Veterans vs. youngsters - how important is experience in golf?
Golf, besides long being considered an elitist game has this air about it that it is a game played by paunch old men who get as good as they are because they have been stroking the ball for longer than their memories would recall.
It took them an eternity to play with the perfection that they do. The golfer’s strides, and the awesome holes-in-one, are a thing you get with experience. Or is it?
Any sportsman would tell you that your play is only as good as the amount of time you put in practice. Practice makes perfect, right? Right.
The contention that youngsters can compete with veterans should go out the window. However, it has not. There is an explanation as to why not.
You may be a younger player, but given the strict attention to ‘golf-rearing’ parents are into these days, you might as well be a veteran by the time you go professional.
Take Guan Tianlang for example. He was barely two when he had been introduced to the stylized swing of the golfer by an eager father who also had him practicing regularly before his fourth birthday.
Tianlang is not even out of high school yet and he has made his old folks proud by causing ripples in the golfing community.
He became the youngest player in the world to ever qualify for the US Masters, aged fifteen. Let’s write that again: age fifteen. He is not even in college yet.
The older crop before him, just turning professional this year like Patrick Cantlay, had, during their amateur stints in college, amassed enough credentials to actually turn down invitations by the Opens Championship.
Compared to Tianlang, Cantlay can be safely shelved with all the wonder boys of the yesteryears.
This is the new reality in golf: young players are not inexperienced or lacking in skill finely honed by years of experience in the field that only the graying masters could once boast of. No.
When they turn professional, they mean business. Moreover, within a few short years, and making the cuts as they go, and if they are especially talented, they make serious contention to the top slots otherwise untouchable to the lower echelons of the field.
Veterans versus youngsters you ask? I say that distinction is fast being blurred. The chief elements that veterans of yore possessed, that the younger lot did not have, was experience.
It is out in the market now. However, if you insist on asking which one I would choose to put my money on (not taking into account that each player has his or her own style of play upon which we are actually betting, be it young or old), my money would be
on the young ‘uns.
The reason being, in an incredibly short time, some of them have managed to achieve what the other older lot took the better part of a lifetime in achieving.
World no. 1 Rory McIlroy is an example. He is already on top of the competition before his 25th birthday, having had begun play at seven. To Asian kids trying to emulate him, that is a slow start.
Lucas Hodreal is a six year old Filipino who participated in this year’s Kids Golf World Championship. He hopes to be like McIlroy when he is older.
His father put a golf club in his hand when he was two. ''I like golf because I get soft drinks and get to play iPod in the car,'' he says.
I rest my case.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own and in no way represent Bettor.com's official editorial policy.
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