Why Golf is So Popular
Golf is a sport that's played all year long, from the first week in January through the second week in December. Golf on the tube has grown proportionately, from a few shows in the 1950s to nonstop golf on TV today. We get that with the Golf Channel, which covers golf 24 hours a day.
The places that TV takes you during the golf year are a vacationer's dream. Every Saturday and Sunday, you can do the couch thing and watch the various tours play from every corner of the globe. The golf is good, but the pictures are stunning. The viewing audience and the PGA Tour start to prepare themselves in the Florida swing for the first major tournament of the year in early April, when Augusta and the Masters Tournament are in full bloom. Then the PGA Tour settles into normalcy for a while, as players start to prepare for the heat and the long rough of the U.S. Open in mid-June. The month of July is for the British Open and its storied past; plenty of plaid and windblown golf balls decorate the landscape. The last of the four majors, the PGA Championship, is played in August. These are the tournaments that all professional golfers gear up to play well in. They're the measure of a player's worth and his quest — and they make for great viewing.
During the first part of the year, many celebrities play in the AT&T tournament at Pebble Beach and the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. If viewing the stars is your thing, you can see these would-be golfers hacking away at all their inhibitions during these pro-am tournaments.
If Hollywood stars are not your idea of role models, maybe professional golfers can fill the void. You don't see much trash talk or foul play on the golf course. In fact, golf may be the only game in which the players police themselves. Almost weekly, there's an example of a player on the PGA Tour penalizing himself for some inadvertent Rules transgression. Can you imagine a basketball player turning down two points because he pushed someone out of the way en route to the basket? Probably not!
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