Why golfers are athletes

Give me a break you jokesters! With all that said, I would like to acknowledge someone with a vision of changing golf. If golfing was all about launching balls at a high-velocity towards endangered birds, I would at least refer to it as a manly activity.

It still would in no way be a sport, but about times more fun to watch. The only way golfing could be any less of a sport is if, instead of walking you just drove around in little cars in between each shot. Just because golfers don't wear running shoes and don't run down the fairway doesn't mean they aren't athletes.

The unique blend of demands is the reason so many jocks, both current practitioners and alumni of their primary sport, gravitate to golf. They love adversity; they like to be challenged to the extent where they have to push themselves beyond a certain level.

No one has done that better than former major league pitcher Rick Rhoden, the all-time leading money-winner on the Celebrity Players Tour and the No. Rhoden, 53, now a professional golfer, has struggled to find success on the Champions Tour and says the transition from one playing field to another is filled with unexpected challenges. Those guys are very good at not wasting shots, at shooting par or better when everything's not clicking.

On the celebrity tour, if I shot around par, very few players would pass me. On [the pro] tour, 50 guys would. For some highly successful athletes who have tried to master golf, that sedentary, unsporty reputation had to be overcome. Adds former Wimbledon champion Boris Becker, a 7-handicapper: "Golf is a different kind of sport than tennis if you're talking about athleticism.

I will say that walking four days in a row is exhausting; I just did it at Michael Jordan's tournament, and you're definitely exhausted after doing that. His reason is often cited and difficult to refute. But it is a game, and it's the hardest game I've ever played.

Adds Scott Hamilton, the Olympic figure skating gold medalist and a It's really hard. Michael Jordan is the best basketball player ever, arguably, and he's not that great. He's a good golfer, but he's not that great. What is he, a 6-handicap? Tiger's a plus Hockey players, baseball pitchers and quarterbacks heavily populate our list of athlete-golfers; of the athletes on our ranking, come from the NHL, baseball and football.

John Smoltz, a starting pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, ranks basketball players as the best athletes but says hitting a round object squarely in both baseball and golf is the toughest thing to do. You need a higher average than that in golf," says Smoltz, whose Handicap Index is 0.

Like many athletes interviewed for this article, Smoltz credits Woods for "forcing the issue'' of athleticism on today's top golfers. Says Dawson, the Olympic skier: "These days, if you're not working out and don't have a build like Tiger and all these young guys, you're not going to be as competitive. You're not going to be able to get the clubhead speed, you're not going to hit the ball as far and you can't hit it out of the 7-inch rough that they're going to put everywhere to keep up with technology.

Ryan Longwell, who kicks for the Minnesota Vikings and plays to a plus Absolutely they're athletes the way guys are approaching it now. Former heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis, a neophyte golfer who rarely plays all 18 holes and has no established handicap, says the emergence of Woods in the past decade will attract more and better athletes to the game. The focus required on the course and in the ring is something that connects golf with the sweet science, says Lewis.

You definitely can't take your eye off the ball. They need to turn the raw strength into sport specific power in the swing and when this is achieved, they can out drive their opponents and get a further distance with less club anywhere on the course.

If you think playing a round of golf is easy, you are sadly mistaken. Golfers need to do this 3 or 4 days in a row for multiple rounds and need to play at the top of their game at all times. This is going to require a lot of physical fitness and stamina. Even average golfers can hit a good shot every now again but professional golfers need to do it every time if they are to have any chance of being at the top of the leader board when it comes time to dole out the prize money.

When Tiger Woods was at the top of his game, he was able to pull off incredible shots over and over again and it almost appeared as magic. The golf club was just an extension of his hand like the basketball to Michael Jordan or the football to Cristiano Ronaldo. If you have ever played golf, you have probably felt the pressure of teeing off on the first hole and if you have played a few times, you have almost certainly known the feeling of hitting an absolute stinker off the first tee box due to the pressure.

All sports come with pressure and all of the best athletes are able to overcome that pressure and rise to the top of their sport. Imagine the nerves a boxer feels before an important fight and that is probably very similar to how Phil Mickleson will feel before the Masters. Golf adds extra layers of pressure because you have so much time to think about the next shot and how important it is before you take it, like sinking an 18ft putt in front of millions of viewers to win a major tournament.

The Mental toughness that a professional golfer needs is just as much as any other athlete in the world. When an athlete gets paid a lot it is for one reason, people are willing to pay money to watch them and the dollars flow from all sorts of sponsorships, advertising and ticket sales.

All the best athletes in the world earn handsome amounts of money from Cristiano Ronaldo to Floyd Mayweather to Tiger Woods. Golf is one of the richest sports in the world and the demand to see these super stars in action combined with the purchasing power of golf fans makes golfers some of the highest paid athletes in the world and they have some of the longest careers out of any sports stars to boot.

Every athlete experiences set backs and losses in their career, regardless of what sport they were in. Missed shots, lost championships and bad performances and golfers are no different.

Golfers are prone to hitting bad shots, playing bad rounds and missing 2 feet putts but the difference is that they need to pick themselves up immediately and make sure their next shot is a good one.

Bouncing back from defeats and losses is part of a great athletes arsenal and you find plenty of that in golf. In most sports, you can make a ton of mistakes and still win the game which can take away a lot of the performance anxiety but elite level golfers are so good at what they do that you have to be almost perfect on every shot to have a chance at winning the main prize at any event.