She’s certainly a good golfer, but not only did she cry on the 18th green, as she was eliminated, she had a handkerchief w/her, to wash away the tears during the press conference.
Gee, an athlete has to know how to act at all times. She played right into the hands of the fat males she would beat everytime. No, I’m not fat & I don’t play golf.
Women fall pretty far behind men in track and field events. The female record for the 100 meter dash is frequently topped by male high-school athletes. There as a thread a month or two ago on these boards about how the WNBA could probably not play competitively with most college teams. It also harder for women to retain muscle mass than for men - a woman can get as buff as a man, but she’s going to have to spend a lot more time working out to maintain it.
Tell that to Freddy Couples after he won a few weeks ago (he cried) and Len Mattiace when he came in second at the Masters (he cried).
I quit listening to the PGA’s “rationale” for their discriminatory rules back when they whined about the guy who needed to use a cart instead of walking the course. The PGA’s “powers that be” asserted that was taking away the physical stamina part of golf. Not only did that almost kill me 'cause I was laughing so hard, it completely ignores the fact that all the golfers have someone else doing the physical part of the walking–that part where someone else carries the clubs!
Maybe if I get obscenely rich I’ll sponsor a $50 million tournament, where all the golf players have to carry their clubs and their caddies around the entire 18 holes. --Or maybe a 500-hole “cross-country” course, and the first three people to complete it, the one with the lowest score wins-- 24 hours of Daytona style, round the clock. They’d be out there playing in night-vision goggles.
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His name is Casey Martin. A cart can’t get him into a tournament because he isn’t playing well enough. He is currently playing on the Nationwide tour and has only made the cut once this year.
Thanks, Casey Martin- I think the US SCt knew he would rarely make the cut ,too.
Or perhaps because there is way more money in winning on the LPGA vs. finishing 70th on the PGA?
From a 1995 article at the website of the Feminist Majority Foundation
In 2002, 3,960,517 boys participated in high school sports compared to 2,806,998 girls (The Secretary of Education’s Commission on Opportunity in Athletics).
First off, one tournament is not enough… one tournament simply does not give enough convincing data to prove anything about her game from a statistical stand point or a scientific one.
I think her game is good enough to compete… the problem is the amount of attention she attracts changes the stakes… if she were simply just another man out on the course and had her game, I would go so far to say that she would be winning a handful of tournaments…small tournaments.
When people like her and Tiger play, it’s good for the professional game… its also good for America… but it’s not always good for golf. It always brings up stuff like sexism and racism that are supposed to exist in the sport… no doubt, there are a lot of bigots out there, but that’s true anywhere.
Bottom line, if she’s playing to improve her game then it’s a good idea, but if she’s out there to make some kind of point… you get the picture.
What I’ve seen of her game is very little… but she seems to have good mechanics and is disiplined… she stands to make a lot of money… good for her.
The problem today is that people don’t play for the love of the game… they’ll say it to your face, put on a big show, but bottom line, if they could make it as a professional wrestler they’d do it too. No devotion to the game. People who play golf for golf don’t need money or Nike golf balls.
If it turns out she plays because she loves golf then good… because it truly is good then for golf.
Height probably makes more of a difference than any other variable in the game… too tall pulls and slices… too short hooks and pushes… you have to adjust everything about your swing depending on your height… even your equipment… if you’re too tall, all your irons will have too flat a lie angle… what this means is that when you come down into impact, the toe of the club hits the ground first, opening the club face… the result? Mishits are almost always slices… the opposite is true with being too short… but being short has more advantages actually than being too tall… taller players have a wider archs which causes more speed in the swing… your body has to be just that more in sync to hit the ball correctly… more wild shots are the result of much less out of sync swings than if you were shorter.
While this may be theoretically true, it is rendered nonsense by one simple fact: players get clubs appropriate to their height.
While there are successful short players (Ian Woosnam, 5’ 4.5"), let’s look at the top ten in the world rankings:
Tiger Woods: 6’ 2"
Ernie Els: 6’ 3"
Davis Love: 6’ 3"
Vijay Singh: 6’ 2"
Mike Weir: 5’ 9"
Phil Mickelson: 6’ 3"
David Toms: 5’ 10"
Padraig Harrington: 6’ 1"
Retief Goosen: 6’ 0"
Jim Furyk: 6’ 2"
So, only two under 6’. That would suggest that height is an advantage. With the exception of Furyk, those tall guys have one thing in common - they hit the ball a long way. As you say, they have a bigger arc and can get more clubhead speed. At the pro level, they rarely mishit shots by more than a fraction, so the out-of-synch argument doesn’t apply.
All stats from www.pgatour.com.
As has been mentioned above, and was suggested by commentators BEFORE the tournament, Annika’s driving distance was not the limiting factor in her game. She was betrayed by her short game, chipping and putting, where strength and size isn’t a factor. She is only an average putter on the LPGA, and most commentators observed that the LPGA players cannot hold a candle to PGA players around the green. Getting out of rough, sand, special shots are all made better by the men than the women.
The billiards example is important here. Even though there is NO size or strength advantage in pool, men far exceed women in skill at the upper echelon. Women do play less pool than men, but that alone cannot explain the difference. Women and men are wired differently, there should be no surprise that (on the highest levels) there is a difference in skill.
Why not?
I do believe it was Vijay Singh who made those comments.
RM Mentock, as I understand it, in pool, women are thoroughly uncompetitive against men at the highest level of competition. In order to explain such a disparity, I would expect that men would be FAR more likely to take up the sport.
Assume that men and women are inherently equally skilled at pool. If men were, for instance, 10 times more likely to take up the sport, it would explain why there are 10 times as many men in the top 100, not why there are only men in the top 100.
Pool, while being more popular with men, is probably far more even in participation than many other sports. It is certainly not the type of sport that women avoid like baseball or football or hockey. It would be more like golf in participation rates, perhaps even higher than golf in female participation.
Cheesesteak,
To use your own logic: Assume that men and women are inherently not equally skilled at pool. If men were, for instance, 5 times more likely to have the top spatial skills required for the sport, It would explain why there are 5 times as many men in the top 100, not why there are only men in the top 100.
I know for a fact that some women can have extremely high spatial skills equal to the top men. There is a lot more to pool than visualizing vectors. I think it’s more a factor of culture than anything else. What woman would venture into a male dominated pool hall?
Ah, I misunderstood. When you said “Women do play less pool than men”, you meant that “Less women play pool than men.” (And your point was, that’s not true to a great extent.) I took it to mean “Women practice less than men.” That would certainly make a difference, no? 
And I think it’s probably true. Although I do see a lot of women playing pool, there are none of them who have the fanaticism of some of the guys I’ve known. Perhaps they just need the role models–twenty years from now, things may have turned around.