Offhand, I can’t think of any game that has been “invented” which gained any popular appeal. One example of an invented game is Flickerball. I love it, but it isn’t played anywhere except as a tool for teaching teamwork. It is a combination of football, basketball, and hockey, and knowledge of the rules is everything.
People who participate in sports are athletes. I’ve been involved in discussions about whether NASCAR drivers and golfers are athletes. Even some baseball players deny being athletes themselves. Yet an athlete, by definition, is someone who can meld the mental processes into some form of muscle control better than the rest of us–hand/eye coordination, as they say. NASCAR drivers have endurance (always considered an athletic trait) and the ability to use their muscles to control a car moving in close proximity to others at 200+ mph. Golfers, likewise, have phenomenal muscle control in much the same way as world-class swimmers and divers. They pretty much use every muscle in their body in graceful coordination.
Sorry…off on a tangent!
Games are an evolutionary creation. Any game with a ball began as someone threw an object, or tried to hit something thrown to them. Golf, like field hockey, began with people hitting a small obect on the ground with a stick. Games picked up rules as they became means of competition. Golfers began trying to hit stones into rabbit holes, then developed into a contest to see who could put their stone into a hole more quickly, or with fewer strikes.
There are other individual sports in which a participant actually plays against himself or some standard. All bowlers want to score 300. But golf is unique. The conditions of play change every day, and often with every stroke. Bowlers may have to deal with hard or soft lanes, but the air conditioning generally can be counted on to work. And it usually doesn’t rain on the lanes.
Even a course someone plays every day offers a different test each time. The tee boxes are moved around, and the holes are cut at different spots on the greens. The wind changes direction and intensity. The fairways and greens may need cutting, or might be soft or hard depending on weather conditions. Or any combination of these variables. Of course, the less skill a golfer has the more likely each round will be different. If I hit a 260 yard drive down the left side of this fairway today, I may hit a 220 yard drive down the right side tomorrow. Is it in the rough, on the fairway, in a bunker, or even the water? Pretty good variance there without even considering the other factors. And a 30 yard pitch from one side of a green can be far different from a 30 yard pitch from the opposite direction.
Yes, endurance does come into play in golf, too. Typically, a golf course is about 6700 yards long, tees to greens, measured down the middle of the fairway. That’s a little under four miles. Not really a long walk, but it is augmented by many more yards from one hole to the next, and plenty of walking around greens and looking for lost balls. Certainly no marathon, but the legs are important for the swing, and when they get tired the swing suffers.
Most of all, golf is a game of the mind. The competition is one between the golfer and his mind, with the course and weather being both distraction and obstacle. I think that is why it appeals to me. I can’t get mad because a lineman missed his block, or the outfielder was out of position. I can’t even allow myself to get mad at me, because that also negatively affects my play. What Yogi Berra said about baseball is true in golf: “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” The swing must be trained to perform automatically. When I’m hitting the ball poorly, I often make things worse by trying to think as I swing. Mind control is everything.
Golf is my game. After many years of football, baseball, basketball, racquetball, flickerball, and softball, I’m devoted to a game without the word “ball” in its name. What my body now refuses to do is react quickly, and that’s what those other sports require. Golf doesn’t ask me to react, except mentally. And that’s an even greater challenge.