Seems this argument has been popping up a lot lately, so I put it to the good folks on Dope.
Is golf a sport or a game?
My stance is that for something to be considered a sport, excelling in it must require more than the average human’s amount of physical conditioning. Golf doesn’t fit this. Is Tiger Woods an athlete? I could argue yes, but that would be completely independent on his proficiency on a golf course. To me, golf is a game, plain and simple, on par with bowling and foosball. Yes, exceeding does require a very specific skill set and many hours of practice to hone your skill, though no different than in Halo or chess. Baring some extremely debilitating condition, your physical requirements are basically nil. Sports are by nature, physical games. Lose the physical aspect, it’s just a game. Look at John Daly. If a an obese alcoholic who gets short of breath fetching his morning paper can be in the upper echelon, this cannot be a sport.
Care to weigh in?
ETA: Couldn’t decide if this should be in the game room or IMHO. If I guessed wrong, please slap me on the wrist and move it to the correct venue.
I dunno. I go back and forth on this one a bit. I don’t think it’s enough to restrict the definition to activities that require peak cardiovascular conditioning. Regardless of your fatness, hitting a gold ball 500 yards requires tremendous strength, aim, and coordination. I think it qualifies. But not if you’re driving around in one of those stupid carts.
On the other hand, what’s your opinion of NASCAR? As much as I can admire a person with insane car-driving skill, I find the notion of calling them athletes to be absurd.
I’d hesitate to call NASCAR a sport as well, for the same reasons. I’m not restricting sport to only cardio conditioning, only that to be an athlete you must have an above-average degree of SOME type of physical talent. Yes, hitting a golf ball takes superior hand-eye coordination, but so does throwing a dart at a target. Insofar as strength is concerned, my understanding (I don’t play golf. I’ve not the patience for it) is that the distance you can whack a ball depends much less on the physical strength behind the swing and much more on the technical form and technique. This would disqualify it from sport, IMO.
And I’m not even going to get into the absurdity that is the motorized golf cart.
Though now when I’m getting more in to it, are events such as archery and horse racing sports? Horse racing might qualify, though the horses would be the athletes, not the midget jockeys whose physical talent stops at their ‘butt-whacking’ prowess*. Archery is an olympic event, but isn’t it just a more technologically advanced form of darts? I don’t think hand-eye coordination can be the only deciding factor in determining what is a sport. Many games require you to be insanely coordinated. To be a sport, there must be some physical talent involved as well.
(*to be fair, I honestly don’t know much about the intricacies of horse racing, only what I’ve pulled from bad movies and that one time at the track.)
None of the terms “athlete”, “game”, and “sport” are well-defined. Each has fuzzy boundaries.
You are free to declare golf either inside or outside your definition of “sport”, and you’ll have some 200 million native English speakers agreeing with you. And another 200 million disagreeing.
ET: I tried several times here to come up with some parameters that define a sport. No matter what I chose, there were obvious exceptions.Ccoordination? Agility? physical effort? training? Competition? Records? None are definitive. IMHO, sport is a *know it when I see it *category.
There’s been successful overweight athletes in a number of other sports (David Wells the baseball pitcher, for ex.) an endeavor which, according to your definition, you would otherwise consider a sport. Then there’s all the fat offensive linemen in football. I’ll also challenge the depiction of auto racers as non-athletes-you are aware of the high G-forces they have to endure each and every lap, right? While there may have been some overweight racers in previous eras (saw one guy on a replay of an old NASCAR race, and he was certainly pudgy), that’s something you really can’t get away with anymore. There’s a reason why endurance races have teams switch drivers every 1-3 hours. Archery also requires great strength to succeed.
Point-you can draw the line anywhere you want (if there even is a line), but it would be completely arbitrary. Each sporting activity requires certain skills, which differ from sport to sport. I’m not about to be presumptuous and declare that skill set X means it’s a sport, while skill set Y equates to a “game.”
It’s ultimately a meaningless distinction, because it’s determined entirely by what definition you choose to assign to each word. Different people use different definitions. Any “discussion” is just regurgitation of everyone’s individual definition, and people nitpicking it.
On that note, let me nitpick your definition
You say that a “sport” should require greater than average physical conditioning. As such, the “average” person is unable to participate in a sport. I submit that baseball is no more physically taxing than softball, and plenty of average folks play softball. Plenty of average folks also play pickup basketball.
I would say that a sport is a competitive activity that requires physical rather than mental skill.
I agree. This is my point. To me, a sport assumes a degree of physical exertion. Golf does not require the physicality necessary to be a sport and to me, golfers are not athletes. It annoys me when people include Tiger Woods in conversations featuring the likes of Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps when discussing greatest athletes ever. The Mikes are athletes. Tiger Woods plays golf.
Allow me to clarify another point as well. I’m not saying that in itself, being overweight disqualifies one from being an athlete. Of course the huge linemen in football are athletes. But they also have a tremendous amount of training and physical conditioning and strength whereas one such as John Daley does not. What I’m saying is that to excel in a sport you must be of above average physical condition. Anybody can play a sport and have a damn good time at it. But to be a pro athlete you must be a physical specimen in some regard. Golfers (and possibly NASCAR drivers… I’m still on the fence on that one) do not fit the bill.
And yes, of course this is all very arbitrary and valid arguments can be made for either case. I started this thread to hear the justifications for both.
The folks I play basketball with are typically done after 18 (and they ride). So define “sport” since those “ballers” can’t even come close to physically being able to compete. I mean seriously a couple of hours shooting hoops doesn’t even get into my wheelhouse. Add the mental side of the game and it may not be a sport but it’s the toughest five hours of physical and mental stuff that you can do.
I’m just curious and not casting aspersions - do the “golf requires no physical exertion” people actually play golf? And I don’t mean the kind with the windmills?
Kent Hrbek never really trained. He spent the off season fishing. Was generally overweight during his career. Wasn’t much of a weight lifter. Drank a lot of beer (although not an alcoholic as far as I know). Had a lot of talent.
John Daley was an exception among pro golfers for the past twenty years. Large levels of pure talent. MOST pro golfers now do train - they lift weights, they do flexibility and strength, conditioning and endurance training. And, of course, they train daily on their golf stroke, working with teachers continually to keep their stroke as near perfect as possible.
I don’t. Not regularly anyway. I have before and in my very amateur experience, getting out of a cart to whack a ball, and then back in to drive and find the sucker was hardly taxing on my less-than-perfect physical state.
This brings up a very good point. If I were carrying a bag of heavy iron sticks for miles and miles up and down varying inclines, then yes, that would be physically exerting. However, in my limited experience, that seems much more the exception than the rule. Tiger Woods certainly isn’t carrying his own bags, or even walking from hole to hole. If the rules of golf were amended to state that a player had to carry his own bags and carts were heretofore illegal, then things like cardiovascular conditioning and fatigue do come into play and would alter the outcome of the event. The more physically fit players would preform better on the 17th and 18th holes and have a clear advantage. This would, to me, then become a sport.
Professional golfers are almost always in vastly better shape than the average person. Yes, there’s John Daly (not “Daley.”) There are fat guys in football and baseball, too, but they’re rare exceptions and are usually immensely physically talented despite their size (Daly is insanely strong, and he works on it.) You can complain about them not carrying their bags, but PGA golfers are “conditioned better than the average human.” The average human is weaker and has less endurance than the average pro golfer, even if you control for age. That was your definition, so you’re stuck with it. So that sort of shoots your point down in flames and smoke right out of the gate, doesn’t it?
Of course, there’s also the fact that you just sort of made your definition of “sport” up. A sport can be anything you want if you’re making up your own definitions; we have one prominent poster who says that the 100-metre dash is not a sport because it’s not a sport unless someone is trying to stop you. No, really, we have a guy who says that.
To my mind - and this is just my opinion - a sport is
A contest of physical skill, (this eliminating chess, Monopoly, etc.)
Played for its own intrinsic purpose, (this eliminating things that are not games, like warfare or mugging people)
That determines a winner.
It’s an open definition - it includes billiards, but not chess - but I think it’s the only one that makes sense. You can certainly argue that some sports are harder than others but everyone knows that.
I disagree that sport does not require mental skills. Look at a quarterback under pressure. He’s scrambling to get away from linemen and linebackers, at the same time he has to stay aware of where each of his receivers are on the field and be able time a throw at just the right time and place. How about a pitcher and catcher deciding on what pitch? They have to keep in mind where the runners are and what the current pitch count is. Hockey, basketball, football, and soccer players all have to keep the time remaining in mind when working on certain plays. And, golf, since that’s what the discussion started with: angle on the green, wind speed, which club to use, etc.
Sports do require mental skill as well as physical skill.
As far as definition, someone earlier stated it correctly: I know it when I see it. On that note, I think any definition of a sport would have somewhere in it that a human is doing the primary work. Meaning that auto racing is not a sport. Drivers must be athletic, but the car does most of the work. Same for equestrian; jockies must be athletic, but the horse does the running and jumping.
Well, the statement to which you agree said “a sport is a competitive activity that requires physical rather than mental skill” not physical exertion.
Whatever you think of John Daly, the man has flexibility and hand/eye coordination the likes of which you could not even imagine. In my opinion, those certainly qualify as physical skills.
In fact, tho I’m not a baseball fan, I imagine that hand/eye coordination may well be one of the main attributes necessary for baseball - at least for DHs. I read an article yesterday wher John Kruk described playing a game, then hanging out in the clubhouse slamming beers until all hours of the night, then sleeping in and waking up to play the next day’s game. But he certainly competed in a sport at a pretty high level, no?
Placekickers? Are they not athletes participating in sport?
Pro bowlers - athletes competing at sport or what?
And the guys playing pro baseball can well be athletes competing at sport, while you might feel the guys playing beer league softball are somewhat different. So what?
Oh yeah - you might want to search for the many times this has been debated at great length here before.
Of course I made up my own definition. That’s the point. This is to me, what constitutes a sport. I’m not trying to say it’s any more right or wrong than yours, this is just MY definition. I just want to hear the definitions of others, specifically those claiming golf to be a valid sport.
And, though I’ve no more proof than you, I do not believe pro golfers to be in any better physical shape than an average human. Obviously this is speculation for both of us, but getting out of a cart 18 times a day to walk 6 feet, swing a club, and then get back in does not an athlete make. What sort of training regimen is required other than mastering the technical nuances of the swing itself?
I like your definition, but does golf constitute a contest of physical skill? You obviously will say yes, and on that I disagree. It’s a contest of technical skill… like bowling.
It may be speculation for you. It may be less speculation for others of us, who are aware of pro golfers training routines, what the season is like, and may even know a pro (or top ranked amateur) or two.
You might want to spend some time reading golf fan magazines or books written by pro golfers or maybe even know some pro golfers (or really good amateurs) before you make such statements, since you weren’t even aware pro golfers walked the course .
Feel free to make whatever arguments you wish, but your position is not aided by willfull ignorance and exaggeration. As noted aove, pro golf (excepting seniors and rare exceptions) does not allow carts.
It would take very little effort to google for info as to the increased emphasis on fitness by today’s golfers. But it can be more fun to simply argue from a position of abject ignorance…:rolleyes:
During last week’s tourney they posted Tiger’s daily regimen. I forget the specifics and don’t care to google them, but I believe it started off at 6 or 6:30 with 90 minutes of weightlifting before breakfast, and continued pretty much all day until 5 or 6 p.m. And they mentioned him being able to bench some freakish amount like 400 pounds. But no, he’s just a fucking couch potato who might as well be slamming brews on the course.
Hell, I think I’ll head off to the course and practice some chipping and putting in my particularly unathletic manner!
Clearly, you don’t know much about golf but that’s OK. We’re here to tell you that golfers walk the course (roughly 4 miles) in hot sun four days in a row, and are required to perform at the peak of precision when they hit the ball. The flexibility and strength they need to hit the ball far and accurately comes from training, weights, and practice, practice, practice. In some ways it’s a less strenuous warm weather version of biathalon.
You may not feel it’s a sport and I can accept that, but you should acknowledge that your facts are incorrect.
