Hockey Bigger Than Golf? Survey Says Yes!

Americans hate hockey. That's the problem, right? The TV ratings stink. Nobody cares, except a handful of Canadian wannabes up near the border. That's what the experts keep telling us.

Golf. Now there's a sport people love. You can't go near your TV without seeing Tiger Woods and the lads shuffling around a fairway somewhere, acting like it's real work. Golf is big. Huge.

But wait! According to a couple of recent public opinion polls, hockey is at least as popular as golf among America's sports fans. Maybe more popular.

The bad news about hockey is drilled home year after year by the savants who measure television audiences. The 2004 Stanley Cup Final, for example, averaged about 3 million American viewers per game. That's essentially nobody.

(Of course, if you looked out your window and saw 3 million people, you wouldn't say, "Nobody's out there." But in TV-speak, 3 million is "nobody," and we have long since let the TV hucksters set the standard.)

So the latest numbers from the pollsters are somewhat surprising.

The Harris Poll asked, "If you had to choose, which ONE of these sports would you say is your favorite?" The results:

1. Pro football - 30%
2. Baseball - 15%
3. College football - 11%
4. Men's pro basketball - 7%
5. Auto racing - 7%
6. Men's college basketball - 6%
7. Men's golf - 4%
8. Hockey - 4%

Next, consider the Sports Illustrated 50th Anniversary Poll, published in September. It asked people to identify their "favorite sport to watch":

1. Pro football - 44%
2. Basketball - 12%
3. Baseball - 12%
4. Auto racing - 8%
5. Hockey - 6%
6. Golf - 4%

Who would have guessed that hockey is almost as popular as car racing? Isn't NASCAR supposed to be the perfect model of a regional sport that turned itself into a national obsession?

Whatever happened to golf, supposedly the new megasport? And tennis barely registers in either poll. So how come Tiger Woods and Serena Williams are considered bigger stars than Tiger Williams?

How far you want to carry this argument depends on how much credibility you invest in public opinion polls, that glorified pseudoscience of half-truths and dubious trend-spotting.

You won't find many sports fans who follow one game to the exclusion of all others. But the pollsters told people to name one sport only. Folks weren't asked what else they watch. Maybe a lot of people would rate golf number-two or number-three, if anyone asked. Maybe tennis is everyone's second-favorite sport.

Then there's the fine print. The Sports Illustrated poll claims to be accurate within 3.2 percentage points. The folks at Harris say the margin of error is 3 percentage points. So once you get past the big three sports - football, baseball, basketball - the numbers are practically meaningless.

The Harris Poll offers a further qualifier: "Unfortunately, there are several other possible sources of error in all polls or surveys that are probably more serious than theoretical calculations of sampling error. They include refusals to be interviewed (non-response), question wording and question order, and weighting. It is impossible to quantify the errors that may result from these factors."

In other words, aside from telling us that football is king - which we already knew - the poll results are useless.