I like to think that the 4th paragraph of my response from Tuesday (https://www.stevesailer.net/p/what-country-will-win-the-olympics/comment/63770270) inspired your post. I didn't get a chance to respond there, but the one distinguishing feature of the Olympic golf tournament is that, while it features 60 golfers of each gender, it isn't necessarily the top 60 of each gender, as each country is limited to 4 per gender. The USA has Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, Wyndham Clark, and Collin Morikawa (born in Los Angeles, alumnus of Cal), and that's it; Patrick Cantlay gets to watch at home!
Once you get outside the top 15 qualifiers, countries are limited to only two participants per gender, so Sungjae Im of Korea, who is 34th in the world, is out of luck, while 43 other golfers who are below him qualified. Overall the 60 men who qualified are representing 32 countries, while if the top 60 golfers were participating, only 18 countries would be represented.
> Golf is unlike tennis, track, and shooting in that its male and female stars almost never get together
I would say that in the latter three the stars like screwing each other, while in golf they don't. Even Nancy Lopez, who has married three men, didn't marry a golfer, although husband 2 was a famous baseball player.
> Babe Didrickson Zaharias married a professional wrestler
Susan Clark won an Emmy for playing her in a TV movie in 1975, with her husband being played by Alex Karras. In a case of art imitating life, Clark and Karras ended up getting married themselves in 1980.
A lesbian writer hoping to claim Babe Didrickson as one of her tribe asked people who'd known her if her marriage to George Zaharias was just a sham marriage of convenience.
She'd get answers like, "Are you kidding? When I'd stay overnight in Babe and George's guest bedroom, the ruckus coming from the master bedroom had me worried that those two were going to shake the whole house down."
She had a great physique. Athletic females are attractive. But poor Babe had a face that looks uncannily like a friend of mine (also Norwegian American) who was on the '96 national champion men's eight.
Doesn't mean she wasn't a girl. Some Norwegians just look severe (some Scots and Irish women have the same bad luck). Swedes and Finns have smaller, more "cute" features in general.
I definitely like the idea of mixed pairings. It would be quite fun to watch a Bryson DeChambeau or Scottie Scheffler paired with Nelly Korda or Laura Coughlin playing Best Ball or Alternate Shot format, blasting an awesome course to smithereens. I think you would see the US, South Korea, and Japan dominate, at least in the near term. I believe I read that American men won all four majors this year (Scheffler, DeChambeau and Schauffele) for the first time since the early '80s; that's a pretty long stretch of parity with the rest of the world.
The future of golf probably isn't 4.75 hour 18 hole rounds a 3 hour roundtrip out in the exurbs.
A lot of young people like the Topgolf high tech driving ranges with your choice of various games.
I'd like to see a crowd-pleasing test of skills in Olympic stadium golf. For example, during a pre-Masters practice round, the tradition over the last 40+ years has been to try to skip a shot across the pond on the 16th at Augusta National on to the immensely sloped green. Here's Jon Rahm making a hole in one by skipping the ball across the pond and then having it roll in a right to left boomerang for 150 feet across the famous green.
Unrelated... but all the political nonsense from the athletes over the last few cycles completely extinguished any interest I have in the Olympics - forever. I thought they would jump on their soapboxes again this time, but the Last Supper open outdid all expectations. I remember as a kid sitting around the tv watching with family - I wanted to be Nadia Comaneci! In fourth grade! I named my gerbil after her :)
My high school and college aged sons have zero interest in them whatsoever - so different than what I had experienced. It makes me wonder who is watching in the largest numbers.
I did glance briefly; when did women start playing rugby?????
The Olympics have become the big business of jingo nationalism. And for crying out loud can ANY HUMAN ON EARTH really deal with the please just shoot me now ESTONIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM for the love of God, even Estonians?
As you may imply, the cool events are the oddballs, the ones the clods of the Broadcast Age barely mentioned but thank the Lord you can now see all of on streaming -- the survivals, potlatch extravagances of vanished aristocracies, the pentathalon -- archery, one-touch épée, freestyle swimming, pistol, cross country, and begging-to-be-crippled equestrian jumping like in ‘Anna Karenina’, which the reincarnated-Spartan-butchest-future-general-since-Andrew Jackson George E. Patton finished fifth in Stockholm in 1912 -- training for all the skills required of couriers in the Napoleonic Wars except for silence under torture -- which, if they’re serious about reversing spectator drain, they really need to revive.
For me it’s the firearms. I was skeet champion on the QEII one time -- not much of a title, but not much in life beats vaporizing clays off the stern in a 10-mph crossbreeze. As for pistolcraft, since the tragic closing of the dear old basement range on Murray Street I just do amateur 25m air. Most of the kids have gone to the Pardini K2S and I still shoot my faithful Drulov DU-10 Condor -- co2, but I can't get up the energy to tinker with compressors and pressure gauges and for God's sake.
Anywaze, come ON, jocks and jockettes. What is water polo but the group delusion that anyone, anywhere, can sit through even five minutes of living Seroquel? Man the hell up.
There's a theory that George S. Patton actually should have won the 1912 Pentathalon. He was penalized in shooting for completely missing the target, but some argue he actually made two bullseyes with the second bullet passing exactly through the hole left by the first.
A team competition like LIV has started is an obvious improvement for Olympic golf. Since the power players in golf hate LIV they are unlikely to ever implement it. There are several different formats they could try. The LIV team championship is a match play team tournament where teams get one point for each match play win. Making it look like a regular week on the PGA Tour is the worst way to go.
The big scandal today, on social media, is the swift boxing victories by a Transgender North African, who broke the nose of an Italian woman. After the Trans boxer was declared winner of the match, he moved to embrace the loser (Italian woman, broken nose) by briefly fondling her breast.
That boxer is an XY with a genetic disorder that prevents the body from responding to androgen. Such people are born without male genitalia, so they’re taken to be female. But of course they don’t have ovaries or a uterus either. But apparently they still have male strength.
I don't have anything against them. They didn't choose to be born with that unfortunate birth defect. But they should be guided away from women's sports, especially combat sports.
In general, women's boxing should be discontinued.
Agreed. It's a big scandal that a semi-male/XY chromosome individual is sanctioned to batter a woman -- and it was brutal; just watch the video. But it's a bigger scandal that 'women's boxing' exists at all.
It's interesting that Imane Khelif is Algerian: this doesn't seem like a country/culture that would be big on girl gladiators. So has Algeria sent any other female boxers to the Olympics? Are there any other female Algerian boxers, or just Khelif?
It seems that "women's boxing" began as an Olympic medalling sport only with the 2012 Olympics.
A woman from India took a medal in one of the women's boxing events in August 2021 at Tokyo.
It is rare for India to get any medals at the Olympics (only 7 of the 1080 total medals awarded went to an Indian athlete or team at Tokyo, summer 2021), so this "women's boxing" win was notable. Name: Lovlina Borgohain.
Lovlina Borgohain is a contendor for a medal again at 2024 Paris. Steve Sailer may take note; an Indian woman doing jobs Indian men just won't do: winning Olympic medals.
Could you grow a par 3 golf course on wheeled barges full of dirt and then roll it into the Melbourne Cricket Grounds and then roll it away before it kills the grass field underneath?
I like to think that the 4th paragraph of my response from Tuesday (https://www.stevesailer.net/p/what-country-will-win-the-olympics/comment/63770270) inspired your post. I didn't get a chance to respond there, but the one distinguishing feature of the Olympic golf tournament is that, while it features 60 golfers of each gender, it isn't necessarily the top 60 of each gender, as each country is limited to 4 per gender. The USA has Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, Wyndham Clark, and Collin Morikawa (born in Los Angeles, alumnus of Cal), and that's it; Patrick Cantlay gets to watch at home!
Once you get outside the top 15 qualifiers, countries are limited to only two participants per gender, so Sungjae Im of Korea, who is 34th in the world, is out of luck, while 43 other golfers who are below him qualified. Overall the 60 men who qualified are representing 32 countries, while if the top 60 golfers were participating, only 18 countries would be represented.
> Golf is unlike tennis, track, and shooting in that its male and female stars almost never get together
I would say that in the latter three the stars like screwing each other, while in golf they don't. Even Nancy Lopez, who has married three men, didn't marry a golfer, although husband 2 was a famous baseball player.
> whatever the L.A. Open is called these days
Genesis Invitational
I’m pretty sure the + means minor-attracted.
Old pro Gardner Dickinson married young pro Judy Dickinson, but that's about it for golf pro marriages.
Babe Didrickson Zaharias married a professional wrestler. Probably no golfer was man enough for her.
> Babe Didrickson Zaharias married a professional wrestler
Susan Clark won an Emmy for playing her in a TV movie in 1975, with her husband being played by Alex Karras. In a case of art imitating life, Clark and Karras ended up getting married themselves in 1980.
A lesbian writer hoping to claim Babe Didrickson as one of her tribe asked people who'd known her if her marriage to George Zaharias was just a sham marriage of convenience.
She'd get answers like, "Are you kidding? When I'd stay overnight in Babe and George's guest bedroom, the ruckus coming from the master bedroom had me worried that those two were going to shake the whole house down."
She had a great physique. Athletic females are attractive. But poor Babe had a face that looks uncannily like a friend of mine (also Norwegian American) who was on the '96 national champion men's eight.
Doesn't mean she wasn't a girl. Some Norwegians just look severe (some Scots and Irish women have the same bad luck). Swedes and Finns have smaller, more "cute" features in general.
I definitely like the idea of mixed pairings. It would be quite fun to watch a Bryson DeChambeau or Scottie Scheffler paired with Nelly Korda or Laura Coughlin playing Best Ball or Alternate Shot format, blasting an awesome course to smithereens. I think you would see the US, South Korea, and Japan dominate, at least in the near term. I believe I read that American men won all four majors this year (Scheffler, DeChambeau and Schauffele) for the first time since the early '80s; that's a pretty long stretch of parity with the rest of the world.
I would like to be paired with Paige Spirinac.
The future of golf probably isn't 4.75 hour 18 hole rounds a 3 hour roundtrip out in the exurbs.
A lot of young people like the Topgolf high tech driving ranges with your choice of various games.
I'd like to see a crowd-pleasing test of skills in Olympic stadium golf. For example, during a pre-Masters practice round, the tradition over the last 40+ years has been to try to skip a shot across the pond on the 16th at Augusta National on to the immensely sloped green. Here's Jon Rahm making a hole in one by skipping the ball across the pond and then having it roll in a right to left boomerang for 150 feet across the famous green.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lzuoTarQjs
Reproduce that hole inside a stadium and make closest-skipped-to-the-pin one of the feats of strength and skill.
Another one could be bouncing the ball off the club like in the famous Tiger Woods Nike commercial of a quarter century ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG2JYpiM48U
Star golfers, having extraordinary eye-hand coordination and 3D cognitive skills, have a lot of weird skills.
Unrelated... but all the political nonsense from the athletes over the last few cycles completely extinguished any interest I have in the Olympics - forever. I thought they would jump on their soapboxes again this time, but the Last Supper open outdid all expectations. I remember as a kid sitting around the tv watching with family - I wanted to be Nadia Comaneci! In fourth grade! I named my gerbil after her :)
My high school and college aged sons have zero interest in them whatsoever - so different than what I had experienced. It makes me wonder who is watching in the largest numbers.
I did glance briefly; when did women start playing rugby?????
I too had a gerbil who excelled at the uneven bars.
Around the same time they started boxing. What a ridiculous display.
The Olympics have become the big business of jingo nationalism. And for crying out loud can ANY HUMAN ON EARTH really deal with the please just shoot me now ESTONIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM for the love of God, even Estonians?
As you may imply, the cool events are the oddballs, the ones the clods of the Broadcast Age barely mentioned but thank the Lord you can now see all of on streaming -- the survivals, potlatch extravagances of vanished aristocracies, the pentathalon -- archery, one-touch épée, freestyle swimming, pistol, cross country, and begging-to-be-crippled equestrian jumping like in ‘Anna Karenina’, which the reincarnated-Spartan-butchest-future-general-since-Andrew Jackson George E. Patton finished fifth in Stockholm in 1912 -- training for all the skills required of couriers in the Napoleonic Wars except for silence under torture -- which, if they’re serious about reversing spectator drain, they really need to revive.
For me it’s the firearms. I was skeet champion on the QEII one time -- not much of a title, but not much in life beats vaporizing clays off the stern in a 10-mph crossbreeze. As for pistolcraft, since the tragic closing of the dear old basement range on Murray Street I just do amateur 25m air. Most of the kids have gone to the Pardini K2S and I still shoot my faithful Drulov DU-10 Condor -- co2, but I can't get up the energy to tinker with compressors and pressure gauges and for God's sake.
Anywaze, come ON, jocks and jockettes. What is water polo but the group delusion that anyone, anywhere, can sit through even five minutes of living Seroquel? Man the hell up.
What's wrong with the Estonian national anthem?
May I ask if you're an Estonian? I actually have a very dear Estonian friend, but she's not a fan of martial music either.
As the saying goes, military music is to music as military law is to law.
There's a theory that George S. Patton actually should have won the 1912 Pentathalon. He was penalized in shooting for completely missing the target, but some argue he actually made two bullseyes with the second bullet passing exactly through the hole left by the first.
Well, that would be in character for Patton, any --
Wait.
Hang on a second...
…
…
Woah. You just sparked off that final flash of insight: I know how they rigged the Trump’s Magic Ear Trick.
"which half of the holes the woman will tee off on"
The front 9, I should hope.
A team competition like LIV has started is an obvious improvement for Olympic golf. Since the power players in golf hate LIV they are unlikely to ever implement it. There are several different formats they could try. The LIV team championship is a match play team tournament where teams get one point for each match play win. Making it look like a regular week on the PGA Tour is the worst way to go.
Are there any Transgender Olympic golfers?
The big scandal today, on social media, is the swift boxing victories by a Transgender North African, who broke the nose of an Italian woman. After the Trans boxer was declared winner of the match, he moved to embrace the loser (Italian woman, broken nose) by briefly fondling her breast.
Italian female boxer: Angela Carini
Algerian Transgender boxer: Imane Khelif
.
https://x.com/Heritage/status/1818986053706891511
https://x.com/Heritage/status/1819036451545211324
"The people calling you weird are okay with men beating up women" -- Heritage Foundation social-media controller
That boxer is an XY with a genetic disorder that prevents the body from responding to androgen. Such people are born without male genitalia, so they’re taken to be female. But of course they don’t have ovaries or a uterus either. But apparently they still have male strength.
Same as Caster Semenya.
I don't have anything against them. They didn't choose to be born with that unfortunate birth defect. But they should be guided away from women's sports, especially combat sports.
In general, women's boxing should be discontinued.
Agreed. It's a big scandal that a semi-male/XY chromosome individual is sanctioned to batter a woman -- and it was brutal; just watch the video. But it's a bigger scandal that 'women's boxing' exists at all.
It's interesting that Imane Khelif is Algerian: this doesn't seem like a country/culture that would be big on girl gladiators. So has Algeria sent any other female boxers to the Olympics? Are there any other female Algerian boxers, or just Khelif?
It seems that "women's boxing" began as an Olympic medalling sport only with the 2012 Olympics.
A woman from India took a medal in one of the women's boxing events in August 2021 at Tokyo.
It is rare for India to get any medals at the Olympics (only 7 of the 1080 total medals awarded went to an Indian athlete or team at Tokyo, summer 2021), so this "women's boxing" win was notable. Name: Lovlina Borgohain.
Lovlina Borgohain is a contendor for a medal again at 2024 Paris. Steve Sailer may take note; an Indian woman doing jobs Indian men just won't do: winning Olympic medals.
They shouldn’t be competing and yes, boxing is a dangerous sport. Some think it can cause brain damage.
Love the idea of a par-3 tournament! if the pros were honest, they would rather play that than a 5-hour slogs at the end of the major season.
Could you grow a par 3 golf course on wheeled barges full of dirt and then roll it into the Melbourne Cricket Grounds and then roll it away before it kills the grass field underneath?
The Flemington Racecourse for horses in Melbourne seats 120,000.
The Daytona International Speedway, home to the Daytona 500 NASCAR race, has a 180 acre infield and grandstands that seat 101,000.