one definition of sport I found is: “an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature”.
i wouldn’t say golf is athletic, or that it requires physical prowess, unless you include the actual technique you learn to make the ball go where you want it to. In which case, snooker is a sport too. and darts. but i’m struggling to think of darts as a sport. does F1/rally driving require physical prowess?
Well, as for F1, ask any driver. It sure requires a hell of a lot of strength and endurance. The amount of acceleration the body experiences in a race is nothing to be sneered at, and they need to be on 100% concentration for 1 1/2 hrs.
As for golf, I’m not a player, but you try hitting a ball with 150 mph and make it go where you want it to.
I doubt there’s an objective, factual answer to this question. And that’s largely because the definition of “sport” is hard to pin down.
Sport is 100% subjective, but I read a Sports Illustrated article once that argued a sport should be defined as “any competitive athletic activity in which defense is employed.”
So basically if it’s an athletic competition where you defend against an opponent in any way, it’s a sport. Otherwise it’s something else.
Chess would just be a “game” because it isn’t athletic at all. Marathon running would be an athletic competition but not a sport, because the runners aren’t allowed to hinder each other.
Things like stock car racing would be gray areas, there is some level of physicality to driving for that many hours in those conditions, and they definitely employ forms of defense to hinder other drivers. At the same time it’s very hard to argue it is the same sort of athletics required for most other athletic sports like basketball, soccer, or etc.
Expect this to be moved to GD, because there is no definitive answer.
Golfers like to argue that even if golf didn’t use to be a sport, the advent of Tiger Woods changed that, because all the young guns are now spending hours in the gym as well as on the course.
On the other hand, in the 2009 British Open, the buff Tiger, who at the time was still the undisputed best player in the world, missed the cut, while 59-year old Tom Watson came within one four-foot putt of winning it. So there goes that argument.
It’s facile to say it isn’t a sport because you can play it while smoking and drinking, but the same can be said of adult league softball. And it takes tremendous speed, skill, and coordination to hit a 300-yard drive – many pro football, baseball, hockey, and basketball players play golf almost full time during their off season, and very few of them can do it consistently, even though the motion is fairly similar to baseball or hockey moves.
So it just comes down to how you define “sport,” or if you define it as an activity engaged in by athletes, how you define “athlete.”
I think that under any reasonable definition of sport, it is one.
But it is all a matter of definition. For example, I don’t consider figure skating a sport. It is beautiful, extremely athletic and all that, but there are no objective criteria for what you do to win. And the judging is not only subjective, but often highly biased. Similar remarks are true for diving, gymnastics, etc. And the worst is synchronized swimming in which, one participant explained, the most important thing is your smile. That’s a sport? Absurd.
Contrast that with curling. Not highly athletic by any criterion, although curlers in better shape do better and curlers lose the edge when they hit the mid 40s. But there is virtually no judging involved; most matches can be played without officials (occasionally there is a measurement, much more precise that a first down call in American football, and very occasionally another infraction of the rules that, in most cases, the players resolve with the referee’s intervention–also true in gold).
Baseball involves too much umpires’ judgment for my taste, especially on balls and strikes. When playing in Yankee stadium, the very same pitch that will be called a strike when thrown by a Yankee pitcher can well be a ball when thrown to a Yankee batter. You can see the same “home team” effect in other stadiums, but nowhere as striking as in NY. And this in an era when it would be perfectly feasible to automate those calls.
I’m pretty sure golf qualifies as a sport under that definition.
athletic activity: Walking a course carrying a golf bag isn’t easy, especially during the summer. Neither is precisely delivering a clubhead to a ball, controlling the velocity (speed and direction) of your swing, the angle of the clubface, and the position of the clubhead.
skill or physical prowess: If placing a small white ball 200 yards away into an small area doesn’t take skill, then you go try it. Report back with your results.
competitive: Golf is quite competitive. The pros play for sponsor’s money, the amateurs play for their buddies’ money (at least they have at the course I worked at and at the two course I regularly played.
If you still don’t think it’s a sport, name a sport you do think meets those qualifications.
What if I ride the little golf cart in between having my caddie lug the bag around?
I think golf fails to meet the “defense is employed” criteria I mentioned, but the cart is irrelevant at the professional level. You aren’t allowed to drive a golf cart in the PGA tour.
The “Defense is employed” criteria eliminates the 100-metre dash, shot put, high jump, and any number of things that would be rather preposterously excluded from the list of sports. If the one hundred metre dash is not a sport, there is something wrong with the definition.
The definition I was taught in school (yes, I took an elective on this) and which to be honest is the best I’ve heard is that a sport is a game in which a winner is determined primarily through the demonstration of physical skill.
Golf is, by any reasonable understanding, a sport.
i don’t remember many pros carrying their bags of clubs around. and it’s a sport played regularly by old men. i really think you’re overdoing the athletic activity side of it here. i’m with you on skill - i really don’t think anyone could argue with that point, and it’s competitive too. but chess fits both those points, and isn’t a sport. it’s a game. i think you could apply that to golf too. the only athletic activity you could argue is the strength in the drive, and i think that’s largely technique and timing. strength will obviously add to the yardage, but is a smaller percentage of it than the first two
My 77 year old dad plays a lot of golf and has since he was a boy. He was at his peak in his early 30s. Since retirement at 60 he plays more than he ever did before but his form inevitably has tailed off. Despite advancements in golf-club technology he just doesn’t have the physical strength required to hit the ball as far as a younger man. Just because it is not an all-out muscle-power sport does not mean it requires no athleticism at all.
that’s a fair point, ticker, but the fact he can still play it at nearly 80, even reasonably well, would suggest it’s limited in terms of athletic ability required
The “defense is employed” criterion is interesting, but I don’t see why it is inherently necessary for something to be a sport.
As for the OP, I agree that golf is a sport by any reasonable definition of the term. Sure, older people can play it, but older people can play baseball, too.
Also, a person who says golf doesn’t involve defense has not played or watched competitive golf. In both match and stroke play one will alter one’s shot depending on the state of play of the match as a whole, and also depending on the play of one’s opponents. Isn’t that what defense is?
I almost posted that, but changed my mind about it being “defense”. I think “defense” means physically impeding what the other player or team does. The one time you can do that in golf, hitting another player’s ball with yours, the other player gets to replace his ball where it was before being hit.
But yes, you do alter you play depending on the shot the other guy hits or what your score is relative to his. Runners, too, alter their pace in response to their opponents.
No. Defense IMO is doing something that prevents your opponent from doing what he wants to do. Nothing I know of in golf is like that, at least since they got rid of the stymie.
Just adjusting your own game isn’t defense. The OP’s example of a marathon applies. You might try to speed up if someone gets ahead of you. That’s adjusting your own game, but it’s not defense.
I think that’s a good definition.
But it does leave open the question of whether simple hand-eye coordination counts as physical skill, because, if it does, then many computer games count as sports.
Being able to do it when you’re old can’t count. Badminton is clearly a sport, and is quite popular with older people; swimming is a sport except under the ‘defence’ definition, and loads of people do that when they’re really old.
A sport is a game where physics matter.