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Enough is enough. I've been pushed too far, and I'm sure it's the same for all you golfers who have had to withstand endless abuse from our superjock pals. The time has come to drop the gloves (yes, as golfers, we only wear one glove, but it just didn't sound intimidating to say it was time to drop the glove). Let's settle once and for all whether golf is a "sport."

During the British Open a couple weeks ago, while listening to a random poll conducted by our local CBC radio station on whether golf should be accepted into the 2016 Olympic Games, I was reminded just how low an opinion most people have of golf as an athletic endeavour.

It's become an issue, again, because the sport's bigwigs from the PGA Tour, the LPGA Tour and the PGA European Tour are lobbying hard for Olympic inclusion. Their chances of success are good, I reckon, because golf has money and the International Olympic Committee likes money, not to mention that golf has an Olympian history; in fact, the last time golf was part of the Olympics, it was a Canadian, George Lyon, who won the gold medal (okay, it was the 1904 St. Louis Games, but the record stands).

When the CBC ran its poll, the near unanimous response was that golf was not anywhere near enough of a sport to warrant inclusion. Any activity where you can drink beer and smoke a cigar while engaged in said activity should disqualify it automatically, some respondents said. There are too many fat guys playing the game, others said. It's too slow. You don't need to be in shape.

Okay, I'll allow that golf does not call for the same cardiovascular power as other high-energy sports. Nor does it call for the same muscular strength. Or the speed. Or the ... wait. Let me start over.

If athleticism is measured by flexibility, balance, hand-eye co-ordination, endurance, intelligence and psychological strength, then golf is not just a sport, it is perhaps the most difficult of sports. Athletic trainers report that in the categories of balance and flexibility, pro golfers rank higher than other professional athletes. Jerry West, former general manager of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, said last year on The Jim Rome Show that Tiger Woods was the best athlete he had ever seen - in any sport. The golf swing is such a complicated and difficult action to master that it has spawned literally thousands of books on the subject.

And so I was readying my case, preparing to berate my more jockish pals in print, the ones who can't golf and therefore make fun of it. But then I stopped. I stopped because as I was thinking about this issue, the Tour de France was hit with yet another doping scandal. This was supposed to be the year of the clean Tour, except that, like every other year, the cheaters cheated and whole teams bowed out.

But this is isolated to the dishonest few, the sport's apologists say. Which must explain why Leonardo Piepoli, defending his expelled colleague Riccardo Ricco, reportedly said on Dutch radio that "Kurt Cobain killed himself because of drugs and Freddie Mercury died of AIDS, but they are remembered for their beautiful music and it is the results on the bike that should count and nothing else."

Spoken like a true athlete.

It was then I realized golfers were fighting the wrong fight. It's time to forget the argument over whether golf is a sport and take a new road; not higher or lower, just new. And that is for golfers to stop and say, "You know what, we don't want to be a sport."

Why would golf want to be thought of as on par with, for instance, baseball, a sport so full of cheaters and liars and dopers that even the sight of Barry Bonds's freakishly large head is starting to seem like old hat, if you will. Watching Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee call each other liars in front of U.S. Congress this past winter was as degrading a spectacle as any sport would want to endure. Football isn't much different, wherein linesmen might as well be cattle, they're so pumped full of growth hormones. Swimming is forever battling accusations, as is gymnastics. Every track and field star now needs a coach, a masseuse, a trainer ... and a lawyer to help fight lifetime doping bans.

And we don't even need to talk about weightlifters, a sport so dirty that entire national federations have given up; the Bulgarian weightlifting federation recently removed its entire squad from the Beijing Olympics, having determined that there was no way to field a clean team (or, perhaps more likely, one that wouldn't get caught).

Golf instituted drug testing this year, primarily to conform for its Olympics bid, I suspect, yet the thought of anti-doping officials standing around watching Mike Weir pee into a cup in the Glen Abbey locker room after a round at the Canadian Open seems ridiculous to me. Drawing a blood sample from John Daly would probably reveal a startling and hugely entertaining variety of substances, but I'd be willing to bet none of them are performance enhancing.

The case can easily be made that golf is a sport, given how physically complex it is and how difficult it is to master that challenge while coping with the game's psychological pressures. But if golf was smart enough to wet a finger and test the wind, it would realize the last thing it needs to be associated with is a bunch of doped-up cheaters strutting around calling themselves athletes.

Golf isn't a sport, you say? I can live with that.

Curtis Gillespie is the author of Playing Through: A Year of Life and Links along the Scottish Coast. His most recent book is the novel Crown Shyness.