Golf hasn’t been an Olympic sport since the third modern games, back in St. Louis in 1904. Since then there hasn’t been a clamoring for the sport to return to the quadrennial event – no large protests or player-led crusades. Most in the sport seemed perfectly happy with the status quo: Four major tournaments, a few other top-tier events, an annual team competition and then run-of-the-mill tournaments that pepper the schedule during most of the calendar year.
But this year in Rio, golf is back at the Olympics. And no one seems to care.
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Adam Scott, the Australian golf star and former Masters champion, announced Tuesday he wouldn’t be competing in golf’s re-debut in Rio, citing travel concerns. He might be a lone wolf, opting out of an event most athletes dream about. Or he could open the golfing floodgates. There are a half-dozen reasons why Scott might be the first of many, but there’s one key reason above all: apathy. Golfers don’t grow up dreaming of winning a gold medal. They aren’t swimmers or gymnasts or track stars or archers or divers or the ones who compete in the event where they hold that ribbon. The Olympics are not the ultimate prize for a golfer. A green Jacket, U.S. Open trophy, Claret Jug, Wanamaker trophy – those are the trophies for which golfers play. The Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, PGA Championship and Ryder Cup are the biggest events in the sport, along with the U.S. Amateur and NCAA championships. No kid anywhere in the world has ever been on a putting green imagining that he was standing over a 15-footer to win a gold medal.
That’s why golf is a harder sell (and a terrible inclusion at the Olympics). If a gold medal isn’t the highest achievement in your sport, then your sport has no business being on the Olympic program.
Will Scott be the first or the last big name to drop out? Though Jordan Spieth and Jason Day are among the young players all-in, one can certainly see Scott’s side of it:
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1. Here’s the schedule for a top golfer playing the top tournaments over the next five months: The Masters (Georgia), April 7-10; The Players (Florida), May 12-15; The Memorial (Ohio), June 2-5; U.S. Open (Pennsylvania) June 16-19; WGC Bridgestone Invitational (Ohio), June 30-July 3; British Open (Scotland) July 14-17; PGA Championship (New Jersey); July 28-31; Olympics (Brazil) Aug 11-14 (Aug. 5 if you want to hit the Opening Ceremony); the FedEx Cup (New York, Massachusetts, Indiana, Georgia) Aug 25-Sep 25; Ryder Cup (Minnesota) Sep 30-Oct 2.
That’s one Grand Slam event in April and June, with two in July. The fifth-biggest tournament (The Players) is in May. The Olympics is wedged into a three-week period between the PGA Championship (which every golfer will want to play) and the start of the FedEx Cup (which doesn’t exactly have the tradition of going to Oakmont for the U.S. Open, but is still a big deal on the PGA calendar). And then at the end of September, at the end of that wild summer that has golfers ping-ponging from Florida to the Midwest to Scotland to the East Coast to Brazil back to the U.S., it’s out to Minnesota for one of the biggest events of the year (major or not), the Ryder Cup*. It’s a long slog.
(* And Adam Scott doesn’t even have the Ryder Cup to worry about. That’s a U.S. vs. Europe competition and he’s from Australia.)
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I don’t mean to make it seem like Jordan Spieth and his brethren are going down to work into the coal mines. At the end of the day, they’re still playing a game for a living. But that’s a big schedule, especially considering that golfers will play at least a few more events not listed. So, if you’re looking at all those weekends filled-in through the end of September, what would a golfer do to get a break? What’s the first to go? Doesn’t that trip to the southern hemisphere in August, days after the PGA Championship and before the start of the FedEx Cup, seem the most expendable? Sure, it’d be great to win a gold medal, but at the expense of any other achievement on that list?
2. Traveling to a new golf tournament on a course no one has really seen in a timeframe that won’t allow players too much chance to familiarize themselves with it doesn’t sound appealing. At all.
3. The tournament itself is going to be softer than a Charmin commercial. Here’s the (pretty simple) rules for entry: “The top-15 world-ranked players will be eligible for the Olympics, with a limit of four players from a given country. Beyond the top-15, players will be eligible based on the world rankings, with a maximum of two eligible players from each country that does not already have two or more players among the top-15.”
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This makes for a field that is, uh, well it’s not good. In this current list of the 60 players who’d make the field, I legitimately haven’t heard of 25. And I’m a golf fan. Not a golf die-hard, but a golf fan. I’d imagine a die-hard might not know 15-20 guys on the list. Of the 60, I’d say 15 are “big names” in the sport. Why only 15? Because with a four-man cut-off, the American team is Jordan Spieth, Rickie Fowler, Dustin Johnson and Bubba Watson. There’s no Phil Mickelson, Brandt Snedeker, Zach Johnson, Matt Kuchar, etc. Of the current top 30 in the world golf rankings, only 16 players are in the Olympic field – the top 15 and then, because of a slew of Americans bunched up between No. 16 and No. 30, just one more – the 30th-ranked Rafa Cabrera Bello of Spain, hardly a household name, even in Spain.
4. Tennis had the same sort of Olympic apathy until 2008, when the big stars began coming out and playing it as a legit tournament, then hit its apex in 2012, when the event was played on the hallowed courts of Wimbledon. But it still has the same problem as golf: It’s not the tournament in its sport. Even though there’s a gold medal awarded at the end, it still feels like sort of an exhibition.
A gold medal is still a crowning sporting achievement, even if grew up dreaming of winning the U.S. Open instead of standing on a podium. Everybody knows the significance and the honor of representing your country and hearing your national anthem played. But for Adam Scott, fitting in a trip to Brazil for a glorified, third-tier invitational tournament wasn’t worth the chance to try for one. I doubt he’ll be the last to feel that way.
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