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Comment by amichail | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't players want Woods to win all the time as this brings more money to their sport -- and probably also to them individually?

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You don't spend much time around athletes, do you? Athletes compete because they want to do well. Certainly, only a few at one time have a realistic chance of actually winning, but I reckon that most don't want one person/team to win continually.

This is easiest to see in US football and baseball leagues--the fans and the league prefer some degree of parity so a single team doesn't dominate the sport.

While I agree that most people don't want one person/team winning all the time, I believe that this does generate more interest, ie. Many people will take a vested interest in a baseball game so that they can cheer against the Yankees.

Cheering against the Yankees would be a waste of time if the Yankees literally won all the time. It would increase people's interest in the game the same way that a trick coin increases people's interest in betting on coin flips.

It wouldn't be interesting if Woods won all the time. In fact I might argue that underdog/Cinderella stories do as much for the sport as superstars.

Those two sentences aren't mutually exclusive. In 2006-2007 when Tiger was on a 7 tournament win streak, golf ratings were up because a lot of people wanted to see Tiger extend his win streak. Complementary to that, a lot of people also tuned in to root for whoever was in contention to upset that streak.

Probably not. As much as there are long-term benefits to increasing the popularity of the sport (larger purses in the future, etc.), golf tournaments are a zero-sum game. Everyone wants everyone else to do poorly, so they get a larger quantity of the available money.

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