Golf is Hard, Y'All

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who is generally rather awesome, recently tweeted the following:

"Golfers want silence when hitting stationary balls at their feet. Baseball batters, in screaming crowds, hit 90 mph fastballs"

Yeah, we do want silence, and yeah, people who play team sports play in massive screaming crowds, they hope. That's because golf is harder, precisely because the balls we're hitting are stationary. We don't have anything to react to. This is not just my idea; it's a common element of why people who play other sports say that golf is harder than their chosen profession. And so yeah, golfers need quiet. The batter can hone in on that incoming fastball, and react to it, and let the homogenized roar of the crowd fade into the background. For a golfer, there's nothing outside your own mind controlling your timing; since crowd noise would be the only remotely changing thing commanding the attention of your senses, it would make creating an internal timing more or less impossible. Also, of course, in the team sport situation, everyone is playing amidst the exact same crowd noises, and the games are precisely zero-sum, at every stage. In golf, you'd never have the noise evenly distributed around the course, so some players would have it worse than others.

Over the course of the past few days, as the Masters has momentarily commanded the nation's attention, I've seen a bunch of discussion by not-actual-golf-fans that's struck me as rather wrongheaded, for instance this Josh Levin column at Slate (rightfully) condemning people who called for Tiger to disqualify himself in the wake of his somewhat unusual ex post facto penalty, but going beyond that to condemning the game of golf for its insistence on rules like "don't ground your club in a hazard." I'm not sure what it is about golf that makes it so easy to misunderstand. Is it because so much of the game takes place entirely in the minds of the individual players, rather than in the much-more-visible interactions among players? For whatever reason, it seems like people who don't play golf and/or aren't serious fans just can't really imagine what it's actually like to play it, or the logic of the rules of the game, or what makes it exciting. That's okay, of course, in the grand scheme of things, but as someone who is very serious about golf, it's kind of frustrating.