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Competition and Sportsmanship Taught Through Golf

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Most kids are not interested in golf if it’s not introduced to them first.  Kids just don’t generally gravitate toward the Golf Channel.  They don’t turn on ESPN to see what Retief Goosen is up to at the Sony Open.  They’re interested in the more popular spectator sports like football, basketball and baseball.  And I for one don’t blame them.  Face it golfers…watching your sport is relatively dull.  As challenging as it is, and as much skill is required…watching someone drop a 50-foot birdie putt does not compare to a diving catch in the end zone, a thunderous dunk or an outfielder pulling a homerun ball back into the yard for an out.  You can see what I mean.

But what golf can offer is a level of competition that can certainly be equivalent to that of any other sport.  But it’s not just the competition, it’s the competition combined with safety and sportsmanship.  And those are some qualities that should make parents happy as well.

When it comes to competition, golfers are a different bunch…and I don’t mean the pros.  When you compare your average weekend golfer with that of any other weekend sports enthusiast such as the flag football player, beer-league softball guy and rec league basketball player (and let’s face it golfing friends, they are their sports equivalent to what you do on the links), it’s only the golfers who question the skill level of each other.  Some of these golfers wear their handicaps like a badge of honor…like it makes them superior to another golfer.  See, someone like me, I can’t even tell you what my handicap is because…quite honestly…I don’t care.  But in the other sports previously mentioned, you don’t see this.  When was the last time you heard two beer-league softball players comparing batting averages?  Have you ever heard two rec league basketball players bragging about their average points per game?  No, of course not.  They would just sound silly.  But golfers?  It’s a new level of personal competition.  And sometimes, I don’t think they even realize they’re doing it.

Something all parents are concerned about when it comes to their children’s participation in sports is safety.  It’s the NFL that really brings this to light, mainly with the concussion problems.  Football is a violent contact sport played by big, strong, fast men.  There are going to be injuries.  There are going to be broken bones, concussions, tears, strains and the like.  Some will be short-term, some may be life-altering.  And further, during last weekends 49ers-Packers game which was played in wind chills of -20 degrees, is the fact that football players play through any weather condition other than lightning.  One can understand why a parent would not want their child to participate.  So what sport, requiring you to get out of a chair, is more safe than golf?  There is no physical contact outside of a handshake or pat on the back.  And the sport is normally only played in optimal conditions.  What’s the risk?  You didn’t hear someone yell “Fore?”  OK, so it can hurt if you get hit by a ball…but it’s rarely been known to cause any serious injury.

Last but not least is the sportsmanship facet of the game.  I don’t know about anyone else, but the trash-talk and self-promotion in some sports has just gone too far now.  I love football…far and away my favorite sport…but I can’t stand watching a wide receiver get up and celebrate every catch like they just won the state lottery.  Or every time a basketball player throws down a dunk, they have to let out a scream, pound their chest and stare down the crowd.  Congratulations!  You did your job!  I’m not a trash-talker…never have been and really don’t like them.  It’s really beginning to lose its place in sports now.  Golf?  It doesn’t occur unless it’s at a personal level.  But doing it just for trash talk’s sake?  Enough already.

Golf may be a relatively dull sport to watch on television.  But when introduced and taught properly, it’s a great sport to have your kids pursue.  The combination of competitiveness, safety and sportsmanship can teach life-lessons, as well as provide years of entertainment and recreation for anyone who sticks with it.  If it goes further than just the level of a weekend hack, great!  But if not, at the very lest it was a useful tool.

Swing ’til you’re happy!

In the Time of PED’s, How Has Golf Stayed Clean?

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Me and one of my boys were feeling a little under the weather this past Sunday afternoon.  So even though it’s a beautiful day, we’re just hanging out on the sofa scanning the channels.  I’m hoping we land on some type of a sporting event.  Well, in actuality, I’m just hoping we land on something other than Power Rangers.  But with the remote in his hand…who knows what we’ll end up watching.  There’s a good chance I’ll end up watching the back of my eyelids.  But lo and behold, he heads to one of the ESPN’s and says “We could watch high school football.”

So at first, I’m partially satisfied.  I mean, even though it’s high school, it’s still football.  But after I thought about it further, I began to wonder why the heck we are watching high school football on a nationally televised cable network.  A local cable access channel?  OK.  But, being that I’m in Connecticut and watching two teams from Florida on an ESPN channel?  What’s going on?!

Then, this just gets me thinking deeper into youth sports on television.  We have high school football being nationally televised.  High school basketball, and McDonald’s All-America games are nationally televised as well.  And in baseball, we go even further past high school, as every year we are nationally televising little league games!!  I can’t be the only person that sees the problem with this.  What problem?  Over-exposure, that’s the problem.

I could be wrong, but in my opinion, over-exposure is where all of the problems with PED’s in sports begins.  When the extra spotlight is put on players who are too young to handle or understand it, pressure is then created at an earlier age.  This pressure to perform in front of cameras on a national stage creates further pressure to perform at a greater level than they can naturally.  Athletes now feel the pressure at an earlier age to be bigger, faster and stronger than their peers.  Enter PED’s.

Thankfully, as far as we know anyway, the PED problem has not yet come to the world of golf – though we have questioned the possibility.  And maybe a part of the reason for that is, no one cares about amateur golf.  Well, not enough to nationally televise high school golf tournaments anyway.  But if it came to that point, do you think for a second the pressure wouldn’t reach those kids as well?  Sure, extra strength from PED’s would, for the most part, only benefit a golfer off the tee.  So it wouldn’t really help the all-around game.  But when a few 17-year old high school seniors are on ESPN ripping 300+ yard drives on a regular basis while reps from Callaway, Nike and Adidas are watching…well…I think you see what I mean.

So after all of these thoughts run through my head, I ended up changing the channel to something else.  I just don’t like the idea of over-exposing and promoting kids, who are at an age when they should be playing these sports for fun more than anything else, and I don’t want to help promote/support it.  We see what it’s doing to baseball.  It’s happening in football as well, although to a far smaller degree.  And it’s probably only a matter of time before it finds its way into basketball too.  So as long as we keep from putting high school golf on TV, maybe that can be one way to help keep the sport clean.

Swing ’til you’re happy!

What I Took Away From The Masters

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For starters, I guess it was a pretty great tournament.  I didn’t take the time to watch much more than a few minutes of the final round (for the most part, I got my updates from ESPN), but I’ll take everyone’s word for it.  Lot’s of stories – a 14-year old makes the cut, Tiger’s two-stroke penalty, a dramatic playoff win…lots of stuff to talk about.  But I don’t want to do that.  Everyone is going to be talking about the obvious stuff.  Instead, I have a couple of questions.

Let’s starts with the 14-year old.  We’ve asked before if it’s good to have a kid playing in a tournament when a 16-year old played in the 2011 U.S. Open.  But a 14-year old at The Masters?  Are you kidding?  This kid’s mother was packing his lunch and meanwhile he’s keeping pace with Phil Mickelson at Augusta!  Great story, but my question is the same as it was two years ago – when a 14-year old is going stroke-for-stroke with some of the greats of the game, does that cheapen the sport or, at least, the tournament?  Does it make you look at the pro’s with a little bit less respect?

My next two questions though involve the Tiger controversy.  I’ll start with the ruling itself.  So everyone was hung up on the “as closely as possible” part of the rule.  The only real voice of reason I heard was from Curtis Strange when he said that as closely as possible could be determined as 6-8 inches – not 3-4 feet!  I have to agree.  When I hear “as closely as possible” I think “right beside.”  So to stand 3-4 feet behind where your shot was, you’re opening up a can of worms.  I mean, where is the “as closely as possible” line drawn?  What if his original shot was on a downhill lie and he then dropped 3-4 feet back onto a flat part of the fairway?  What then?  Would that be fair?  Would that be judged differently?

Even further…how is this giant loophole left open by the rule-makers?  How can you leave something like that up to interpretation?  If someone else did the same thing but moved 3-4 feet closer, is that the same?  What if they moved 6-8 feet one way or the other?  That certainly isn’t as close as possible either.  But…that’s all up for debate I guess, right?

But the whole controversy brings me to another issue.  Why is it that this day in age, with all of the officials, rangers, scorekeepers, etc. on the course that the player is responsible for keeping his own score?  Granted, we all keep our own scores when we play, but this is the pros, man.  Every professional sport has an official scorekeeper.  Why not golf?  A golfer is expected to sign his scorecard (in a designated area mind you) and remember the entire round?  Why wouldn’t an official be doing that for him?  This sport really needs to move out of the dark ages and update some of their rules.  It’s just silly and leads to stupid controversies such as this that take away from the game itself.

And just on a side note…inputting a rule to protect the players who don’t know the rules is absolutely ridiculous.  Seriously, is this a professional sport, or is it me and my buddies playing on a Sunday morning at the local muni?  If you’re going to play the game, you’d better know the rules.  Ignorance is not an excuse.  In the NFL, if a player doesn’t know something he did is a penalty, do the refs say “Oh, you didn’t know?  OK, well then instead of a 15-yard penalty it’ll just cost you five.”  If an NBA player didn’t realized he traveled before hitting a layup, do they let him keep one of the two points?  Of course not!  The rule is enforced!  They don’t implement another rule because the guy didn’t know!

We’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – for a sport that shouldn’t be nearly as complicated as it is, the rule-makers sure do their best to make it that way.  I mean, if you need to have a rule book, and then a separate book to, more or less, decipher the rule book…you have a problem.  This all boils down to the reason I don’t carry, don’t own and have never even thumbed through the rules of golf…nor do I have any plans to do so.  You could drive yourself nuts!  Don’t drive yourself nuts – know the basics and play for fun.

Swing ’til you’re happy!

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