Golf is a good metaphor at two different levels. On the one hand, you’re right that pressure and so forth can cause players to break under pressure. On the other hand, golf and bowling, at the amateur level, are the only sports that have “handicaps” so that better and worse players can compete on a “level” playing field. And bowling’s slowly going the way of the dodo, leaving us with golf.
In real life, there are no “handicaps” like this, except of course when Affirmative Action rears its ugly head. And even then, typically, it only works for hiring practices. If a company hires a member of some minority group to oversee their production line, their customers aren’t given an incentive to hire that company particularly, because the rest of the production lines are run by white guys. As a result, the “handicap” only benefits the minority person briefly: afterwards he must produce, just like everyone else. Imagine some sort of “handicap” like this in the NBA: they’d have to make one of the current centers play on his knees, so shorter people from other groups could compete. Talk about silly.
