Fragile mentality of golfers... why?

[JoeHova]

So, there's news today that Tiger Woods screeched and swore at some photographer who snapped a picture while he was in his back swing during the last tournament.

 

I know this happens all the time where golfers get in a snit about someone coughing or taking a picture, but my question is- why is golf the only sport where spectators must maintain absolute silence at all times?

[Katuluu]

Because it is completely full of itself?

[ttsather]

I don't think there's a crystal clear answer, but probably several factors:

 

- Each swing is a huge percentage of the actual gameplay and can have a major impact on the whole event.

- Golfing takes a lot of concentration, to which silence is arguably more conducive.

- The individual nature of the sport - you can affect one guy and he's the only guy, not a part of a team

- You're very, very close to the player and to the action, and some might say that commands more respect to the player

- The game is entirely merit-based in terms of pay. Yeah, guys do have endorsements and such, but they don't have a salary that they get regardless of how they play. One swing can mean tens of thousands of dollars, or more.

 

 

EDIT:

I'll also throw in that all of the factors have led, over time, to the tradition of spectator silence, which the players have become accustomed to.

 

More as an effect than a cause, as well, is that it's more of an all-or-nothing thing, where if one guy is clicking a camera outside of relative silence it can be very distracting, whereas if everyone was making noise all the time it wouldn't matter as much.

[jwill535]

qualifying this statement by saying i am no where near talented enough to be a Pro golfer but there could be naked dwarfs doing backflips around me with a all chimp band playing circus music and i would have no trouble swinging a club. Ok maybe that was alittle extreme seeing that i can help but giggle a bit with the image in my head while i type this.

[Menotti80]

tt hit it right on the head. the biggest reasons:

 

1. 1 swing can mean $100,000 or more dollars. because of the distraction, that cost Tiger 1-2 strokes (he bogeyed the hole). it also killed any realistic chance at a comback, and he ended up losing by only 2 shots and made $200,000. if he would have made a par there, he was looking at much more money. Who knows, that could have cost him a chance at a playoff with Ogilvey.

 

2. Golfing takes the most amount of concentration when it comes to a sport. being a TINY bit off on your swing can be the difference between a great shot near the hole and a ball chunked, skulled, or hit into the water. in most other sports, you dont have to be THAT precise.

 

3. (probably the biggest) this is how golf has ALWAYS been. you grow up and learn to play the game with people being quiet when you are swinging. since a person's mind is trained from day one be concentrate on a swing that basically deals with no sound distractions, a cough, honk, bird chirp, camera click, a flash, a fart - any little distraction is magnified 100x because you are not accoustomed to it.

[GAME05]

i think to some degree people have reacted like "geez, it's annoying, but not worth the reaction" because we see it as a happens-rarely type of event. of course what doesn't get reported are the hundreds of times someone does this and Tiger politely asks them to stop. he's not as much yelling at the one dude who did it that once, but from the hundreds of times it's happened to him.

 

it's like playing basketball against the dude who likes to elboy you in the stomach when the ref's not looking. not legal, but not much you can do, but at some point everybody's going to shove the dude to the floor. then it just gets reported "voilent foul over a simple elbow to the chest" but it's a lot more than that.

[PKBadger]

why is golf the only sport where spectators must maintain absolute silence at all times?

 

They ask for quiet in tennis, too, and honestly that one confuses me a lot more than golf.

 

Tangentially, you would think that in the 21st century someone would be able to invent an affordable camera that didn't make any noise when it captured the image. And if these exist already (I am admittedly ignorant of new camera technology), why not make these the only ones permitted at PGA events?

[Patrick425]

There are obviously people who love golf and are addicted to it and others who detest it as being boring and snobbish. I think it's just a matter of personality. I love golf. I'm not as addicted to it as I was 5 or 10 years ago, but I still love to get out on the course as much as my time allows.

 

I also think there are golfers that are much more easily distracted than others. I'm one that's very easily distracted. I could never play golf in front of a large group of people like the pros do.

 

I think the quote about "being a TINY bit off on your swing can be the difference between a great shot near the hole and a ball chunked, skulled, or hit into the water" hits the nail right on the head for me. They say baseball is a game of inches. Golf is a game of small fractions of inches (although with the larger club faces now, it's a bit more forgiving than it use to be).

 

I have always loved the fact that golf requires focus and concentration. It's not a fast moving sport like basketball that relies mainly on athletic instinct. It takes a lot more patience to play golf. The pros make it look easy. I know several people that thought it would be fun to take up golf and then went out and purchased some expensive set of clubs only to end up quiting after a year or two of frustration. Not everyone is cut out for golf and I find those who are not are usually the first to criticize it as being a stupid, boring sport.

[jason21nl]

Its just the way the game of golf is. You should not make a noise in someones back swing, especially when the player it expecting to be total silence. I would rather try hitting a 90mph fastball with a crowd going crazy then trying to hit a non moving golf ball with complete silence.

[NeedMoreFans]

If it is noisy, and a camera clicks, does the golfer hear it? Probably not. But it's silent, so the sound of a camera is quite noticeable. I'm not sure why complete silence is mandated (and this is coming from a golfer). I personally don't like sudden loud noises in my swing, but constant loud noises don't bother me so much. I can swing with train horns blasting (as long as it's not the first time it blasts), traffic going by and stuff like that. There is considerable concentration in a golf swing, and I have messed up quite a bit when I get distracted.

[dadofandrew]

Same reason tennis is quiet...both sports are concerned about decades of tradition and not about making the game fan-friendly.

 

The PGA Tour makes its competitors wear dress pants while they participate in an athletic contest...so common sense need not enter the equation.

[mothershipconnection]

(probably the biggest) this is how golf has ALWAYS been. you grow up and learn to play the game with people being quiet when you are swinging. since a person's mind is trained from day one be concentrate on a swing that basically deals with no sound distractions, a cough, honk, bird chirp, camera click, a flash, a fart - any little distraction is magnified 100x because you are not accoustomed to it.

 

I think that's spot-on. Pretty much any fluent performance which is not trained and practiced in the presence of distracting stimuli will fall apart when distractions are added to the environment (I've done some research in this area, but it didn't involve golf). Performance is always most fluent in conditions that are the most similar to the environment in which the response was trained and strengthened. It's the same reason most of use have trouble reading a book in a noisy environment. Had we been trained to read while Megadeth was playing in the background, we'd have much less trouble.

[bork]

There are obviously people who love golf and are addicted to it and others who detest it as being boring

Well, I see it both ways. It's a fun game to play, but it has to be the most boring game to watch.

[rluzinski]

Same reason tennis is quiet...both sports are concerned about decades of tradition and not about making the game fan-friendly.

 

Letting fans stand a few feet away from the action seems pretty fan friendly to me. Let me stand in the on deck circle while Prince Fielder is AB and I would be as quiet as they want me to be.

[homer]

Why do baseball managers wear the same uniform as the players but no coach in any other sport does the same?

[bork]

And why are they a manager instead of a coach?

[Menotti80]

The only answer I can come up with is (and I may be wrong, so dont jump on me too hard if I am), but coaches in other sports actually "coach" players during the game. they draw up plays in the huddle and during timeouts, they call out plays during the action and they give advice/criticism to players on a regular basis throughout the game. To me, managers in baseball simply manage a game: set the line-ups and make substitutions. They don't seem to really do any coaching of the players on game day.

[Patrick425]

Same reason tennis is quiet...both sports are concerned about decades of tradition and not about making the game fan-friendly.

 

The PGA Tour makes its competitors wear dress pants while they participate in an athletic contest...so common sense need not enter the equation.

I waited to respond to this post, because my immediate reply probably would have gotten me banned from brewerfan. What you described is exactly why I like golf. It discourages loud, obnoxious, beer swilling patrons (although, that element has been leaking into the crowds more and more lately at PGA events - case and point, the loser two weeks ago that cheered for Vijay Singh to hit it in the water on the 18th hole.). Golf tries to maintain some sense of tradition and class. I see absolutly nothing wrong with that, especially in today's society.

 

If people are looking for a sport to attend where it's ok to be drunk, obnoxious, wear cut off jeans and act like a total classless slob, then I would suggest NASCAR or professional wrestling.

[Menotti80]

Well said Patrick.

 

Long live the Gentleman's Sport!!!

[endaround]

Its a class thing. Tennis and golf are considered teh sports of the upper class and as such different rules were to be expected. No vulgar displays like in football or racing matches here!

 

I can almost gaurentee that this "tradition" goes only back to Victorian England.

[JoeHova]

Why do baseball managers wear the same uniform as the players but no coach in any other sport does the same?

Supposedly it's because baseball managers are the only ones who go on the field of play during a game. Obviously sometimes coaches in other sports run onto the court/field, but they aren't supposed to.

 

 

 

 

Anyway, some excellent answers guys. I thought mothership's response was especially interesting, although I'm not sure how much it would apply to pro sports (I mean, how many people show up at little league and college baseball games compared to MLB? The noise level is much, much different).

[BrewCrewForever]

I love golf. Two things I can't stand about watching pro golf are "It's in the hole" guy and "You da man!" guy. They don't need to yell that after Tiger or Phil or any golfer tees off.

[mothershipconnection]

I thought mothership's response was especially interesting, although I'm not sure how much it would apply to pro sports (I mean, how many people show up at little league and college baseball games compared to MLB? The noise level is much, much different).

 

With them it's typically faded in gradually by level of competition. It's similar to the old legend of the frog that won't jump out of water that slowly increases to boiling hot. In little league you have a dozen parents, then in high school you have a hundred or more, then maybe a couple thousand in college and the minors, then a big jump to tens of thousands in the pros. The noise is always there - it just increased in volume each step along the way. I don't know if the jump in noise level would have a huge effect on performance for baseball, though, as it often is not excessively loud during the actual performance, but rather upon seeing the result of the performance. During an AB, lots of MLB crowds are "that loud", but they roar after the ball has been hit when the noise doesn't really matter in terms of the stability of the performance. This may serve more as a reinforcing (or punishing) consequence than as a distraction during the performance. It may be that the size of the crowd is actually a bigger distraction than noise level as it is what is present during the performance. Golfers are probably habituated to crowd size, but have no practice performing when noise occurs during the performance of the skill.

 

Though a frog won't really sit still in water until it boils, the research does show that organisms can habituate quite well to stimuli that are gradually increased in intensity/magnitude and react less than they would if the terminal stimulus were presented prior to the procedure of systematically fading in the stimulus. Back to the Megadeth example, I would read better if the music started at a barely-audible level and increased by 1/2db each day to 110db than if I were suddenly confronted with 110db of Megadeth.

[Diskono]

Remember that Saturday Night Live with Kelsey Grammer as the tennis hooligan on "Scottish Soccer Hooligan Weekly"? This thread reminds me of that.

 

And about baseball managers wearing uniforms...does anyone really want to see this:

http://derivataters.com/pat_riley.jpg

http://derivataters.com/sherman.jpg