trying to figure that out.”

Steve’s growing expertise in regional broadcasting and his deepening love for golf would soon parallel each other as he took on his next challenge. In December 2023, Steve joined the BBC in Singapore as Chief Presenter where he anchors Newsday and Business Today as well as reporting on location for key stories such as the Taiwan and Indonesia elections in 2024.

It’s been a busy start to his career at the BBC, but what’s made it seamless is the global news experience he came armed with as well as a welcoming, friendly and helpful team. “It’s been a fantastic opportunity to learnfrom some of the best in the business and to work on big global stories that are really shaping how the world is at the moment,” he says proudly.

Balancing his newfound role with his passion for golf has required careful planning. His current work and travel schedule makes it challenging to play golf regularly, but he has an agreement with his non-golf playing wife and two teenage daughters.  “I can only play on weekdays because of the working hours that I have on early morning shifts.

So my window of opportunity is pretty slim, but I’m trying to make it work. My daughters don’t seem to have any interest in it. I’ve taken to them to the driving range, but they’ve not really cottoned on to it although they seemed to find the joy in looking for that sweet spot.”

Drawing from decades of experience and witnessing the evolution of news consumption, Steve offers thoughtful insights into the future of broadcasting. “Anybody can have a podcast, anybody can have a YouTube page, anyone can voice an opinion on any given topic. You just have to go online to see how strong people feel about these opinions.

The concern I have, I suppose, is that people get so caught up in the sensationalist or the highly emotive angles to different stories so they don’t take a step back and try and see the nuance to a story or understand the context to a story and the background to a story of why things are the way they are. “So on the one hand it concerns me that a lot of the time it seems people don’t have the patience to look into that, to understand that. But on the other hand, that information is there for people if they want it. Like, the BBC’s been very keen to push BBC Verify, which is where it looks not just what the news is, but how that news has been gathered, how that news has been put together, the sources, the research, the technology that’s been used to establish those facts.

“And I think that’s going to be important because the world is getting noisier. It’s getting more and more confusing, it’s getting more and more congested and muddied with so many different perspectives that people are pushing for their own agenda. I find it reassuring that the BBC is still dedicated to just doing the job, doing the news. For me, news doesn’t have to necessarily be the most entertaining thing, but it does have to be accurate.”

As he balances his BBC responsibilities with his golf aspirations, Steve maintains the same qualities that have guided him throughout. “On the work front I’m just curious, I like to know what’s going to happen, what’s happening next with stories. I just like to do stuff, and I like to have routine. I find that sort of drives me.

I took part in a HYROX fitness race earlier this year which was really good fun. So, I’m trying to get fit for the next one. I have these little goals that I set myself. So one goal was to get my handicap below 20. Next year, I want to do another HYROX event. So you have little things that just keep you moving forward.”

Wise words indeed from the calm, optimistic and curious Steve.