June 24 (Bloomberg) -- One of the amazing things about golf is how many people have been fooled into believing it is actually a real sport. All over the world people now talk and think about golf as if it's more like football or basketball than, say, bird- watching.
The first and most obvious symptom of this mass delusion is the need for golfers to gin up a melodrama inappropriate to the occasion.
It's not enough for Tiger Woods to be the world's best golfer. He must also jump around and holler, pump his fists and thump his chest, and generally behave in ways that clash, tonally, with the thing he's actually doing: dinking a little white ball around in the grass, all by himself.
The striking thing about the recent U.S. Open wasn't that Tiger Woods won it playing on a broken leg. The striking thing was how much he -- and the golfing world -- clearly relished the idea of Tiger Woods playing on a broken leg.
As he limped and grimaced up fairways and around doglegs, with the crowd and the cameras lusting for every wince-laden drive, he was no longer just golfing. He was elevating golf to the status it so desperately seeks: the status of a genuine athletic event.
Finally, you could hear the golfing world thinking to itself: A golfer is proving once and for all that our game is a test of deep character and physical courage.
See: Golfers play hurt!
See: You can even get hurt playing golf!!!
Well, you can get hurt playing darts, too. Or hiking. Bowling can be seriously hazardous, if you don't know what you're doing. Play with enough passion and you can even injure yourself in a spirited game of Monopoly. (I once cut my finger grabbing Park Place.)
Play Through It
It's absurd when you get hurt bowling, just as it is absurd when you get hurt playing golf -- or would be if golf assumed its rightful classification among curious outdoor hobbies, on the same mental shelf as scuba diving and tai chi chuan.
But it can't. Golfers will not allow it. Too many rich, important people are too heavily invested in the belief that golf is a serious athletic event.
Too many rich, important people need for golf to be viewed as a proxy for combat, a test of character, a showcase of mental toughness, and so on. There's too much social pressure for golf to assume anything like an honest place in the world of human activities.
For some time now our age of specialization has been creating a big problem in the sports world. Serious athletes resemble ordinary human beings less and less, but rich, important people want to identify themselves with athletes more and more.
Without Shame
There's an obvious need for some physical activity that can pass itself off as a sport in which rich, important people can easily participate, and simulate the motions of a pro, without fear of total humiliation.
At first blush this would seem impossible. Rich, important people often lack athletic ability, and so any faux sport would need to be doable without balance or dexterity or coordination. Many rich important people are also fat and physically lazy -- and so the faux sport must also be doable with a minimum of exertion.
It would be a plus, for instance, if it could be done, without shame, while riding around in a little electric cart.
Enter golf. If it didn't exist, some rich, important person would have had to invent it for himself.
For the Birds
Once you see golf for what it is -- an activity more like birding than basketball that, for the sake of rich important people, everyone is pretending is more like basketball -- you begin to understand a lot of otherwise hard-to-fathom golf- related phenomena.
For instance, the huge sums paid to real athletes, from real sports, to play golf. The appearance fees that any recently retired jock can earn by playing a round of golf with businesspeople is, on the face of it, bizarre.
It's hard to think of another form of recreation that pays jocks to associate themselves with it. Spelunkers don't pay ex- jocks to spelunk; tai chi chuan masters don't pay ex-jocks to contort themselves conspicuously in the local park.
Only golf pays ex-jocks to play it -- so that the people who engage in it can feel more jock-like.
Which is the first reason ex-jocks have suddenly all become avid golfers. Michael Jordan may think he plays golf obsessively because he likes to play golf. He in fact plays golf obsessively because -- at least in the beginning -- it paid.
Like Mike
And it paid because millions of pudgy rich men long to be able to say to themselves and to others: Michael Jordan and I play the same sport. If instead of being paid millions of dollars to golf, Michael Jordan was paid millions of dollars to play tiddlywinks, or to bird-watch, we would all be marveling at the ferocity with which Michael Jordan pursued the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Once golf has lured actual athletes into it, with cash, it takes little effort to keep them there. As the golfing world knows, money is not golf's lone appeal. Once you create a faux sport -- an activity that seems like an actual sport, without the ardors of an actual sport -- you create something even better than a sport: an argument for not doing whatever it is you are meant to be doing.
Hence what might be called golf's negative attraction; it pulls people in by what typically is not found there. In no particular order of importance these are:
1) Actual Work
2) Wife
3) Kids
4) Awareness that any of the above might be more important than golf.
Some meaningful number of rich, important men have persuaded themselves, and perhaps even their loved ones, that golf is not merely golf. That in playing golf they are simulating work -- or, at any rate, training for work.
This explains yet another curious trait of golf, not found in bird-watching or snorkeling -- although often found, oddly enough, in tai chi chuan.
The people who engage in it always seem to be making a point of not enjoying it. Tiger Woods makes golf seem like a lot of things but one of those things is not fun.
(Michael Lewis, author, most recently, of ``The Blind Side,'' is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The views expressed are his own.)
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