John Daly was a true athlete. Yeah brah
^ And how successful has he been lately? There are lots of meatheads that would keel over dead if they tried to keep pace with me on a bike. They’re obviously not athletic then? There is more than one definition of athletic ability. Golf has serious physic demands at the highest levels. Even if you’re just amateur good, it requires serious physical ability. Does it require excellent cardio and low body fat? No. It doesn’t. You’ll find the guys at the top of the game and consistently so are very fit. Rory McIlroy and Woods are just two fit guys of many. Anyway, again, its not much to say an activity is a joke when you can’t do it yourself.
This is interesting - gets at the debate of whether golf is a game or a sport, where a sport would be defined as an activity where athletic prowess is the principal determinant of victory (i.e. biggest fastest guy wins). Clearly golf is not a game where stereotypically strong athletics is required, it is proven that it has value. A large part of Tiger’s success was because of his physical ability compared to ‘traditional’ golfers.
That said golf requires a lot of physical talent and skill. It’s a combination of hand/eye coordination and athletic stamina - of which John Daly has a tremendous amount. There’s an extremely large contingent of professional golfers who claim John Daly is the best pure golfer and has the most talent for the game of anyone, ever. He does possess a talent unique and rivaled by very few in the world that should be admired…whether you want to call him an athelete or not is kind of beside the point.
I personally think golf makes for great video games. Tiger Woods and Mario Golf are some of the best games I’ve played.
Now that’s what I’m talking about!
Why does he hate you?
I think in this case, what he means is, he is united with me in the simultaneous hatred of both crapfit and golf.
Ah.
Although I absolutely agree that being good at golf does require coordination, dexterity, and alot of discipline, I think it is obviously requires less physical fitness than like 95 % of sports out there.
Sure, guys at the top of the game are fit, but are nowhere as fit as guys at the top of the game in other sports.
In terms of physical demand and excluding sport-specific dexterity, any high-level marathon runner, good college wrestler, competitive track and field athlete or semi-pro hockey player will blow 90% of pro golfers out of the water by a huge margin.
So if you benchmark golf against other physical activities in terms of physical demand, then yes, it is a joke.
Which is not to say that the activity itself is a joke, as it is extremely difficult.
Golf requires an immense amount of skill but you don’t have to be a good athlete to play golf at the highest level. Look at Kevin Stadler, Patrick Reed and Shane Lowry. These guys are about as unathletic as it gets, but they are very skilled. I think it helps your game to be in decent shape hence TW and Rory and some of the other top guys are now more traditional athletes, but it is not required to be successful. I think it gives golf more legitimacy to have top guys in decent shape. I would argue that Tiger got too big and muscular and it hurt his game and made him more injury prone.
But yes golf is a great sport for networking and working in corporate america (especially if you are good). I dislike playing it because I don’t get a sweat and it takes too long, but I do follow it and enjoy watching it on TV.
My .02, which is largely a repeat of what others have already said:
Even though I don’t play (but I hope to someday), I have heard from a lot of non-douchey people that golf can be a good way to blow off steam. It’s a hobby, like hunting, fishing, or chess.
There a lot of “big-dick-contests” in the world. What kind of clothes you wear, what shoes you wear, what watch you wear, where your kids go to school, where you went to school, what neighborhood you live in, what country club you belong to, etc. Dickheads will be dickheads, and golf is just another conduit for dickheads to show off their dick size.
Right, wrong, or indifferent, playing golf is (at least where I live) a de-facto requirement of being a good businessperson. At the higher levels of business (especially sales), an awful lot gets accomplished on the golf course. (I think this is more important in smaller towns where there are less things to do, and people are more likely to know each other.)
Being a salesman (or former salesman), I’d be interested to hear Sweep’s opinion on this.
edit - and I disagree that golf is an “athletic” game. To me, an athlete is a person who has natural athletic ability to play almost any sport. Randy Moss is an athlete. He could play any sport he wanted to, probably at a professional level.
I would say that golf is a skill–the ability to swing a club. But it’s just one skill. It doesn’t translate into success in any other sport. (Pitching a baseball or running a marathon are also skills, IMO. Most of the people who can do them well can’t really do anything else.)
I disagree strongly with the bolded part.
While an excellent golfer might be shitty at every aspect of almost every sport, a marathon runner does have abilities that translate well into other sports, like an excellent cardio and running ability.
^Randy Moss can run a 100-meter dash, 220-meter hurdles, hit a ball out of the infield, make a throw from shortstop to first, make a throw from center field to home plate, dribble a basketball between his legs, make a free throw, make a three-pointer, slam-dunk a basketball, throw a football pass, catch a football pass, and shuck-and-jive a defending safety. He can probably do all of these things at a professional level. (His height would probably prevent him from achieving real success at the NBA level.) And with any amount of practice, he could probably play Ultimate Frisbee, Frisbee golf, regular golf, soccer, and hockey.
A marathon runner can…run a marathon.
^^
I am not sure what you are trying to illustrate. Randy Moss is obviously a beast - a genetic exception. So what ?
Let’s go back to what is being discussed here : take the best quartile of golfers. havethem pass a standardised physical fitness test (cardio, flexibility, Vo2 max, strength, reflexes, etc. ). Now take the best quartile of practitioners of 20 random sports and have them pass the same test as well.
Who do you think will win ? I’ll bet my girlfriend that the golfers get owned in at least 15 out of the 20 cases.
Fran Tarkenton was a pitcher in university. If memory serve, he made his name doing something else.
why does any discussion on sport with Americans always end up on athleticism. The 2 are obviously linked but not the same thing. It’s Ok to have sports that don’t require extreme levels of athleticism but still require an immense amount of skill, eg golf, baseball.
golf is a sport but is quite unique. It requires attributes that no other sport requires.
I’m fucking dreadful at it and that’s even with growing up in the home of golf.
^So what about video games and chess?
^^Sure m8, let’s talk about croquet strategy.
I’m mostly just repeating points that have been made, but skills and athleticism are two different things. Most sports are some combination of the two. Imo, the easiest way to distinguish is to ask yourself “could someone in bad shape succeed at this task?”. Could someone in bad shape be good at golf? Hit a baseball? Shoot a 3? I’d say yes, as they’re all “skills”. How about run a <3hr marathon? Bench 2x their bodyweight? Ride a bike 100 miles? I’d say no because they all require “athleticism”. Golf is a skill. That’s not to say being good isn’t impressive. It’s just to say that it’s not an “athletic feat” per se. The list of unathletic professional golfers is not particlarly short.
Regarding whether it’s fun, I personally think it’s great if you can separate the signal from the noise. The whole dress code, exclusive clubs, undeniable elitist underpinings, etc, all take away from it. If you can ignore all that and just view it as a great way to spend a day with some friends, it’s a lot of fun. Just my $.02, but when you get caught up in all that noise is when it becomes really lame. Then again, that “noise” is precisely what some ppl love about it. To each their own I guess.
Chess requires no physical ability. Stephen Hawkings could play chess. The hand eye coordination and muscular control required to hit the shots the pros hit is an atheletic feat. Its different than chess. Video games may have some limited comparison. Golf doesn’t require a high VO2max nor a high squat weight (though the squat ability probably helps). That doesn’t mean it requires no physical ability.
I haven’t heard his name in a long time so I decided to do a google search fully expecting him to be dead by now. I found this tidbit:
“According to Daly, she wanted him to pay her $2,500 every time they had sex. “She was playing like a hooker. She wanted her husband to pay her to have sex with him,” he recalls. “How bad is that?” Daly is adamant that her body was gorgeous but she was horrible in bed. “She wasn’t worth a cent,” he says.”