Is golf a sport?

The Game Room
21

Wow, I can think of almost nothing less appealing. Maybe a narcotic free root canal.

But you are correct, the fact remains that I do not know a lot about this particular … activity. That is in part why I started this thread. From my limited experience with golf, I cannot classify it as more sport than game. I know there are plenty out there who believe otherwise. That’s what I want to hear. Why is it a sport? My personal requirement for a sport is the degree of physical aptitude one must posses in order to excel. I consider hand-eye coordination to be more a mental attribute than a physical one, but I suppose you could make the argument either way. I’m not trying to prove to anyone that it isn’t a sport. I’m stating my own personal beliefs and I wish to hear everyone else’s.

It actually makes me a bit more forgiving of those who call them athletes to learn that they do actually walk the course themselves. I never knew that.

And I also can recognize that a to properly hit a ball, a golfer must possess a certain amount of core strength, though I do not know to what degree.

So for those in the ‘golf is a sport’ camp. Does better physical conditioning (not just cardio, but strength, and overall fitness) translate into a better golf game? I’m not assuming one or the other, it’s an honest question.

And I knew sooner or later somebody would bring up placekickers. For that, I have no answer, suffice to say that to me, they are not athletes, but they do play a sport. Just as Tiger Woods is an athlete, but he plays a game. Really well.

22

See, now this is the type of stuff I wanted to hear. I acknowledge that I was operating from a very limited viewpoint and I’m grateful for the facts and to hear the opposing arguments, sans judgement. Thank you.

23

I’m currently writing a book on game design theory. The basic model of play that I’m using is this: “Play is free movement within a system of constraints.” This applies to a whole range of human actions: board games, videogames, sports, make-believe, playing music, playing a character in a play, etc. It’s a broad definition on purpose because humans play in so many different ways.

A sport is a game where some of the constraints are the real-world properties of physical objects.

The physical properties of a soccer ball have a large effect on how the game is played. The physical properties of a chess piece don’t. Soccer is a sport, chess is not.

By this standard, golf is a sport, as are bowling, darts, NASCAR, and tiddly winks.

It’s purely arbitrary, of course, as are all definitions. But it’s useful and clear cut.

24

I didn’t start this with the intent to get into an argument, that is, I’m not trying to convince anybody that I’m right or they’re wrong. If that’s how you’re taking this, then that’s your perception and have a ball. I’m simply stating my personal beliefs and I wish to hear those of everyone else. I KNOW I’m ignorant on the finer points of golf. Yes, I can spend hours searching and researching pro golfers and their relationship to physical fitness but it’s more fun to hear it in this venue from real people, many of whose opinions I have a good deal of respect for. I apologize if the golfers out there (or anyone else, for that matter) take offense to this, for that is not my intent. Everybody has their own beliefs based on their own conditioning and experiences. I only wish to hear the variety of viewpoints on the subject.

25

Spoonful, (love the username, by the way), I think your definition, from what I can gather of it, confuses “athletic endeavor” with “sport,” and therefore “athlete” with “sportsman.” You keep pointing out that participants in certain sports are not athletes, but that is not the question. It is whether they are sportsmen.

I, personally, would define “sport” as any sufficiently glorified game. Athleticism does not need to enter into it.

So some things are athletic endeavors but not sports (e.g. jogging, sex, recreational skiing), and some things are sports but not athletic endeavors (e.g. fox hunting, nascar, halo).

26

My opinion:

Golf is definitely a sport as you have to athlete to play golf at a world class level. You don’t have to be in very good shape.

There doesn’t have to be a correlation between athletic prowess and being in fit top shape. I know a runner who compete in 10K and half marathons, but are one of the most clumsy people I know. They can’t shoot a layup in basketball, throw a football, hit a tennis ball and can’t break 70 bowling.

On the otherhand I know plenty of 300 lb men who have outstanding hand-eye coordination who are natural at every sport they play. They just don’t have any endurance.

Athlete does not necessarily equal a low BMI and low BMI does not necessarily equal athletic.

27

When I was forced to play baseball in gym in school, sneaking a book into the outfield was hardly taxing, either. Golf is hard. I mean, the walking is taxing, yeah, but the actual whacking of the ball itself is really freaking hard.

I mean, Babe Ruth played a sport, and he was no great physical specimen. I don’t think you can really take the fattest player and draw any conclusions about them.

28

Very true. John Daly (clearly not Daley ;)) is hardly the prototypical golfer, and I had forgotten all about the Bambino. Recall though, I did include Tiger in that one too. I’m not basing my opinion on the fattest player. Perfect body composition is not the sine qua non of athleticism. I’m basing it on the nature of the activity itself, illustrated by the fact that even non-athletic people (in my perception) like Mr. Daly can excel at a pro level. Now you mention the Babe, which is very valid. Baseball, IMO falls on the outer fringes of what I consider a sport. All the standing, sitting, doing nothing, just doesn’t groove with my particular notion of what a sport is. However, in that instance when you are at the plate, or the recipient of a rocketing grounder, your athleticism is tested in a big way. That’s where the ‘sport’ part comes in. I suppose the same logic could be applied to golf, and Ruth could draw a fair comparison to John Daly. He was not an athletic fellow in any way, shape or form. But he did indeed excel, and in a big way. In my conclusion this would discredit baseball as a sport, but it doesn’t. So then physical superiority can’t be the basis for what is considered a sport.

Well, shit. :smack:

I’m still maintaining that Daly is not an athlete, but I’m starting to think that maybe he does indeed play a sport…

Now my head hurts…

29

Also in the interest of fighting ignorance, you probably are used to seeing video and images of an older Babe. His playing weight in the best part of his career was 215lbs at 6’2". He was a natural athlete from early on.

30

I think you can take the baseball analogy - I mean, if you’re a great batter, you spend most of your time spitting and scratching yourself. But when it comes time to hit that ball, you get, what, ten seconds of bone-cracking excitement and maybe half a minute of running the bases, and you had damned well better do it good. The golf swing is like the baseball swing - it isn’t very exciting until it comes up, but then push has come to shove. I’m not a good golfer, I’ll tell you that right now, and I can’t even conceive of how you can hit the ball 500 yards and send it where you want to go.

31

My 10-word definition for “sport”:

Any physical activity with separate divisions for men and women.

LPGA exists, therefore golf is a sport. There is a separate championship for women in bowling, so bowling is also a sport.

32

Babe Ruth was barrel-chested and funny looking, but he was a tremendous athlete.

Later in his career he got fat, but for most of his career he was in good shape. He started gaining weight around 1921-1925 or so but for a number of years he was still strong and fast enough to overcome a bit of extra weight; he didn’t really get FAT until later. You think of his hitting home runs, but he was also an elite pitcher, a very good defensive outfielder, one of the most aggressive baserunners in the major leagues, and in addition to hitting for power he has one of the highest batting averages in the history of baseball. A lot of the pictures you see of him in uniform are late in his (or even after his) career, when he was very out of shape, but for most of his career he was a very impressive physical specimen.

On preview, Telemark already noted this.

33

Since people with a wide variety of different physical capabilities can play sports, it seems very odd to define sports by the physical capabilities of the players. Part of the reason for my “constraint” definition above is that it defines something as a sport based upon properties of the activity itself, not the characteristics of the people doing it.

Athleticism tends to be important for people who play sports because interactions with real-world physics are an essential part of all sports. But once you start using athleticism as a defining characteristic things get very ambiguous and confusing.

34

I should point out that 500 yards is an overestimation. For a pro golfer, 350 yards would be a huge drive, and one probably assisted by wind or terrain. Distances like 500 yards are reserved for long drive competitions.

What amazes me is the accuracy over distance. A golfer will be standing on the fairway with his caddy, with a moderate wind in his face and the ball on a slight downhill slope, and the following exchange will take place. . .

CADDY: It’s about 145 to the front of the green, 155 or 156 to the pin.
GOLFER: Well, which is it?

. . . because, to him, there’s a real difference between trying to hit the ball 465 feet and trying to hit it 468 feet.
And I concur with the definition already offered here in a couple of places: A sport is a competition in which the primary thing being measured is some kind (or kinds) of physical skill.

35

So then chess
never really understood that one though, or why women allow it

edit- didn’t notice the “physical” requirement of yours…

36

It is not exactly that simple. I would say that yes, in general, if you took any individual golfer, an improvement in his physical conditioning would make him a better golfer.

But that doesn’t mean simply that JD should start jogging and lifting. Perhaps the main requirements to golfing well is a good sense of timing, and a sense of feel. The pros have these to a degree we normal humans can hardly comprehend.

So I’ve played with some pretty overweight guys, who are very good golfers due to their timing and touch. Same way I’ve played with some muscular young studs who have no touch. They may be ale to hit the ball a mile, but they have no idea where it is going to end up. And their strength is of little benefit in putting or making a delicate chip.

The golf swing is a quite complex movement with many different parts that need to act together smoothly and repeatedly. There are not all that many avid golfers who have a repeatable swing, such that they consistently make good contact with the ball to advance it a certain distance in a certain direction. Seriously, even a 10 handicapper - which is a pretty good recreational golfer - will flat out screw up at least a shot or 2 per round.

The pro golfer not only has to have a reproducible swing, but they also need to be able to make minute adjustments to the swing for a certain shot depending on the wind, the precise yardage, the grass/sand in which the ball is lying, the slope of the land where the ball is sitting and where it will end up,

Most pretty good amateurs generally either hit a reasonably straight ball, or one that predictably moves a certain amount from either right to left or left to right. The pro can generally choose the direction he will make his ball fly, how much it will bend, how high it will fly, and how much it will roll.

Here’s a couple more for you - are hunting and fishing sports? I mean, all hunting requires is the ability to move one’s index finger a half inch or so, no? :wink:

Hoo-boy - all that chipping and putting practice wore me out. Maybe I’d better take a nap (after I walk the dogs and go for a bike ride!) :stuck_out_tongue: It is turning out to be a very nice Saturday!

37

Driving a race car requires some incredible reflexes, hand eye coronation and a lot of brute strength. You try strapping in a car that can be 120+ degrees wearing a multilayer blanket (racing nomex is like a multi layer blanket) and wrestling the damn thing around the track for however long. It is an extremely physical experience. I have crewed for drivers that were so exhausted after a race, that they had to be carried out of the car.
To win a car race you need to hit the entry of the turn at the exact point, at the correct speed every time.* If you do this, you might win, if you don’t you will lose.

*A very famous story about Sterling Moss was that one year he was racing at Sebring. A photographer he knew was at the apex of a hairpin turn drinking a Coke while taking pictures. At this point on the track the cars were going fairly slow maybe 25 MPH Sterling went by and motioned that he he wanted a Coke also. So the next time around the photographer held out a bottle and Sterling took it. A few laps later he handed it back the empty bottle. The kicker was, his lap times did not vary. cite

38

The mental side is very much a big part of it. The very best golfers more often than not get this reputation as hardcore thinkers who can concentrate so hard on the immediate task at hand that all else is completely out of mind. Think Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus-hell even Tiger has a mental game everyone else envies.

Okay, but where do you draw the line when some sort of equipment (a horse on these grounds would thus qualify) is necessary to compete? Is downhill skiing a sport? Okay, then how about bobsled? Luge? Motorcycle racing demands precise body movements to balance the bike so as to excel-is that a sport but auto racing is not?

I’ll say this: if John Daly had truly dedicated himself to golf in the way that Tiger did, he probably would have 6-8 majors by now, and not 2. Instead he was blotto for about half his career, and thus had wild swings in his finishes in majors. Hell, he had only one other top ten, other than his 2 victories. You’d have to jump through a lot of hoops to assume he did the best he was capable of.

39

Well let’s move in a lightly different direction.

Aikido is a martial art for which there are mental and physical aspects and a ranking system, but no competitions. The ranks simply note your level of achievement agains a (more or less) pre-defined skill set (I simplify, I know, so lets not debate that).

Judo, Taekwondo, Karate and many others are similar martial arts, with similar ranking systems, but competitions with scoring systems abound also.

Which if any are sports and which are not in your opinion? Why or why not?

And really, did someone say golf is a sport because the players walk 4 miles (!) over the course of a day, stopping to swing a stick 70-120 times during that period?

Walking 4 miles is “athletic”?

The jury is out for me on golf (which I don’t play), but really, I meet little old ladies that can manage a 4 mile hike in the rugged mountains every week and neither I nor they themsleves would claim they are athletes because of it.

A 4 mile walk on a golf course over the period of several hours is not exertion, it is a stroll. If it raises to the level of exertion, then that is prima facie evidence that particular athlete is NOT an athlete, regardless of if golf is a sport or not.

Sheesh.

40

The point is not that it’s hard to walk four miles. Of course it’s not. The point is that golf involves some degree of physical effort, thereby separating it from those games that essentially do not, such as checkers. And a pro golf tournament is not, of course, walking four miles. It’s walking more like six miles, four times, and doing so while executing a near-perfect swing about two hundred and seventy times (if you golfed REALLY well. If I did 72 holes it’d be more like 370 swings.) If fatigue affects your swing *at all *after, say, 250 swings, you’ll lose. And of course, if you want to be a pro golfer, you have to work out, swing the damned club every damned day, and so on and so forth; it’s not just those 72 holes.

The “Golf isn’t a sport” bit - and I’m not an avid golfer so I have nothing to defend here - is a subset of a common SDMB theme, “I’ve Never Done X But It Looks Easy And I Don’t Know Why People Make a Big Deal Of It.” It’s been applied to games, sports, professions, art forms, the job of managing (holy moly, but do a lot of smartasses think managing is easy), and God knows what else, and my reaction to them is always the same; lots of stuff looks easy when you’re not the one doing it. I’ll challenge anyone on the SDMB who thinks golf is easy and who is not a way-above-average athlete to go out and golf 72 holes in four days. I’ll carry your clubs. And I guarantee that if youi honestly try your best to get the best score you can, you will be absolutely spent at the end of it.