Golf isn’t really slower than those sports, it just takes longer and there’s only one guy you can watch at a time. Baseball is boring because it’s a bunch of guys standing around and waving their arms at each other and the action happens fast and then it’s over and we’re standing around again. While pro golf suffers hugely from “let me take five freaking minutes to do a little putting dance”, and the amateurs see it on TV and feel the need to pretend to be Tiger on their home course, generally a golfer is doing something. You hit the ball, you walk up to it, you hit it again, etc. Unless it’s a busy day you don’t stand around scratching your ass for hours. (Of course, for practicality’s sake generally one plays with at least one other person, and you do have to wait on them.) But something’s generally happening.
The only thing I don’t like about golf (or tennis for that matter) is the “QUIET!” business. Fuck that. Learn to concentrate amidst noise, dammit.
You meant football, I presume? Of course you have to add in the random timeouts, the commercials every change of posession and the increasing number of injuries that keep play from happening.
Pool (rotation), against a really good opponnent.
Not bad for the player running 4-5 tables, but moida for the other guy (me 
).
No, football is even worse but the post I replied to mentioned baseball. Which is much, much more boring than golf. And I hate watching golf.
No, Lamar, baseball is monotonous. Unless you figure in the fans and announcers going on incessantly about mundane stats and all, that there ain’t much going on.
Now playing softball, especially co-ed, in the park with a bunch of amateurs who’ll swing at anything, that’s real action.
Of course it’s not fair to compare people having fun to those just doing a job.
I’m just glad this thread didn’t get started two months from now, or we’d have all these replies like “It’d be a real sport if the spectators could throw rocks/fire shots/toss handgrenades at the golfers lololololol”.
Seems to be.
If the point of the game was to hop over a fence as many times as you could in ten minutes, and whoever had the most, it would be a sport. While as if it’s simply seeing who can jump over the highest fence, then it wouldn’t be.
But of course it’s a goal; it determines winners and losers. By definition, it’s a goal.
As per Ellis Dee’s weird decision that a sport must have “defense,” saying now that a sport needs a “score” is just an arbitrary, and illogical, imposition on defining sport. Your definition’s completely arbitrary, no more logical than saying that “sports are games that start with the letters A to N, but not O to Z.” There’s no rational basis for saying the long jump isn’t a sport; your definition seems to be coming out of nowhere.
Running most certainly does have a score, BTW: it’s called a “time.” Long jumping has a score, too - it’s the distance you jump.
It’s only arbitrary in the sense that I had to put a line somewhere on the ground. Where the line falls is indeed arbitrary, but no less so than anyone else’s. I tried to place it in a place where there’s things that are a “game” and others that don’t have a real “game” element to them but are rather simple physical feats.
It may have a score, but it’s not a score in the sense that it’s something you build up by accomplishing a set of goals. You aren’t getting a basket, sinking a ball, attaining a position, etc. Putting one foot in front of the other isn’t a goal, nor is running interactively competitive (one of the further modifiers of my definition.) You could just as easily have the runners run on different days, alone on the track.
Getting to the finish line first is a goal. I’m sorry, but, again, we are not dealing with a matter of opinion here; the word “goal” doesn’t mean what you’re saying it means. Beating you to the finish line constitutes an objective goal.
Why two months from now?
A former sports writer/photographer/editor weighing in:
A sport is anything that has a ball (or a ball-like object -puck, stone) involved, is human racing-like or doesn’t have people holding up numbers to declare a winner.
This eliminates rhymic gymnastics (balloon and ribbon dancing), ice dancing, ballroom dancing and so-called “motor sports”. Actually this even negates boxing, but I have long been for the old-fashioned, “If they can’t toe the mark they lose.” Who cares if it goes for 123 rounds or so?
For the most part when I ran the sports page, I would let almost anything on it if you had a good argument for it. Drag racing, arm wrestling, most gymnastics, mud volleyball pictures. One thing I would not call a sport was cheerleading. I got hauled up to answer to both managing editor and publisher on occasion because I would not put cheerleader stories on the sports page. “But they compete just like athletes,” I was told.
“So do debators,” I would answer, “and I’m not putting debators on the sports page.”
“Well, ESPN covers them,” I would be told.
“They cover spelling bees too, and spelling bees aren’t going on my sports page.”
I am now a managing editor and my sports editor will occasionally slip a cheerleader pic on an inside sports page, and I will growl at him, but it’s his sports page.
On the plus side, with televised golf there is always somebody to watch doing something - and with 30+ guys on the course at pretty much any moment (well except at the beginning and the end) there is generally something pretty amazing happening (OK, so its only amazing if you realize that a 30 foot putt on a bikini waxed green shaped like an inverted jello mold is hard).
As opposed to football, in particular, where a great deal of game time seems to involve everyone standing around (perhaps it is just as interesting if I understood it). (Baseball has this built in everyone standing around feature, but due to commericials and my own knowledge of baseball, the only real waiting is for the pitcher - I understand that there is always something going on - even if only the pitcher, catcher and batter are currently involved).
Now, basketball/soccer/hockey are definately HE-MAN SPORTS! Few of those wimpy timeouts or boring contemplative periods - there is a mess of sweaty humanity moving across the field of play pretty much all the time. Blink and you’ll miss something.
Yes, but it’s not a series of goals. You don’t get a point for each time you cross the finish line ahead of the others; It’s a one shot deal.
(TV time’s entire post deleted by me-for the sake of brevity.)
Aha! An expert.
When I mentioned “figure skating”, above, I was referring to the slow skating around in precision designs (figures), mostly circles. Boring, but what the hey, IMO.
So, is that “figure skating” and the other more popular style done to music “ice dancing”?
I really watched soccer for the first time at last year’s World Cup.
Damn, now that’s work. I can see why the game’s so popular. That, and tennis. I haven’t watched much hockey or basketball.
And so what? That’s a purely arbitrary distinction; you’re creating a definition that simply doesn’t mesh with common sense or, indeed, the history of sport. Would hockey stop being a sport if, instead of playing 60 minutes, all games were treated like overtime and the first goal always won? Isn’t that kind of stupid?
Just back up for a moment and think about what you’re saying. It’s just preposterous to define sport in a way that excludes things that are obviously sports.
I can understand why someone would argue that, say, automobile racing isn’t a sport, because it involves significant mechanical, non-physical-skill elements. I can certainly see why someone would say chess is not a sport, because it’s not a contest of physical skill. I might even see (although I disagree) saying that billiards is not a sport. But when you’re seriously trying to tell me that things like sprinting and high jumping, that are sports and have been regarded as sports by pretty much the entire human race for longer than either of us has been alive, are NOT sports, you’re just not being serious.
I’m going to say yes simply because I suck at it as much as any other sport I’ve ever tried to play. Although I haven’t seen written documentation, I firmly believe it’s a law that I must suck at all sports. 
Maybe so, but softball, the kind I mentioned above in #66, is suck proof. You can’t screw up because nobody seriously gives a shit. Who can, when you’re full of beers and/or burgers.
We used to start with maybe 6-7 players and wind up with 20 or more, most of them “strangers”. We’d play “workup” till more joined in. Sometimes we actually had a “real” field, with bases and everything. The girls usually got the gloves. Fooled us, didn’t they?
So no, there’s no law.
Peace,
mangeorge