Nature vs. Nurture in Sports

Why do famous golfers and tennis players tend to come from some places but not others?

There’s lately been a dispute on Twitter over whether John von Neumann was a genius because of his genes or his social environment (physics and math-crazed Budapest, private tutors) that produced several other famous scientists from Budapest in his era, such as Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner.

Being a notorious extremist, my guess is that both nature and nurture contributed.

Let’s look at some examples from sports. For example, the two greatest golfers of the last 40 years are Tiger Woods (15 major championships) of Orange County, California and Phil Mickelson (6) of adjoining San Diego County.

Is Southern California exceptionally ardent for golf? I’d say less so than, say, Chicago, where, after a long winter, guys go nuts over golf from April (watching The Masters from verdant Georgia on TV on the second weekend of April seems to launch the golf season for Chicagoans the next weekend) into July. Then the mania for greenery fades during the dog days of late summer, and then comes football season and the golf courses shut down as the grass goes dormant and get covered with snow. (Similarly, the state with the highest percentage of golfers is Minnesota precisely due to its long winters.)

In contrast, there doesn’t seem to be a golf season in Southern California.

On the other hand, if you are a kid golfer, like Tiger and Phil famously were, Southern California is a great place to master your sport because golf courses are in fine shape twelve months of the year. By the time you are 18, you’ve simply played a lot more golf than your rivals from the frozen North.

A clear example of this is looking at a list of famous Canadian golfers.

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