By Steve Sailer
01/07/2024
You might think that as pro sports get more competitive, that who succeeds would become more egalitarian. But in many sports, the opposite has been true because the increased competition means that both nature and nurture matter, so wealthier kids who get more nurture benefit.
For example, the paradox with golfers is that as the sport has gotten more competitive, the more important it is to start playing young. Back in 1980s, two top golfers (Larry Nelson and Calvin Peete) didn’t start playing until their 20s, but excelling after starting so late seems hard to do these days.
So, to make it as a pro golfer these days you pretty much have to have grown up in a country club family, and that’s only something like 3% of the population. For example, among the greatest American golfers of the first half of the 20th century, one (Bobby Jones) was a country club kid, but the other four (Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead, and Ben Hogan) started out as caddies.
In recent decades, however, most American champs have started playing golf young. For example, current world #1 Scottie Scheffler grew up in the sports-utopian inner ring Dallas neighborhood of Highland Park and his family had a membership at topflight Royal Oaks Country Club from early childhood:
Smith, the PGA Hall of Fame pro at Royal Oaks in Dallas, has worked with 10 juniors who went on to play on the PGA Tour. Scheffler was 6 when his family moved from New Jersey and joined Royal Oaks, and Smith can still remember a boy small enough to hide in a trash can.
Mostly, he remembers how he wanted to hang around the pros.
“I’m not talking run-of-the-mill mini-tour pros,” Smith said Sunday evening. “He was always up there around the tour pros when he was 8, 9, 10 years old. And it was hilarious. He would just sit there like a sponge. He’d sit over with a shag bag, and then he’d go off and try it himself. He was jacking around with these guys, challenging them to chip and putt and compete.”
It’s a weird paradox that as a sport gets more competitive, it also gets more socially exclusive, but that seems broadly true.
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