Golf Taught Randi Belisomo ’00 to Tee Up a Positive Mindset

The lessons that Randi Belisomo ’00 learned from golf about personal responsibility are still relevant to her today.
When people ask Randi Belisomo ’00 what the biggest difference is in her life today, she replies: “I used to be with people on the worst day of their lives. Now I’m with people on the best days of their lives.” 

Belisomo sees people celebrating their best days at Ronnie Grisanti’s Italian restaurant in Memphis, which she has managed since 2018. Previously, she worked for 13 years as a general assignment, on-air news reporter for WGN television in Chicago.

During her years as a journalist in Chicago, she had her share of fun and heartwarming assignments. “I will never forget covering the Cubs the year they won the World Series (2016). I would go to cemeteries, and people would take a radio to listen to the Cubs game near a father or grandfather who had died and was a Cubs fan. That’s an example of where sports meant so much more than sports. It was a family legacy. I loved doing stories like that.” 

She also remembered covering Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, particularly his 2008 election victory speech at Grant Park, before an estimated crowd of 240,000 people.

For all the good stories, though, she said the news often skewed toward tragic stories. “Chicago was the most dangerous city in the country for several years while I lived there with the highest homicide rate,” she recalled. “I never felt directly in danger. I was just around it all the time.”

Over time, she said, the difficult stories took their toll. Additionally, her husband, who was also in the news business, was diagnosed with colon cancer. “Trying to go out and be on TV and act like everything’s okay every day, while my husband was sick, that was hard,” she said. “That would be hard in any career, but I had to keep going. When everything else was falling apart, I had to keep covering other people’s tragedies.” Sadly, her husband succumbed to cancer. 

Belisomo said she was glad she had attended Northwestern graduate school in journalism and thankful for the years she had in Chicago. “I loved journalism because it was something different every day,” she explained. She also liked working on deadlines.

She gives credit to Hutchison for first learning about deadlines. “Ms. Newberry used to make us write the five-paragraph essay in the course of a class, with a thesis, three supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion, and we had to type it on deadline. That made a difference in my life. I learned how to put out content on deadline.” 

Understanding Personal Responsibility Through Golf 

One of Belisomo’s passions is golf. While she was at Hutchison, she was on the golf team, and although the team didn’t win the state championship while she was playing, they won the region title several times. She said playing golf was different from many team sports like volleyball or basketball because you’re often playing the game by yourself and don’t know how your teammates are faring on other parts of the golf course. 

“You’re responsible for yourself,” she said. “You missed the putt, you hit it in the rough, you had a bad attitude on the golf course today? It’s all you. I learned a lot about personal responsibility. I’m still quick to say, ‘What did I do wrong?’ in a self-examination, because I can’t point fingers at anyone.”

She added that golf is a game of honor, respect, and trustworthiness. “You’re out there by yourself, and if you’re in the rough and the ball moves because you took a step, that’s a stroke penalty, and you have to report that to somebody else. That’s why they call it a gentleman’s or a gentlewoman’s game, because you’re responsible for regulating yourself. There’s no referee.”

She said there’s one other factor that makes golf different: “We’re all playing against the golf course,” she explained. “A lot of people think golf is trying to beat the other person. You’re trying to beat the golf course.” 

Although Belisomo didn’t play golf as an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, she now tries to play golf once a week when the weather is nice. She likes that she can show up to the course, be paired with other people, and make new friends by the end of the day. She’s also learned, through the years, that golf requires a positive mindset, which is a great way to look at life, too.

“You have to have a good attitude to play golf. If you hit a bad shot, you have to put that behind you immediately and move on,” she said. “You can’t let one incident ruin your whole day or your whole round. That’s a good lesson. I’ve had 40 years of practice. I’m a lot better at it the older I am and the more perspective that I have. Trying to learn that as a teenager was hard, and I knew that if I had a bad attitude, my father or my mother would be the first person to yank me off a golf course and say, ‘You’re going home, because that’s not what this is about.’ ”

Learning About Business and Taking Care of People 

In 2018, Belisomo returned to Memphis because her father was sick. At the time, he was in the process of moving Ronnie Grisanti’s restaurant to its current location in the Regalia Shopping Center. 

“I came home to help my mother take care of him, and my father said, ‘Why don’t you go to work?’ While he was doing cancer treatments, he got to come see the restaurant and eat before he went into hospice care. So, I took over his business. It was good timing, because my career in news was becoming harder due to changes in the news landscape. It was a good time to shift, and I’m so glad that I did.”

Having Hutchison friends in Memphis helped make the transition back easier. “There are several of us from Hutchison who have stayed friends through the years and all of us were coming back to Memphis at the same time.” One of her best friends is Emily Bryce Bowie ’00, who was a golf teammate while at Hutchison. When Belisomo married again in 2025, Bowie was her matron of honor for the second time.

Belisomo admitted that running a restaurant is similar to being a reporter because no two days are the same, and you’re meeting new people all the time. She had never managed people before this job, though, and she had to get up to speed on that as well as accounting and other business matters. “I’m in the business of taking care of people, and that comes naturally to me. I love it here.” 

Belisomo tackled a big challenge during the pandemic in 2020. Because people stopped coming into the restaurant, she had to devise a way to keep the business going. They decided to package ready-to-eat entrees from Ronnie Grisanti’s to sell in grocery stores. It was a steep learning curve. 

“Writing our food safety plan for the U.S. Department of Agriculture was about 100 times harder than a master’s thesis,” she said. “We had to learn it because we needed to keep the business afloat quickly.” The business now operates a commercial kitchen in Cordova at the University of Memphis Culinary Institute, where the meals are made. The entrees are sold in about 18 Kroger locations in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and she said they are continuing to expand. The whole enterprise took about nine months to launch.

A Strong Foundation at Hutchison

Belisomo credits Hutchison with helping her build a solid foundation, particularly in writing. “I tell everybody, if you learn how to write, you can go someplace. [English teacher] Glenda Pera is one of my dearest friends today. She was the first person who told me that I could write well. I remember her telling me about an essay I wrote, ‘This is how you write an essay.’ I thought, ‘Wow. I didn’t even think it was that great,’ but apparently she did.”

She added that Hutchison gave her a well-rounded education, including confidence, self-esteem, and great friends. “I knew that my teachers cared about me and my education, and that makes a big difference when you feel like people are in your corner. I’ve always felt like there were people there cheering me on, and that means a lot to a young lady.”
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