Did Tom Watson Show Us That Golf Is Sport?

Tom Watson’s near miracle at the British Open has poured fresh fuel on the question of whether golf can be considered a sport, the thinking being that for the likes of professional football or basketball, it’s impossible for a 59 year old to even dream of being competitive.  Like all such arguments, it seems reasonable enough at first but there are devils in the details.  If we go on a bit of a tangent, Jeannie Longo, at 50, finished 4^th in the road cycling time trial at the Beijing Olympics.  So is cycling not a sport because a 50 year old nearly won at the highest level?  Or should only men’s cycling should be considered a sport because such a feat would seem impossible?  Or is cycling a sport because Longo was competitive at 50 but it wouldn’t be if she were 59? 

The “real sports don’t have 59 year old athletes” argument ultimately tries to define sport by defining what it is not, which simply doesn’t wash.  It seems a lot of what is said in the “what is a sport and isn’t” discussion is similar, they don’t really say anything other than reflecting a person’s preferences, and by doing that the BS can continue to run in circles, which I suppose is what a bar room debate is all about, it’s no fun drinking alone.

With this in mind, I tried to come up with my own definition of what could be considered a sport.  I was looking for a definition, something where a test could be applied, and one that would apply to a diverse array of sports.  It wasn’t easy, but I wasted a lot of brain cells to come up with the following.

And so I say a sport is a physical competition, one where power and technique are elemental, whose participants are ultimately governed by significant bureaucracy.

My definition explained a lot.  Hockey is physical, chess is not.  A basketball game is a competition, while a ballet, though intensely physical, is not.  Power is obviously essential in wrestling, essential but less obviously so in cycling where the key is how efficiently power is produced, but power is not an advantage in darts.  A weightlifter must master the techniques of the clean and jerk and snatch, where a bodybuilder simply poses, the work being done in the act of competing is negligible.  While soccer is governed by a body boasting more countries than the United Nations, there is no international federation of hopscotch, that is a lot of people play soccer, but many more people would have to hopscotch competitively before we begin to think of it as sport.

At the same time, there’s a whole lot my definition didn’t explain.  Is auto racing a sport because power plays a huge role or is it not because that power comes from horses?  What about a piano competition?  The difficult pieces are very physical, very technical, and a whole lot of people play piano.  Of course you can always refine the definition, but that brings up more questions than answers.  We could sensibly choose to exclude piano because the end product that is judged is aesthetic, not physical, but does that then exclude figure skating, which awards half its marks on artistic impression?  What about half pipe snowboarding, which along with difficulty rewards overall impression?  How do you define the balance between the physical and artistic?

By trying to find an answer, I found more questions.  Is golf a sport?  I could say yes.  Golf is enormously popular, an endless amount of technique is involved, and being more powerful is a decided advantage.  But is it advantage enough when you have 59 year old Tom Watson come within a 10 foot putt of winning the biggest title in golf?  And if we’re back to the question of age, what about Jeannie Longo at the 2008 Olympics?

We go round in circles, and every point seems to be built upon an endless slippery slope.  But the point of debate is not to find answers, but to raise questions.  And to every question there is simply too much in the way of knowledge, present and still to come, that can be reconciled by a single answer.  I suspect it will be a long time coming when we can truly say whether or not golf is a sport but I fear not.  At least I won’t be drinking alone.