Thread by @gravislizard

part of the reason golf is so fascinating to me rn is basically that i just found out that it's not the least bit simple. like i always wondered what the fuck they put in golf digest etc. but it turns out there's controversies on controversies

from what i've gathered so far it seems like they're constantly banning and unbanning equipment and techniques. does this happen in football at this pace? maybe? but it seems like there's less equipment in most other sports?

one thing i've come across a *bunch* is that in 2016 the USGA banned "anchored putting", which is when you... yeah... when you... yeah.. .uh .. . . it's when you dig the end of your putter into your belly or shoulder to stabilize it. it looks Awful.

so you're like, okay, they did that. whatever. but then it turns out there's all this terminology and controversy over it. one dude insists that continuing to use "broomstick putters", but holding them with your other hand instead of your chest, is actually a great idea

you see what I mean? nothing's simple! everything contains volumes. something about that is just My Shit even if everyone involved is A) almost certainly incontrovertibly Awful B) rich C) arguing over probably insignificant details

can watching the hubbub around a sport *be* a spectator sport? i'm here to find out

this is why all of us love jon bois' videos even if we "don't like sports." and this applies to more things - even comic books, according to some conversations i've had with people who like comics. it's more about the meta, it's *about* the arguments more than the books

yeah i'm sure a lot of people really actually like reading comic books, but a lot of people definitely just like having a bunch of people they can talk a topic into the ground with and still have plenty left over. the well is *bottomless*

making this observation larger in scope however, let me tell you something that was weird to me: Seattle has four municipal golf courses. it has dozens of golf courses, but four are owned by Parks & Rec and open to everyone.

what's weird about this? i mean, really. golf is extremely popular, has been for centuries. we have 3/4 of a million people in the city alone, not to mention the greater metro area. "my golf clubs", spoken by a middle class man, is a sentence we all have a neuron reserved for

my head never really accepted this though. Golf was something exclusive to the *very* rich in my head, and primarily occurred in private clubs in Specific Places, like florida

who the fuck thinks "golf course" and their brain responds "Seattle"? and I think this way a *lot*, about a *lot* of things, but the reality of course is it doesn't work like that at all. There's tons of people who golf and they aren't going to travel 3000 miles to do it.

The West Seattle Golf Course claims they had 60,000 rounds played last year. That's 160 rounds a day, and with each game lasting hours, that's a lot of people on the course at once. This still seems impossible to accept.

and I have this thought with a lot of stuff. my brain goes "a town of 16000 people in Iowa has a football team?? why??" as if the people there don't have their own personal lives and their minor local victories don't still matter to them

and that's it, right - my brain just always assumed that golf was a finished product. but no, if that's all you play, or the only products you make, or what you watch on TV, you want it to have layers, changes, new wrinkles

the "pro" shop at the beacon hill public golf course might actually sell to some pros. this is a hard thing to comprehend for me, because my brain goes "pro golf? that means TV, PGA tour, all that, right?" but like, probably not necessarily?

there's probably smaller competitions that i just don't know about because they aren't big enough to be household names. there's so many people in the world, and they all want to do something with their time, and they Get Into things, and I always underestimate that.

and the same goes for everything else. i've always had a really tough time understanding the scale of human life, how many small and medium stories are happening alongside the ones big enough to get a TV station to point a camera at them

To steer in an entirely different direction
This is, I think, part of what being "a fucking nerd" is about. I am a fucking nerd, and I have no idea what people who went outside as kids do as adults.

Sure, I don't spend my entire life "in my basement" - I work a normal job, I have great interpersonal skills, I go to parties sometimes, I have hobbies. But one of the things that escapes me is the idea of participating in group activities with strangers.

I guess there's people that play golf with friends, and then when they're good enough they sign up for competitions with like... all the other people in town who also did that. There's a tournament, there's a scoreboard, someone "wins." This is alien to me.

I think a lot of people who are like me are similar. The idea that because you like doing a thing, you'd go join a group of people also doing that thing is weird. That's, like, backwards.

If I want to get into a thing that requires multiple people, I need to either know others who are into it, or convince my friends to join me and hope they get interested. I can't fathom doing it the other way around.

that's, like, part of why the king of the hill boggle tournament is so funny, i feel? because all of us fuckoff nerds are watching it going "hehhehugheuheh who would drive to another city and play boggle with a bunch of strangers"

what's all this matter for? well. I feel like my perspective is probably not unusual. It's hard to explain my reasoning, but I just get this feeling that Us Nerds have very small worldviews when it comes to culture.

the first words out of everyones mouth when golf is mentioned are "fuck the rich" but if there's 160 games a day at the four *public* golf courses we have up here, how many of those players could be the very rich? i wonder what the demographics really are?

the city has been asking this - apparently their golf courses used to make enough money to provide a nice subsidy for Parks & Rec, and in the last few years they... haven't, and they're trying to figure out why

https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/1100516884028448768

(sorry, I meant 160 games a day at *one* course. if that's a typical average across all four, then there's a quarter million games being played *just at municipal facilities* in a year)

Not to imply at all that it isn't a game for old white people, it certainly is, but I'm pretty sure there's also just some not-very-well-off families out there playing with their kids and shit, which is not something I thought was possible.

I guess my point is that I had assumed this was a completely exclusive sport that the poor literally could not participate in, but it doesn't really look that way. Yeah, there's definitely a massive luxury end to it, but that's true for everything.

You can pay $20 and spend four hours playing a game on a public course with a couple $5 thrift store clubs. that seems like great value for money, and I visited one of these places and there's no air of exclusivity. it looks and feels like any other public park.

I'm not so much stanning for golf here - like yeah, having looked into it I'm not sure it needs to be seen as such a shitty rich people thing, but that's not really the point I'm making. It's more that the entire thing seemed alien to me. I never thought about *any* of it.

to me golf was something that happened with businessmen at a minimum, millionaires primarily, and mostly at exclusive venues. and that's as far as my thought process went. the idea that *actual humans* could and do participate in it never entered my mind.

It's hard, as a fuckin nerd, to understand what life is like for people who aren't permanently online.