(At Least) Ten Reasons Why Cycling Is Not The New Golf

As I was flipping through TV channels on Easter Sunday, I came across The Masters Championship. It was around 4:00 p.m., so CBS was about halfway through their 6 hour continuous broadcast of the event. In vain, I continued to flip through the (basic cable) channels, looking for a mere glimpse of Paris-Roubaix.

No luck.

The infamy!

We hear over and over that cycling is “the new golf”, but if that is the case, the broadcasters in the U.S. haven’t received the memo yet. I remember sitting in a sports bar on the day last fall when Lance Armstrong announced his comeback. You would think that the return one of cycling’s most decorated champions would merit a mention on “Sportscenter”, but it didn’t even come up. It was all about Brett Favre’s return, if I recall correctly.

In honor of my favorite sport, I respectfully present my thesis: “At Least 10 Reasons Why Cycling is not the New Golf. It’s Better!”

1. No tee times: When I want to ride, I ride. I hope on the bike and go. Also, I don’t have to wait for my foursome to show up. If I want to ride with 40 people, that’s fine. If I want to ride alone, that’s fine too.
2. No greens fees: Once your equipment (bike, clothing, etc.) is paid for, everything else is free. Roads and trails are open to anyone who wants to ride them (with acceptable risk). There have been recent instances of bike parks opening up around the country that would like you to pay to ride, but those are rare
3. The equipment is far more useful: You can’t ride your golf clubs to the corner market to pick up a gallon of milk. If you’re riding your golf cart to the corner to pick up milk, well that’s just pathetic.
4. I can ride my bike at night. With young kids and family commitments, sometimes the only rides I get are at night. Playing golf at night requires glow in the dark balls, which don’t fly as far, and the activity will likely result in your getting kicked off of the course.
5. On a hot day on the golf course, the only breeze I ever got was when I whiffed the ball. When you’re riding a bike, the faster you go, the better the breeze.
6. Did you ever dream of waking up on Christmas morning and finding a really cool set of golf clubs under the tree? Me neither.
7. I may not be able to afford an exotic sports car, but I can afford an exotic bike and when I go fast, it’s under my power – and the chance of getting a ticket and having my insurance go through the roof is far lower.
8. In cycling, you get real exercise. Cycling is an aerobic and anaerobic workout. You will get fitter and leaner. I know that golfers will comment on how far they are walking, but if your heart rate gets elevated walking 200 yards to hit the next ball, you should probably make an appointment with a cardiologist. And if you’re riding in a golf cart, just forget the whole thing – you might as well be driving around in your car. Not to minimize the effects of walking, but if you walk 200 yards and then wait 4 minutes for the rest of your foursome to hit, well….
9. Calorie consumption: You’ll probably burn enough calories (800 to 1500) on a bike ride to make up for the sandwich and beer you have afterwards. In golf, between the snack cart, the hot dog at the turn and the 19th hole, you’re in trouble.
10. Golf developers would tear down thousands of perfectly good trees to build a course. Some would say that you have to tear down trees to build roads, but most of the roads I ride have been in place for at least half of a century. It seems that if anyone is building new roads around me, it’s probably because someone built a golf development out in the middle of nowhere and everyone wants to live there now. That said, I would rather see 350 acres turned into a golf course with 50 houses than into a development with 500 houses.
11. If you live near a bike trail instead of a golf course, you don’t have to worry about golf balls smashing through your windows.
12. No focal dystonia (the yips): I’ve never ridden my bike, gone to sleep and got up the next day and seemingly have forgotten how to ride my bike. It happened all the time with golf.
13. No “hurry up and wait”: Every time I play golf, it’s always “Ready golf!”, “Be ready to hit!” and then you get stuck behind someone chipping the ball 25 yards a pop. It’s nice to hop on the bike and just GO. If you come up on someone going slower, you pass them. If you feel like going slower, you slow down.
14. Cheating: Doping in the pro ranks aside, the average cyclist can’t cheat. Furthermore, why would they? When amateurs dope, they tend to die sudden mysterious deaths. Golf on the other hand is all too easy to fudge –  “practice swings”, “foot wedges”, “mulligans.”
15. Here’s the word on golf from some of the experts:

•    “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” – Mark Twain
•    “They call it golf because all of the other four letter words were taken.” – Raymond Floyd
•    “Golf is the cruelest of sports. Like life, it’s unfair. It’s a harlot. A trollop. It leads you on. It never lives up to its promises… It’s a boulevard of broken dreams. It plays with men. And runs off with the butcher.” – Jim Murray
•    “Golf is a game in which you yell ‘fore,’ shoot six, and write down five.” – Paul Harvey
•    “Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps.” – Tiger Woods
•    “One thing about golf is you don’t know why you play bad and why you play good.” – George Archer
•    “Reverse every natural instinct and do the opposite of what you are inclined to do, and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing.” – Ben Hogan
•    “If you want to take long walks, take long walks. If you want to hit things with sticks, hit things with sticks. But there’s no excuse for combining the two and putting the results on TV. Golf is not so much a sport as an insult to lawns.” – National Lampoon, 1979
•    “Golf is so popular simply because it is the best game in the world at which to be bad.” – A.A. Milne

16.   Here’s the word on cycling from some of the experts:

•    “But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn’t racing. Life is the metaphor for the race.” – Donald Antrim
•    “Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time.” – Greg LeMond
•    “It never gets easier, you just go faster.” – Greg LeMond
•    “This is not Disneyland, or Hollywood. I’ll give you an example: I’ve read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don’t fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else.” – Lance Armstrong
•    “When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”  – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
•    “Get a bicycle. You will certainly not regret it, if you live.” – Mark Twain
•    “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” -Albert Einstein
•    “Don’t buy upgrades; ride up grades.” – Eddy Merckx
•    “When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.” – H.G. Wells
•    “I want to ride my bicycle; I want to ride my bike. I want to ride my bicycle; I want to ride it where I like.” – Freddie Mercury
•    “The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon.” – Bill Strickland
•    “Ride lots.” – Eddy Merckx
•    “Cycling is like church. Many attend, but few understand.” – Jim Burlant
•    “Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.” – James E. Starrs
•    “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.  Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” – Ernest Hemingway

I’m not an unreasonable man. There are some advantages and equivalencies.

1. Clothes: This one is a bit of a toss-up. A lot of cycling clothes are ugly. Really ugly – somewhere on the order of Rodney Dangerfield in “Caddyshack”. Golf gets a bye on this one as the clothes have gotten a lot better looking, and at least you can wear them to the office. Cycling clothes are getting better: nice looking, understated kits can be found, but you still can’t wear them to work.
2. Equipment: Another toss-up. I’ve known golfers that buy new clubs every year and I’ve known cyclists who seem to be in a constant upgrade mode (Okay, I’m one of them). That said, the equipment gets better every year, and in both cases, the newer equipment can make the sport more enjoyable.
3. Cart girls: They bring you food and beverages while you’re playing. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a domestique bring you bottles when you’re riding?
4. No cars on the golf course. When you ride a bike, you have to acknowledge that you’re playing in traffic and that your very life is at risk. No one ever got plowed down by a car on a golf course.
5. Business discussions: hard to close a deal while gasping for air on a 20 degree climb. Be careful not to drop the CEO.

Tags: basic cable, bike clothing, brett favre, cable channels, easter sunday, favorite sport, gallon of milk, golf cart, greens fees, hot day, infamy, Lance Armstrong, new golf, Paris-Roubaix, playing golf, sports bar, sportscenter