Talking about golf never fails to put people at ease. Even the bad shots.

So when asked about it, businessman Robert John Sobrepeña beamed. He settled on his leather, argyle chair and remembered fondly how he would play golf with the late former president Fidel V. Ramos back in the '90s.

During those rounds, Sobrepeña said they would talk about a lot of things including building a mass transport project. An idea that may have given birth to what is now the MRT-3.

There is truth to it, after all: The tired, old saying that more business deals are done on the golf course than in the board room.

"That's a big one. Golf and the president of the country had to do with a big infrastructure in the country," Sobrepena told Tribune Golf in an exclusive interview. "Oh, but there are many more."

It was a free-wheeling talk with the top-notch developer — whose vast work includes the MRT-3 itself and several golf courses like the famed Manila Southwoods — inside his office in Pasig.

But it mostly delved on the game very close to his heart.

"There a lot of deals that are discussed during a golf game, but normally the way it happens is you start talking about the business side before golf, during, and then after golf is more on trying to finalize a lot of these deals. So yeah, there's a lot of business deals," he said.

Of course, he happens to be good at both golf and business.

And his theorem makes sense as well because most of the time the people who makes the biggest decisions that affect the biggest portion of society are those who can afford to play golf.

But for Sobrepeña — whose handicap went to an all-time high of eight before the years brought it to 12 — golf allows people to have better perspective.

"When you play golf, you're under a lot of better situations, you are more relaxed, you may drink together. You definitely will eat together. Play together and somehow discussing business is a little bit easier. Or a lot easier," he said.