I’ll be at the PGA Championship 3 days this week watching golf. Can’t wait.
I played college golf. The sport continues to get bigger and bigger. Huge global following. Even Canada. Chris, your fellow Canadian Mike Weir even won the Masters in 03.
Powerlifting is a basement cult sport. Always has been always will be. Thats not a dig either.
Well said.
Monster Garage Gym does a great job with training videos.
Indeed. Judging a sport by the amount of fans or the revenue of the participants is amazingly retarded. This would make sports like gymnastics and wrestling very bad sports, almost on par with powerlifting and weightlifting though we can all agree that these all require athleticism, strength, speed and endurance in varying combinations. Gymnasts and wrestlers specifically can, in good conscious, be called the most well rounded and fit athletes around.
While golfers do earn well, the sport itself requires no strength, speed or endurance. Top players can be nearing their 80’s and they’ll be smoking cigarettes and eating sandwiches while they drive their golf-carts to the next course. It would be a stretch to call even the minority of top golfers athletes. Golf is a game, and it might even be a fun one, but it has as much credibility as a sport as does chess.
That’s an interesting reading of this discussion. I’d say it was judging a sport’s popularity by the amount of fans. Which seems a reasonable metric to me…
EDIT: Remember, this entire discussion started because someone couldn’t believe powerlifting was rated about the same level of popularity as a bunch of other odd sports. One side is arguing the sport lacks spectator appeal, the other side is arguing it’s the messed up feds.
Well I got it mostly from comments like these, but surely people might have been arguing about the popularity at some point also. I might have missed the intended target with my original post but my opinion stays the same.
These sports are in the olympics and generate significant revenue and viewers in MANY countries. The comparison does not work.
Although wrestling was taken out of the games a bit ago.
Just like golf
Exactly.
Maybe you better re-read the beginning of this thread, nowhere was I arguing about the popularity of PL. My argument was that the sport has a lot of bullshit going on (like IPF money grabbing) that doesn’t need to be happening, and some lifters (like Rondel Hunte) are getting no attention when they are winning championships and setting records or coming close to it. Just to repeat, Rondel Hunte won the 105kg class at the NAPF championships (a meet where winning a weight class actually means something) and is very close to the 105kg open total record but he is still a junior.
Significant revenue? To the athletes? I beg to differ. They might get upkeep and some support from the athlete’s country. The chosen few have a shot at the olympic game’s podium that’ll lead to a medal bonus. For the wrestlers even that bonus is gone.
If a top golfer earns around 15 million USD and a top wrestler earns around 15-20k USD does that make golf a thousand times better as a sport?
Again, are you only looking at this from the perspective of the United States?
What do they get paid in WWE or WCW? I’m sure it’s a lot more than that. Nobody would argue that it’s a great sport either way, and it might not actually qualify as a sport because it’s all fake and choreographed. But people watch it and it brings in a lot of money.
The fact is that what makes a sport a sport, or a great sport, is not necessarily the same thing as what brings in money and spectators.
This is what I spoke to earlier in regards to the tradeoffs between “integrity” and mainstream appeal.
If you want your sport to have integrity, that is awesome; just realize it’s rarely going to be taken seriously by the mainstream populace, and as a result, it will be a “joke of a sport” as you mentioned earlier in the topic. There simply won’t be the finances or infrastructure available to support it.
I personally prefer the sports I participate in to be fringe, but I also understand the tradeoff is that I have to travel 6 hours to compete.
In the case of powerlifting, the problem seems to be greed and incompetence.
That’s part of it, along with, again, the fact the sport is simply not spectator friendly and won’t generate enough revenue to support it.
Pretty sure he’s talking about the real sport of wrestling.
I never said he wasn’t, I just mentioned that WWE pays a lot more and isn’t an actual sport.
The real money is in bitcoin, from what I hear.
Well that’s like going why does Tom Cruise get paid so much it’s not even a real sport.