Let me just be totally honest: I've never really been a golf guy. I've never actually played a real game of golf in my life, just mini-golfing every so often, which was fun enough. But after playing some Mario Golf: Super Rush lately, I finally got it as to why golf kinda annoys me. It's not that I don't play it, it's just that the sport itself is kind of broken to me.
Let's start this off talking about something simple: golf just isn't physically very demanding. Most sports have you on the move the entire time, running, jumping, dodging, blocking, you know, doing things. But golf? You bludgeon the ball, take a cart like some geriatric on vacation, or worse, you get to walk an impossibly long way just to bludgeon the ball again. That's it. The game is half tromping around. Even Mario Golf knew that was boring, so they added power-ups and let you run about causing a hassle between shots. But even then, it's mostly fluff - you're still wasting far too much time just travelling from A to B without really playing.
And then there's the complete lack of interaction with your opponent. In literally every other sport where competition exists, you can mess with the other guys, block 'em, trick 'em out, tackle, steal, taunt, whatever. Golf? You stand around in silence, waiting for them to hit their shot, praying they screw up. That's it. No defense, no counter, just hoping someone else messes up.
And on that point, the only real way to win is just... not screwing up. There's no dramatic turnaround point, no "holy crap, they turned it around!" nonsense. You screw up once, and unless the other guy screws up as well, which he likely won't, you're just along for the ride, watching yourself slowly lose. That happened to me in Mario Golf: Super Rush. I flubbed one damn shot at the start, and that was it. My friend didn't skip a beat, and the rest of the game was like being in purgatory, expecting some sort of miracle that never fucking occurred.
That's not competition, that's just fucking agony.
And, heaven forbid, playing someone else in a game of golf? You're almost certain to lose if you go first. It's stupid. The other guy gets to watch all you do and just... do it better. You mess up? They don't. You don't mess up? They do it a little bit better anyway. It's like the game punishes you for going first. And don't even mention wind and slope. I know that terrain and weather are part of sports, but in golf it is like some sort of cruel joke. You prepare what you think is the perfect shot, only to be ruined by a gust of wind or a slight slope. It's like trying rocket science blindfolded. You finally step onto the green and let out a sigh of relief, and all of a sudden the game requires you to calculate a calculus problem just to roll in the putt. Hit it too softly and it rolls an inch short. Hit it too hard and it goes sailing by.
It's a nightmare. So yeah, after my Mario Golf experience, I'm fairly confident in saying that golf doesn't really qualify as a sport for me. It's slow and isolating and stupidly punishing and doesn't even let you do anything half the time. And even the video game version feels like it hates you. I get that some folks love it, but I'll be playing games where I'm actually having fun instead of fighting physics and praying for a fluke.
