Why Golf is the Best Sport

Don’t bore me by arguing about whether or not golf is a sport. Are darts a sport? Bowling? For the next 25 minutes let’s just assume that it is, if we may.

Of course golfers are not the best athletes. However you might choose to measure “athleticism,” golfers are not likely to be near the top. Have you ever seen Jack Nicklaus? Howard Cosell said he thought race car drivers were the best athletes. I’ve heard people say the hardest thing in sport is to hit a pitched baseball. One of my favorite sports quotes, attributed to Pittsburgh Pirates great Willie Stargell, is, “They give you a round bat and they throw you a round ball and they tell you to hit it square.” Yet still, while golfers may not be the best athletes, golf is the best sport. And let me tell you why.

Before I sing the praises of golf, let me tell you why I think the other sports fall short. Of the “big three” in the US, of course baseball is the much superior sport. Football is too brutal and basketball is played by freaks of nature. (I’ll dismiss, later, briefly, hockey, soccer, volleyball, and tennis.)

First let’s cast off the easy one, basketball. Well, at least basketball as played in the NBA. Here is why the MLB is better than the NBA. First off, we regular ol’ folk can ALMOST imagine ourselves playing baseball. José Altuve, the Houston Astros’ second baseman and the 2017 American League Most Valuable Player, is 5 feet 6 inches tall and 166 pounds. The most recent NBA MVP was Giannis Antetokounmpo who is 6 feet 11 inches tall and weighs 244 pounds. I am not at all like that. (Well, lemme say I’m not that tall.) And while realizing that even if I had devoted my whole life to becoming a major league baseball player I would have failed, I could almost imagine hanging with them. Whereas there was zero chance of my ever being an NBAer. Zee. Row.

Very relatedly, one of the joys of baseball is that the checks-and-balances between the pitchers’ and catchers’ arms and the baserunners’ legs mean that the stolen base is pretty much the same weapon today as it was a century ago. This means we can (kinda, kinda) compare players across generations. Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs in 1927 stood for 34 years, and Roger Maris’s 61 homers in ‘61 weren’t exceeded for another 37 years, by two or three guys all of whom were on steroids so I won’t mention them here except to say that that is a big reason why this essay is about golf and not about baseball. So, people can enjoy good-natured arguments about who was better, some player in the 1930s or some player today. (Sidebar for one of my favorite sports quotes: In 1958 some reporter asked Ty Cobb [lifetime batting average of .366], “What do you think you’d hit against modern-day pitching?” The ever-confident Cobb replied, “Oh, probably just around .300 . . . but then I’m 72 years old.”)

Contrasted with baseball’s checks-and-balances is basketball’s unilateral assault on the 10-foot rim. This makes it impossible to compare one generation of play to the next. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the man nicknamed “Mr. Basketball” was George Mikan. This from his Wikipedia page: “George Lawrence Mikan Jr. (June 18, 1924 – June 1, 2005) . . . was an American professional basketball player . . . . Invariably playing with thick, round spectacles, the 6 ft 10 in., 245 lb. Mikan is seen as . . . one of the pioneers of professional basketball, redefining it as a game of so-called big men with his prolific rebounding, shot-blocking, and his talent to shoot over smaller defenders with his ambidextrous hook shot.” Mikan was the 1953 NBA All-Star game MVP. The median height in that game was 6’ 5”. The median height in this year’s NBA All-Star game was 6’ 8”, with over a third of the players as tall as Mikan or taller. Whereas Ty Cobb can semi-realistically joke about hitting “modern-day” pitching at age 72, if the 6 foot 1 inch, 13-time NBA All-Star, Boston Celtic Bob Cousy time-traveled from his MVP year of 1957 to 2020 he might be able to make it as a sub on a current NBA team. Maybe.

So, let’s talk about dunking a basketball. It is beyond me why a dunk would ever be one of the “Top 10 Plays of the Day.” So, some guy’s genes and nutrition allowed him (if you will, let me use male pronouns here. Yes, I do know that some women can dunk a basketball.) to get tall and jump higher than most, or allowed him to get really really tall, and maybe not even be able to jump very well at all. And thus he is able to hold a basketball in one or two hands and get all of that ball to 10 feet off the ground and drop or shove it into a hoop almost twice as wide as the ball. Big phreakin’ deal! How is this an accomplishment? I can’t do that, most of us can’t, but it took very little effort on the part of the dunker to get to that point in his life. That 6’ 11” Mr. Antetokounmpo, with a wingspan of 7’ 3”, can drop or throw a ball down into a hoop 10 feet off the ground impresses me not one bit. All healthy nine-month-old babies, similarly thanks to their physical make-up, can crawl under a kitchen chair, and I can’t do that either, and neither can you, but we’re not watching instant replays of that. (Actually, I WOULD enjoy watching that.) Let me offer one final complaint about dunking. I will admit that there is an occasional amazing display of well-practiced, well-earned athleticism that ends with a dunk, such as when the 5’ 7” Spud Webb dunked, or Jordan’s leap from (almost) behind the free-throw line. But most of the time when dunks are celebrated it is because the defender who failed to block or otherwise inhibit the dunk is embarrassed by the shot. This is called, charmingly, being “posterized,” as the image of this very tall, or very very tall man putting a ball through a wide hoop when another very tall man could not stop him shall become commercialized as a poster, representing superiority of the dunker over the dunkee. Yawn.

College basketball, with its annual denouement of March Madness, and women’s basketball, are somewhat more relatable, but don’t distract me from the point I’m trying to make here.

Baseball is superior also to football. (I recommend strongly going onto YouTube and viewing George Carlin’s magnificent comparison of militaristic football [“aerial assault,” “bullet passes,” “bombs”] and pastoral baseball [“The object is to ‘go home.’ I just want to be safe at home!”].) Baseball is superior somewhat because of the real-people vs. freaks argument (mean weight of a Green Bay Packer offensive lineman in Super Bowl I, in 1967: 245 pounds. Mean weight of the 2020 Green Bay Packer offensive line: 309 pounds.), but mostly because of the latter’s brutality, and concomitant number and seriousness of injuries. I believe that while I will not, my sons may well live to see a time when there is no football. We (well, they! The players.) are just too big, too fast, too strong for the sport. I like watching football, for some reason. Nostalgia, likely. But no matter how the powers-that-be try to make it such that these fast, muscular missiles don’t kill each other, by making rule changes (“no ‘targeting’”) and by making better helmets, still, testosterone and money being what they are, men will continue to fling themselves literally head-long into other large, muscular, fast men in ways that leave each other injured for life. I do get excited when the football season arrives – there’s that first hint of fall in the air, you think maybe you need to toss a jacket in the car, you remember the glory years when YOUR team (who, at this very moment, has zero losses, just like all the other teams) was on top of the world . . . and then when the first 19-year-old goes to make a tackle leading with his head and is paralyzed for the rest of his life, I wonder “Why do I endorse this?” Don’t get me wrong, I continue to watch the rest of the season, but less joyfully, more embarrassedly. The amazing athletic acts of a one-handed catch or a head fake that jukes a defender are way way more plentiful than the life-threatening injuries. Yet hardly any game goes without some season-ending injury, so it is a hard calculus. But whatever the calculation is, the fact that I am doing that calculus drives football onto the discard pile with basketball.

Allow me, if you will, to highlight three additional recent NFL events/trends. First, in November the visiting Tennessee Titans team had a “meeting” on the 50-yard-line before their game in Baltimore. This is very unusual. After their little meeting, several of the Titans turned to face the Ravens’ bench and made the motion of wiping their feet on the Ravens’ logo at midfield. I am a big fan of testosterone. Love it. Hold onto whatever dollops still stream through this aging body. But like almost everything – hot fudge, Scotch, sex, pistachios – too much of it can be nettlesome. Way to keep it classy, Titans.

Second and third, all these penalties and the instantiation and proliferation of instant replay reviews make watching a game so outrageously frustrating. You never know when to cheer. I could not find on the web any data on how many penalties are called in an NFL game now versus in 1967, on average, but I am certain the ratio is approximately a million to one. And I have written elsewhere on the frustration with all this instant replay to make sure the right call was made. The rules are WRITTEN frustratingly ambiguously – for a pass to be declared caught and fumbled, rather than simply incomplete, the receiver must catch the ball and “make a football move” before the ball is dislodged. Puh-lease. Do you know what a “football move” is? ‘Cause if you do, please tell the refs, for they are NOT of one mind about this. It is not “take one step” – that would be too easy.

Speaking of “step,” this takes me back to the NBA (this one last time – then we shall never talk of it again). One of the reasons the NBA is so hard to watch is because approximately every 10 seconds (I am not exaggerating, this time) there is either a foul called or some contact that does NOT elicit a foul call but might’ve, at another time, by another ref. There are 48 minutes in an NBA game. I read that this past season there was an average of 48.1 fouls per game. That’s some easy math, right there. The problem is, for every one of those fouls, the same contact, either in the paint, or by a superstar, or in the fourth quarter, did NOT fetch a foul call. Thus no one (literally) knows what is or is not a foul, and so players whine all the time, at the call of a foul once a minute, or the non-call of a foul at two or three or four contacts in that same minute. It is truly exhausting. And don’t even get me started on “traveling” (or “steps”). If a player has two feet on the three-point line and takes a little hop back before launching his shot, that is the very definition of “traveling.” The next time you see that called will be the first time it has been called in a decade.

So, baseball, yay. Now I know a bunch of y’all may think baseball is boring. And I would have a hard time convincing you otherwise. It can be a great multi-tasking sport – have something else to be doing during the game. In grad school I would love to take a couple of articles I needed to read, and my highlighter pen, take off my shoes and manspread over about five seats (there were few people in the stands) and watch a college baseball game while doing some work. However, much like with a duck gliding seemingly calmly across a pond while there is much feverish paddling going on beneath the surface, there is much going on in a baseball game and the more you know about the game the less boring it becomes. I was already a baseball fan before we listened on our transistor radio as Mazeroski hit that glorious homer in 1960. And so I think I know a lot about baseball. But then when I sit and watch a game with our son who played college ball I learn so much more. “Why does the shortstop smack his glove when sneaking in behind the runner at second, to hold him close to the bag, even when they have a play on to actually throw back to try to catch him off base?” To which my son says, “Oh, so you think you should behave differently when the throw IS coming?” Good point!

I probably should include women’s softball in this baseball group hug, but it seems to me that the pitcher has an outsize influence. Sure the pitcher is way important in baseball, but pitchers are so dominant in women’s college softball, and thus scoring so rare, they’ve had to institute the artificiality of a runner placed at second base to start each half inning if a game goes into extra innings. So, maybe back the pitching rubber a few feet and we’ll talk.

Now, hockey, soccer, volleyball, and tennis. All lovely sports. All way better than football and basketball. Hockey is elegant (well, except the bit about the designated brute whose job it is to beat the shit outta any of the other guys we want to target), and The Great Gretzky may be my favorite athlete of all time. (If Sandy Koufax is reading this . . . I am just kidding Sandy. Of course it is you.) Wayne was so graceful, so talented, playing hockey chess to everyone else’s hockey checkers. While I touted earlier the joy of being able to compare baseball players across generations, another fun statistical look is to compare a superstar with his age cohort. Among The Great One’s many records are his almost 2000 (1963) career assists (an assist is a pass that resulted in another teammate scoring a goal. How lovely!). Gretzky’s record number is 157% of the second-place skater, Ron Francis. (Oh, you remember ol’ Ron, right?) So, get what this means. You could take away one-third of Gretzky’s assists and he would still be the record holder. Looking at per-season statistics, Gretzky has the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh highest season’s assists. Amazing athlete.

But even The Great One cannot elevate hockey over golf. This sport requires a specialized skill, rinks are in such high demand youth teams have to schedule practices at weird hours, it requires expensive equipment, and . . . ice. Cold. Yuck. And the play is so demanding even the best-conditioned skater has to go sit and rest for at least half the game.

I might imagine soccer is great. If I lived in any other country but the US I might elevate soccer above golf. People of any size can play it. It demands strategy and team play. It rewards athleticism and creativity. I would probably like it more if my experience with it had been anything other than one six-weeks period of every year in high school the PE coach throwing a soccer ball out onto a field and saying “OK boys, play soccer” while he went to have a smoke. And then the football team members would just beat the ever-lovin’ crap out of the rest of us little guys.

I love volleyball. You’ve probably read somewhere that I was a University of Texas at Austin intramural volleyball champion. Well, graduate-student league. Well, co-ed division. But “champion” is the key word, here. And, like women’s basketball, it demands team play – planning, coordination, selflessness. Volleyball does favor the tall, but a talented player of any height can make a valuable contribution, and indeed arguably the most important player is the setter who can be any height. But, you need a good net, and 11 other people (don’t even talk to me about doubles in the sand – only about 1% of the skinniest, most in-shape people can enjoy, two-on-two volleyball), and . . . OK, it is ALMOST as good as golf.

The things tennis has going for it are you need only one buddy, public tennis courts are plentiful, and one can play the sport deep into old age. (Pickleball is a recent mutation that seems to be taking people even deeper into old age with a fun, similar sport.) I was the captain and, until I discovered girls, #1 player on my high-school tennis team, and one of our sons was the captain and #1 player for his college tennis team. Across the city from me Chris Evert was the captain of her high-school tennis team. She took it a little more seriously than I did. And I can’t say much bad about tennis. The only goink is, and this portends my primary joy with golf, given the confluence of the speed of the game, and humans’ competitiveness, and the generative nature of perception, there are often conflicts surrounding line calls. At the highest level of the sport they have quick, excellent technological support for line calls. At a player’s behest the ref can request an instant replay and on the big screen we can all see a representation of whether that ball hit the line or not. But at any lower level, your opponent, that bastard, can call your shot out when you KNOW it was in. My characterization of perception as “generative” means that things other than visual sensations go into forming the perception, things like beliefs, biases, desires. So, even if you and I are both sitting at about the same spot in the stands, watching a point, if you are rooting for one player and I am rooting for the other, we could have pretty much the same visual sensations, but I could perceive that ball to be in when you, you damn cheater, could perceive it to be out. Some of these differences are to be expected and excused, but if a pattern should develop a high school or college player can call for a coach to come watch and serve as ad hoc referee.

(Here’s a weird sidebar that has always puzzled me, and if I don’t include it here no one will ever benefit from my deep thinking. In tennis, volleyball, and baseball the line is “in.” A ball that hits the line is in play or is called in. Well, in tennis and volleyball, consider what I call a “compression point.” If a ball is just a teensy bit long but compresses to hit the back of that back line, it is called in. Seems to me that when that first little bit of tennis ball fuzz hit beyond the line, before the ball compressed to have the back-side of the ball graze the back of the line, the ball was OUT. Before compressing. No? I’m overthinking it? Shocker.)

But consider golf. (After you watch George Carlin on baseball vs. football, go watch Robin Williams’s bit on the invention of golf. Warning: NSFW. Hell, BSFH [Barely Suitable For Home].) No need for instant replay. Almost no one gets hurt. There are almost no rude, self-aggrandizing celebrations as in, say, football. Some dang defensive back deflects a pass, and he celebrates like he just cured cancer – pounds his chest, points to the sky. What? “You and me, God. We did that!” Spare me. That was your job. You made a C. “Meets requirements.” Go back and see if you might possibly do it again. In golf, no “posterizing” your opponent. No standing over him when he’s down, no “Who’s yer daddy” stare, when you’ve beaten him on a hole. Indeed, one of the biggest controversies in the PGA in recent years was when a player chose not to mark his ball on the green when his playing partner (note – his competitor!) was about to hit his shot out of the sand trap. Rather the would-be offending player left his ball on the green, on the other side of the hole from his competitor’s green-side bunker shot, on the off chance that his competitor’s errant shot would hit his ball (which he would by rule get to replace at its original point), thereby keeping his competitor’s ball from going in the water. So here’s the deal. Every player is tasked with “protecting” the rest of the field, so by potentially helping his playing partner (again I say, fellow competitor), he was potentially harming the rest of the players who were also trying to best as many players as possible. But, that’s the way it is in golf. You want the others to do their best, and you strive and hope to make your best just a little bit better.

And here is the real deal. One must be one’s own referee. Golf will not work if anyone cheats, and so cheating is absolutely verboten. If we were not all perfectly assiduous in following the rules the game would not work. It would require that there be one referee for each player, following them into the woods to see if the ball really was found or if the player just dropped another one down, thereby avoiding a penalty. And that would be unmanageable. In my long lifetime, I can remember only two PGA players for whom there were hints that he may have cheated and, true or not, people have tended to look askance at these two ever since.

In perhaps every other sport the player will try to gain any edge. A football gets fumbled and every player on each team points in their favored direction – “It’s our ball; we recovered.” Even if they have no clue who recovered, “truth” does not matter, rather we just wish to influence the refs’ decision. In basketball when the visiting team is shooting a foul shot the home team fans employ whatever creativity they can to auditorily or visually distract the shooter from making his free-throw. And woebetides the player (if ever there was one) who might admit, “Excuse me ref, sir, that ball did graze my finger just before it went out of bounds.” Even in baseball if we can see that a pitcher is “tipping” his pitches (if we can tell that he does X when he’s throwing a fastball and Y when he’s throwing a breaking ball), we share that knowledge gleefully among our teammates. But in golf, let us keep the playing field as level as we can, shall we?

Now, in some Saturday morning golf game, who the hell cares? I shot an 84. Well, I took a Mulligan on the first hole. And you gave me a generous “gimme” on a coupla putts that I may or may not have made. So, an 84, or an 85, or an 86, who the hell cares? But if this is a tournament or a high school or college match, or if you are going to turn this score in to affect your handicap (note, in which case one might wish to INCREASE the score, to increase the handicap), then you gotta “play it as it lies.” No Mulligans. No gimmes. No “foot wedges” (kicking the ball out from behind the tree). If you get an 84 it means you hit it 84 times (or maybe 81 times, with three penalty strokes for those three balls in the lake).

Another joy of golf is the handicapping system. Each golfer may maintain a handicap ranging from zero (a “scratch golfer”) to 36, based on their historical performance. If your handicap is 8 and mine is 12, you are gonna have to give me four strokes across our round. This is cool. This allows people of differing skills to compete. If you give me four strokes and you still beat me, that means that you played closer to your potential than I did to mine. Hooray for you. I’ll buy the beers. I don’t think that exists in any other sport. What, might Chris Evert play left-handed against me? Might we say I can hit it into the doubles alleys against her but she has to hit it within the singles lines on my side? I think there is no handicapping equivalent. (I guess in horse racing they make some horses carry more weight, in the jockey and added weights in the saddle, than lesser horses, but let’s stick to bipedal sports.)

Here’s another weird aside that I wish to sneak in here. Once we get to the course, you with your fancy single-digit handicap and me with my 12, there is only one other accommodation – the tee boxes. Most courses have three sets of tees, red for women, a little farther back the whites for men, and farther back still the “championship” blue tees. These days some swank clubs will have maybe five sets, with the green tees between the reds and the whites for old men, and the black tees, farthest back, for the really long knockers. Why is distance the only thing we additionally accommodate? I can hit a golf ball kinda far, but I suck at putting. Why not have, on each green, the current 4.25-inch-diameter hole, for most people, and a second, 6-inch-diameter hole for people like me? Also as I get older, or after I have two beers, I don’t concentrate as well as I used to. How about people with poor focus get to hit a do-over on some number of holes? Heck, I’d play from the black tees if you gave me a few do-overs.

Golf isn’t perfect. It can be expensive and elitist, though there are efforts (see “First Tee”) to correct this. There is a history of wasting water and of run-off of ecology-destroying fertilizers, but these too are being corrected, with water collection and more organic greening technique. It takes a long dang time – likely six hours from the time you leave your garage ‘til you pull back in. It is mostly an individual sport, though there is some team play, with the Ryder Cup, with its manufactured scarcity (only every other year) and geographic allegiance making it one of the most exciting and popular events of any year it is played. But all in all, golf is the best sport.

Yeah, the ball is just sitting there. No one has thrown it 98 mph, or 85 mph with spin that influences its placement when you try to hit it. Yeah, golf has a relatively ugly history when it comes to slowness to embrace diversity. Yeah it can take all damn day. But ya gotta love a sport where the top players’ performance clearly demonstrates an amazing dedication to their craft, where someone of any size may excel, where you can play by yourself or with buddies, where you can play until that age when you can no longer stand upright, where humility and good sportspersonship are the rule rather than the exception, and where every player is simply expected to follow all the rules, dutifully, joyfully, reflexively.

See you on the first tee.

_{Photo by Tyler Hendy from Pexels}