Aaron Doster-Imagn Images
Politics tend to come up on the golf course more often than most people would prefer. That might not really be the case on the PGA Tour, but a study suggests pros might actually play worse (and lose a significant amount of money in the process) when they’re paired up with someone they don’t see eye to eye with.
Golf is primarily an individual sport, but it’s also a fairly social pastime when you consider most people will hit the links with other players when they head out for a round.
The company you keep can end up having a major impact on your ability to enjoy an outing.
If you end up getting paired with people you’ve ever played before, it’s generally a good idea to treat the round like a first date by avoiding discussions concerning potentially dicey topics, but in my experience, there are far too many people who insist on injecting politics into the proceedings at some point.
There’s significantly less chatter between players on the PGA Tour, so while you might not think guys who play golf for a living have to deal with that particular issue during a tournament, there’s some new evidence that seems to show it can still impact their performance.
A study claims political differences can impact how a player performs during a PGA Tour event
Golf attracts people from across the political spectrum. With that said, the stereotypical Country Club Crowd is certainly associated with the right side of the aisle, and based on a study that was published in the journal Management Science, the same can be said for the majority of players on the PGA Tour.
The study in question set out to look at how pro golfers are impacted when playing in a group with at least one player who supports a political party other than their own.
It examined over 2,600 golfers who competed in PGA Tour events between 1997 and 2022 and analyzed information (including social media posts, voter registration, and donations) that allowed the authors to determine a party affiliation for the 360 players who were ultimately used to explore the hypothesis: 82 Democrats and 278 Republicans.
The identities of those players were not revealed, but they were placed in a model that compared rounds where threesomes or twosomes were comprised of guys with the same general beliefs and those where at least one member was linked with another party.
The results were fairly striking, as the paper asserts:
“Golfers playing in politically mixed groups scored 0.2 strokes worse per round, ranked approximately 2.5 positions poorer, and faced a 5.3% reduced probability of making the tournament cut…
These performance differences translated into a financial loss of approximately $13,000 to $23,400 in each of the PGA’s 47 tournaments.”
The authors noted there was no reason to believe the golfers were routinely discussing politics during the rounds that were analyzed while suggesting merely knowing they were playing with someone they disagreed with was enough to impact their game.
That’s some pretty wild stuff.