Golf is the go-to recreational sport for many professional athletes, from basketball, football, or NASCAR stars to UFC fighters and Olympic athletes. And most of them love the game for pretty valid, professional reasons, which WNBA star Caitlin Clark laid out at the sidelines of the ongoing Masters at Augusta, Georgia.
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The stars of the PGA Tour have convened at the Augusta National Golf Course for the 89th running of the event. Needless to say, the first golf Major of the year has attracted fans from all walks, including hobby-playing elite athletes. A golf aficionado, Clark, of course, had to be there.
While enjoying watching the PGA tour greats tackle the greens, Clark spoke at large about how a few rounds at the course help her keep calm, distracting her from the grueling grind of basketball. Talking about golf-playing basketball stars, no one can, arguably, beat Stephen Curry.
Maybe he is not as much long-distance sharpshooter on the greens as he is on the NBA hardwood. But hey, Curry can putt, and even give some pros a run for their money. Clark spoke a lot about Curry, whose love for the sport was such that he had apparently told the Minnesota Timberwolves not to draft him partly because the state had no good golf courses at the time.
Clark recalled how Steph has used golf to get his mind and focus back after a bad outing on the court. “One of my favorite stories is when Steph Curry… [He] had just lost and he didn’t play very well,” she said.
“The next day they had off and he didn’t wanna go to the gym. He wanted to go to the golf course. [And], next day he came out and had 45 points,” added Clark.
Clark could be talking about two instances here. After a lackluster Game 3 in the 2018 finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers, Curry posted a picture on Instagram of him playing a round of golf. He then went on to score 37 points in Game 4, which gave the Golden State Warriors their third ring in four years.
The more likely event Clark is talking about would be Curry’s refocusing game of golf during the 2022 NBA Finals. While his 2018 performance was excellent, it came when the Warriors were already up 3-0. In 2022, the Warriors’ backs were against the wall.
Down 2-1 against the Boston Celtics, Curry, after his meditative game of golf, came out in Game 4 to score 43 points. This game shifted the balance of the series entirely. The Warriors did not lose another game for the rest of the Finals.
Clark loves the calming nature of golf just as much as she adores the relaxed, yet competitive fervor of it. For super athletes like her, turning off the competitive spirit is far less of an option than simply finding a way to refocus it.
While Clark is quite a good golfer, she is probably not in the pantheon of other golfing basketball players. Obviously, there’s Steph and his brother Seth, who are both quite good.
But no one is at the level of Michael Jordan, who is such an avid golfer that he owns courses across multiple locations in the country.
