Golf is a sport which you can play when smoking. Not only does a round of golf involve much standing and walking between shots, you can even smoke when actually playing a shot. Going through a picture library researching this article, I came across many pictures of players doing exactly that.
Indeed, one golf instructor uses a video of Ben Hogan doing this as as a teaching aid for his pupils. Hogan is practising shots with his cigarette holder clamped in his mouth and, in it, a lit cigarette, The instructor says the cigarette’s angle points out exactly where Hogan’s head position is during each moment of his swing. He even encourages his pupils to try a drill based on this, although he suggests using a chopped-down chopstick instead of a cigarette to hold in the mouth.
Hogan only gave up smoking in his 70s. It was said that he could get through two packs of cigarettes during a round. Arnold Palmer was another golfer who would smoke a lot – reportedly one or two packs a day – but around the mid 1960s he quit smoking for health reasons. Well, he quit smoking when out on the course anyway. Off course it took a little longer and he only gave up cigarettes around 1970.
“When I see some of the old film clips and see how I silly I am with that thing hanging out of my mouth I could just cringe,” Palmer had said after he turned 70. “I can run now at 70 better than I did 40 years ago, when I huffed and puffed. If I had known what cigarettes were doing to me, I would have quit sooner than I did.”
Both Hogan and Palmer advertised cigarettes. As did Sam Snead. There are advertising images of Sneed holding a Granger tobacco box with a pipe his mouth with the strap line "Granger Keeps the smoker happy...a cooler smoke in a drier pipe.” However Sneed was not a smoker. He reckoned he had “won a lot of tournaments because I was in better shape than other guys. I didn't smoke and didn't drink and went to bed at reasonable hours.”
Hogan won nine Majors and Palmer five. Jack Nicklaus, winner of 18 Majors, is another who was also a smoker, at least for a time. The list of Major winners who smoked on course at least during part of their careers also includes, among others, Gay Brewer, Angel Cabrera, Darren Clarke, John Daly, Max Faulkner, Alf Padgham, Lee Trevino, Ian Woosnam and Fuzzy Zoeller.
Smoking has become less fashionable than it was and gym work and fitness training is now part of many top golfers’ lifestyle in a way it once was not. It was against this backdrop that pictures of Charley Hull puffing away while signing autographs caused a social media sensation. She responded that “everyone in my family smokes. My dad goes through 40 a day. I find it quite funny, because I actually do go to the gym and I’m a very healthy person. I only smoke. I hardly drink.” She also says that she plans to give up.
England's Dan Brown, who came so close at the Open Championship, was also captured multiple times on the broadcast smoking cigarettes. Bryson DeChambeau also revealed on a podcast in 2022 that South African Shaun Norris smokes "34 cigarettes a day".
Spanish golfer Miguel Angel Jimenez is also famous for his love of cigars.
