I don’t think you’re using “head game” in the same way as Clinton. I assume he means that its easy to have your internal mental state throw off your game in golf, much more so than in more fast paced sports. I seriously doubt he’s comparing the level of logical or highlevel thinking in golf with that of chess or whatever.
And I still remember the exact moment in the late 90’s when I hit Clinton blow-job joke saturation. Now I can’t hear one without giving a little mental shudder. Sort of like how people who drank too much tequila in one night find that afterwards, they can’t even smell it without retching a little.
My favorite was when Monica’s lawyers made an “oral proffer” during the immunity negotiations–“Isn’t that what got her into trouble in the first place?”
I think this is it. Things like chess and poker are certainly high level analytic challenges. But the mental challenge of golf is harder to explain. I would roughly characterize it as the type of mental challenge of creating a work of art in a stressful environment, in that it requires patience and creativity in a type of chaotic setting that isn’t immediately obvious to non-players. When I say chaos, I’m referring to the constantly changing weather, ground, and topology, as well as the player’s emotional state.
I play poker a little, and it’s certainly true that emotions can affect your play. You get beat badly and you can be rattled for a few hands, for example. But in golf, getting rattled often results in a very quick death spiral: hit a bad shot and get mad. Then you are P.O.ed and that leads to another poor shot, and then another and another. It is much, much more difficult to recover from that in golf than in poker. That’s a huge mental challenge, but not an analytic one.
ETA: Furthermore, at least when I play poker, it’s very possible to brush off a bad play by simply saying, “Well, that’s poker.” In golf, a bad play very often leads to an emotional outburst of frustration that has to be contained. After all, how many times have golfers broken their clubs or threw them in anger? Maybe there have been poker players who have upset the table or thrown their chips at someone, but it sure isn’t as common as chucking one’s five iron into a lake.
That means that it’s even less of a “head game” than other sports are. If achieving that “flow of the game” mental state really helps in basketball, then a large part of basketball is the ability to achieve that mental state.
Nah… You’re not quite getting it. Basketball is so fast paced that you don’t have time during the game to let your thoughts interfere, other than shooting free throws, and you certainly see what Clinton was saying there. There is absolutely no reason for someone who has been playing a game their whole life to shoot such an easy shot at a 50% clip, but they do. Golf is like shooting 70 (or 80 or 90) free throws in a row, except sometimes the wind is blowing left to right, sometimes right to left, uphill, downhill, left, right, and sometimes from halfcourt, sometimes longer.
You have to take all of this into account, adjust your stroke accordingly, then let it all go mentally before hitting the shot. You have to do this on every shot, not just once before you get started.
And you also have to do that with every sport that’s played outdoors. You think quarterbacks don’t need to account for wind? Or for that matter, receivers or outfielders who need to know where the ball is going so they can be there to catch it?
Marginally, at best, unless you’re playing in a gale. A football weighs ten times more than a golf ball, and at best it is being thrown 180 feet. A golf ball is routinely hit 900 feet, and often 700 feet towards the green. Football receivers can also adjust to the ball’s position, while a golf hole is stationary.
A quarterback also throws from level grass every time, while a golfer has to hit from an uphill, downhill, or sidehill lies. Sometimes from sand (from rock hard to deep soft beach sand) or bare dirt of landscape bark.
It’s always interesting to hear people who clearly have no experience with something try to explain how something they clearly aren’t all that familiar with is actually nothing like what experts say it is.
I can understand that people may not agree with Clinton’s assessment of golf being the most difficult head game. But I don’t think there’s any doubt from anyone who has tried to be good at golf that it is in the running… yet Chronos knows better, calling it “not remotely” a head game.
I think I’ll start insisting that chess really isn’t that more difficult than checkers. Never mind that the last game of chess I played was probably like 30 years ago, I just don’t see how anyone can argue that it is anything but a bit more difficult than checkers. King me!