Eric Scheske hacks around once in awhile (eight times last year, once this year so far) and he follows the Majors (U.S. and British Opens, PGA, Masters), so he's interested enough in the sport to find this writer's ideas about is male-ness very interesting. NYT Link. Excerpts:
Golf features no body contact, no car crashes and no cheerleaders, yet men keep watching. They make up more than 80 percent of the TV audience for golf. . .
You could theorize that this is a cultural phenomenon, a holdover from the days of alpha males playing at exclusive clubs. But even though most courses have been opened to women, the percentage of golfers who are women hasn't risen in 15 years. Another traditional country-club sport, tennis, is played by nearly as many women as men, but golf remains one of the most segregated sports by sex - more male-dominated than rock climbing, racquetball, pool or roller hockey. . .
Was golf the modern version of Pleistocene hunting on the savanna? The notion had already occurred to devotees of evolutionary psychology, as I discovered from reading Edward O. Wilson and Steve Sailer. They point to surveys and other research showing that people in widely different places and cultures have a common vision of what makes a beautiful landscape - and it looks a lot like the view from golfers' favorite tees.
The ideal is a vista from high ground overlooking open, rolling grassland dotted with low-branched trees and a body of water. It would have been a familiar and presumably pleasant view for ancient hunters: an open savanna where prey could be spotted as they grazed; a water hole to attract animals; trees offering safe hiding places for hunters.
The descendants of those hunters seem to have inherited their fascination with hitting targets, because today's men excel at tests asking them to predict the flights of projectiles. They also seem to get a special pleasure from watching such flights, both in video games and real life. No matter how many times male pilots have seen a plane land, they'll watch another one just for the satisfaction of seeing the trajectory meet the ground.
