not when you take into account attrition, as more recent has to be better
Mickelson’s majors are more recent than Tigers (in general)
Players majors are older than Jacks
ditto Palmer, Snead, Trevino, Hogan, Nelson, Hagen
And as we all know, impressing you should be the goal of every red-blooded American. But I have already given more relevant evidence than you and Mensa combined (which, I concede, is a very low bar). I showed that few of the best international players played the US majors, and few Americans played the British, before 1975. Combined with undeniable demographic facts about the size of the talent pools of the different eras, that constitutes real evidence for my case. All you guys have offered as “evidence” is your ASSUMPTION that there were more genetically gifted golfers playing then. That is about the tightest circle I’ve ever seen in circular logic.
Noticed that, did you? I guess you didn’t notice this response. Why am I not surprised?
And if you think you’re tired or reading it, imagine how tired I get of writing that winning majors has a large element of luck to it, so it is stupid to look only at them, when you have so many other events with world class fields. This isn’t 1930. The WGCs, the FedEx Playoffs, the Players, and the strongest regular tour events all have fields as strong or stronger than the majors of the 1960’s, so it is criminal stupidity to pretend they don’t matter.
There are all kinds of reasons that the best golfer in the world can lose a major. A couple of bad bounces, being off his game, or a Michael Campbell having the week of his life, to name just three. Bad bounces might even out in the long run, but the long run in probabilistic terms would need thousands of events, not four per year. Tiger and Jack are the first to admit it takes luck as well as skill to win a major. Why can’t you guys see that?
Yeah, we get that. As you noted yourself, you’ve repeated it ad nauseum. And you keep saying I dodge it, when I have answered every time that you are confusing the fact with the explanation. The FACT is that Watson, Trevino, Palmer, et al compiled better numbers than Phil, Ernie, and Vijay. Two possible explanations of that fact are:
a) your theory, based on either absolutely no evidence (genetic differences) or even contradictory evidence (demographics), that the fields were just as strong then, but that there were more genetically gifted golfers, or
b) my theory, based on the actual differences of the number of golfers worldwide then and now making for a much larger talent pool, the difference in prize money then and now that makes athletes choose golf as their first sport, the differences in training and coaching that make more golfers play to their potential, the technology that reduces the difference between good and great ball strikers, and, most obviously, the fact that a significant percentage of the world’s best golfers did not show up for the majors before 1975.
I’m not saying it’s impossible that Palmer and Trevino were better players than Vijay and Phil, I’m just saying that you haven’t given any real evidence for it. All you’ve offered is your BELIEF that there were more gifted golfers in the 60’s than today. And I’m saying that based on the reasons I just gave, which are demonstrable FACTS, not beliefs, there is more reason to think that the lower numbers we see today is because there are more good golfers, so the wins are distributed among more people. It’s not that difficult a concept. You can disagree with it all you want, but it’s a flat lie to say I haven’t offered any evidence, or that I have been dodging your wonderful arguments.
I didn’t blow them off; I said they weren’t as important as you claim. The same factors that result in more wins for the stars of Jack’s era will also result in more high finishes, from second on down. But it’s also a fact that nobody but Jack fans bring up second place finishes as if they are truly important. Not too long ago, I was mocked by you or one of your pals for even bringing up Bruce Crampton as an example of a good player, because I justified it by saying he finished second to Jack in majors more times than anyone else. Pretty consistent of your side.
Sorry, but making up some stat and then calculating it over a whopping sample size of 40 majors does not constitute a study. I can show you similar studies that give a better correlation between the Super Bowl winner and the stock market. What’s hilarious is that even though you cherry-picked the stat yourself, when it showed what you termed a “pretty significant” indication of stronger fields now than then, you hand-waved it away.
“Now that is pretty significant, undoubtedly, but what does it mean in terms of how many players were X strokes behind the leader(s)? If you compare two tournaments with similar SD’s (say the 1972 US Open vs. the 2009 Masters, essentially in the latter tournament (vs. the former) you have 2, maybe 3 more players within 6 or so strokes of the lead. Yes, sometimes one of these “extra” players will break out and win something, but essentially there isn’t that huge of a difference between the two decades, not enough in my estimation to offset the elite players of the 1970’s that gave Jack so much grief.”
In other words, I don’t care what my own cherry-picked data for my made-up stat shows, in my estimation, Jack’s the best, so there!
And as your pathetic “study” shows, you still just can’t conceive of anything but majors being important. I know everybody else does it, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s not stupid.
Rory won the PGA this year. That’s great, but he played badly in the other three majors — as bad as Tiger at the Masters, and much worse than Tiger in the US and British Opens. We’re about to start the playoffs, where many of the best players in the world (probably a higher percentage than in the majors of Jack’s day) will be in the field. Suppose he pulls a Paddy and MC’s in all of them, and Tiger pulls a Tiger and wins a couple of them.
It won’t matter. All people like you and Mensa will care about it that Rory won a major this year, and Tiger didn’t. Even though most of the top 100 in the world are in the same field a dozen or so times a year now, you still think it’s 1930, and only the majors count.
To ignore all the other events with world class fields is just stupid, in my humble opinion.
It is a very great leap to go from your little “study” not changing my mind to saying that nothing will change my mind. I am wide open to the possibility that Jack, or Jones for that matter, was the Bob Beamon of golf, and would have been the best golfer of any era. You can’t account for genetic freaks.
But there is no evidence for it; it would just be an assumption. And the assumption you guys make, that there were half a dozen Bob Beamons in the 60’s and only one today, is just too hard to swallow, when there is very good evidence that a simpler explanation, i.e. wins are being distributed among more great players, is correct.
With all the evidence that points to stronger fields today, I think it is MORE than fair to admit that we can’t directly compare the abilities of players of different eras, and assume they are equivalent. What you CAN do is see how many of them showed up for the big events. And then it’s obvious that a lot of them didn’t show up for the majors in Jack’s day, and a lot of them were in the service during Nelson’s streak, and you are left with either Tiger, or the likes of Jones and Vardon.
And I think even you would admit that the fields are tougher now than they were in 1900, or even 1930.
Obviously Jack was a chump as he demonstrated that he could not win in Great Britain.
Oh that’s right, he won 3 British Opens and was beaten by a total of 25 different players from 1963 to 1980.
Obviously Jack was a chump as he demonstrated that in he could not win in USA.
Oh that’s right, he has 69 other wins on the PGATour and 15 majors.
Obviously Jack was a chump as he demonstrated that he could not win elsewhere in the World.
Oh that’s right, he won 6 Australian Open Championships.
In Majors, he won less British Opens than the others, yet he was the most consistent in that championship
I strongly disagree. IMO he is the second best golfer of all time. Not sure what you have against him.
In other news, straw prices hit a new high as a sudden world-wide shortage took farmers by surprise.
I only have time to sum up my new study (after I received some extra shifts at work which delayed things here), but here it goes; other points will have to wait until tomorrow; I’m done for tonite. I’ve done stuff like this for baseball off and on, and sometimes you learn something new. I hope somebody gets something out of this: if you do, please PM me, otherwise this kind of thing ain’t being done again…
I examined the two decades 1970-79 and 2000-2009 and looked at all top ten finishes in majors, determining how many (and of what type) each player had, with the expressed aim of helping to determine just how deep the fields were.
In the 1970’s, the basic distribution was as follows, Top 10’s first, followed by the number of players with that many, majors won by that group in parentheses, and names for the top spots provided:
1970’s
35-1 (8) [Jack]
18-1 (1) [Weiskopf]
15-1 (4) [Player]
14-1 (3) [Watson]
13-2 (4) [Miller & Irwin]
12-1 (4) [Trevino]
11-1 (1) [Hubert Green]
10-2 (1) [Floyd & Crenshaw]
8-1 (1) [Casper]
7-6 (2)
6-3 (3)
5-5 (3)
4-8 (1)
3-17 (1)
2-33 (3)
1-53 (0)
2000’s
25-1 (12) [Tiger]
20-2 (4) [Mickelson & Els]
15-1 (2) [Vijay]
14-1 (0) [Sergio Garcia]
12-2 (5) [Goosen & Harrington]
11-1 (1)[Mike Weir]
10-1 (1) [Jim Furyk]
8-1 (0) [Davis Love III]
7-3 (4)
6-6 (2)
5-5 (0)
4-18 (1)
3-16 (2)
2-28 (3)
1-70 (2)
The top ten golfers for each list are highly comparable; I see no significant differences between the tops of the two lists. The biggest differences are in the 4 and 1 slots; there were apparently more solid middle-of-the-road contenders in the aughts, along with a few more one-and-dones.
Stats for each:
1970’s
n=136
x=3.28 [arithmetic mean]
s=4.19 [standard deviation]
2000’s
n=156
x=3.04
s=3.66
The data here are perfectly consistent with my earlier one (link) which measured how many strokes out of the lead the top tens were-so yes there is a bit of interdependence between the two studies. In the earlier study there tended to be more golfers closer to the lead, but not that many more, such that a 10th place then would probably finish in 12th or 13th place now. I thus concluded that fields now are c. 15-30% deeper now than they were in the 70’s.
Here there appear to be more “occasional contenders”, who might show up on the final leaderboard once every 2-3 years, and more fringe players who luck into one top 10 per decade (note that some of those like Greg Norman may have once been prime golfers who ended up on the down side of their careers).
But overall field depth is a different question from determining how likely someone from each group is to actually win the major in question. If I check the top ten players from each list and see how many majors they won (out of the 40 available per decade), the 70’s stars won 27 out of 40, while the 00’s won 25. For just the top 7 from each decade, it’s the 1970’s, 24 vs. 23. On the flip side, only c. 30-40% of all majors in both groups were won by players below the elite, tho more of these came from fringe players in the 00’s (8 vs. 4 for the bottom 3 categories). Note that this could be evidence that the depth of the field wasn’t nearly so good in the 00’s as you might think, if that many fringe players could sneak in an snag a few here and there (or maybe that’s because of Jack’s great consistency during his decade, with any fringe players having to get past him first a huge part of the time).
If you eliminate Jack and Tiger, it’s 19 to 13 70’s over 00’s, which suggests that the larger fields of viable intermediate contenders in the aughts, along with a bigger pool of fringe players with long shot odds, cuts down the chances of the top players winning by 10-30%, again perfectly consistent with the other study, but not suggestive of any effect significantly larger than that.
And, as for my main point (the numbers of historically elite players in both eras-i.e. playing golf nearly as good as anyone has ever done, for a period of years), that thesis remains unchanged-i.e. the best players in the 70’s were better than their counterparts in the 00’s, even after you adjust for the field strengths. While overall field depth can be estimated fairly well using these and other means (with sample sizes running across dozens of tournaments each with 100’s of players) and will remain generally predictable from year to year, the number of historically elite players, being such a small quantity to begin with, can easily fluctuate from zero to two to one to three across a period of seasons.
This is highly significant because it is the star players who are winning the majority of majors and hence would be expected to have the biggest effect on each other’s chances (the fringe guys-not so much), when they are at the absolute peaks of their games. And Tiger simply didn’t lose hardly any majors to these players-and didn’t really win many from them, either. He certainly deserves credit for the blowouts as well as winning most of the close ones, but doesn’t his rivals deserve blame for not really making him sweat much if at all? And likewise shouldn’t Jack’s rivals be given plenty of credit for beating the man when he was playing some of the best golf of his life? I honestly don’t know how anyone can be so absolutist against this pretty reasonable postulate.
I will address one more point before going to bed, and that is exactly how should you adjust for differences across eras. I have been consistently of the position (through many a baseball argument) that adjusting for the caliber of competition is perfectly fine; obviously those who you have to beat should certainly be factored into any analysis. I am much less comfortable adjusting for playing conditions, which greatly favors the more modern player, resulting in the conclusion that Ty Cobb, if he were to play today, plucked from the time stream as he was in his prime and plugged into a modern lineup, might hit .260 if he was lucky, or that Bobby Jones…you get the drift (by the same token, let’s see Tiger try to hit balata balls with hickory shafted sticks. I always assume that the athletes in question get the benefits from growing up and training in the environment you mentally “shuffle” them to, or the comparisons become very problematic very quickly-i.e. heavily skewed in favor of the modern player with all his wonderful shiny new toys, game over.
Once this long-winded discussion has run its course, I’ll set up a poll, for those (still) interested.
Genetics is just part of the equation, so that’s a straw man; one reason I think Watson was better than Phil was that Watson, post 1975 Masters, never (or very rarely) experienced breakdowns in his course management like Phil regularly did (exhibit A: Winged Foot 2006). Trevino never really did, either, nor Player for that matter, but Phil’s career is riddled with such moments (which actually put him in closer company to Arnie, but that’s another debate). Heck, the “Tiger Effect” was coined because people kept noticing how contenders would wilt under Eldrick’s intense stare, or something (not that I think that was a real effect necessarily, but that the mental side counts just as much as physical attributes, and probably a lot more in fact in golf specifically-another debate tho).
I also am not fully convinced about the demographic effect, either, but I’ll leave that one lie, for the moment (see below)…
Because that actually supports my thesis! :smack: Since you agree that Phil, Tiger’s best rival, was worse than Jack’s best rivals, we are finally making progress!
Another straw man-I have already, in both of my studies now, fully acknowledged that fields now are indeed deeper. If you want to study these other events you can go right ahead-nobody’s stopping you (tho the Players only began in '77-I was there to witness Jack winning the one in '78-he actually threw his ball right to me, but I stupidly dropped it. If not I, inspired by the Blessings of Fate, probably would have won millions on the Tour by now…).
The only questions remaining are, how deep are they, and what effect do these fields have on the chances of the best golfers winning? My conclusion, based on the evidence, is that it is not that huge. There is, and always has been, a small number of superstars (occ. topped by 1 or a few superduperstars), the only difference now is that there are more and better players back down the curve.
Then you agree that Tiger has been lucky in that his competition hasn’t often challenged him then-gotcha. On a slightly more serious note, I know all about sample sizes thankyouverymuch, and focusing on majors has allowed me a chance of finishing these studies sometime before the next apocalypse. And the sample size thing is a red herring anyway, since the dozens of majors that a golfer plays in over his career constitute a perfectly fine sample (but read on).
As I said in my last (uber sized) post, everything after the first two are conditions of the era, not conditions inherent in the abilities of the players in question, so I consider them outside the scope of this discussion. And the first two are still well within the realm of debate, as other sports have seen their salaries skyrocket as well.
And as for (a) & (b), why can’t it be BOTH? That is probably the core of the contentiousness here. I see no reason why (on the large and thus predictable end) we can have say 30 guys who have a realistic shot at winning a major, and that number only changes modestly, in percentage terms at least, increasing slowly over time, AND (on the small and hence highly variable end) we can see the numbers of truly great players go up and down from era to era. There was no such player after Nick Faldo got old and before Tiger showed up, a period of close to 5 years (the '96 Masters was a gift from Norman more than anything else), so why couldn’t there be 2, 1, 0, or 3 of them at one time?
It still adds up to more handwaving, since I have yet to see, you know, an actual cite as to the “facts” you posit. Yes, I believe that these factors have indeed make the pools deeper, but you still assume that they constitute an entire order of magnitude increase, not the modest gains that I have found.
I never snarked on the Crampton thing, so please don’t lump me in with the other posters here (I found notfrommensa’s most recent post in this thread to be pretty useless, to be honest). And my study last night puts the lie to the bolded part:
In any sport, at the highest levels of competition we are dealing with the extreme right hand slice of the traditional bell-shaped curve. In Jack’s day things appeared to look kind of like this (best players at the right, past the extreme left lie all the schlubs like I used to be (don’t play anymore), those who would never really have a prayer of even playing in a major):
x
x x x
x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Tiger’s Era probably would look more like this:
x
x x
x x x
x x x x
x x x x x
x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Yes, a definite increase in those occupying the fringe, but a more modest increase in those on the edges of contention, and a rather small if insignificant increase in the number of top players.
While, from what I have gathered from your arguments, you appear to think things look like this (correct me if I’m wrong, or make your own graph):
x x
x x x x x
x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x . . x <Tiger the lone x by itself, way out in front of all the hapless mere mortals
Essentially, my data indicates that the 2nd graph is a better match for current conditions, because if yours was closer to the truth, we’d have fewer guys with 15-20 top tens and a lot more with 6-14, and we simply don’t, ACCORDING to your own stated standard in the bolded part above! We’d also have leaderboards absolutely crowded with players-note that since Tiger’s last major win, they have indeed gotten more crowded-but I think that is because we are now missing not only 1 or 2 superelite guys, but 2 to 4 star players of c.f. Padraig Harrington or Ray Floyd quality. And THAT’s where the small sample sizes come into play, because who am I to argue with the Lord if he creates 3 great great players for one decade, but only 1 in another decade?
[And a statistician might quibble with the shape of that last one, because the slope is too high to be the extreme right end of a normal distribution curve.]
In any event, the number of guys who can be perennial contenders for a period of years has always been very small. The size of the madding hordes behind them can definitely vary based on demographics, but few are able to climb that mountain, and fewer still are able to play lights-out for 2-6 years, or whatever.
Except it wasn’t a “mere” sample size of 40, but 400+ finishes for each decade.
This was a much more modest effort than some halfassed voodoo thing some pundit somewhere invented out of whole cloth to get more hits on his blog. My first study, purely and simply, measured how “tight” the fields were, then vs. now. There’s nothing mysterious or bullshitty about that, and your attempt to pooh-pooh it on these grounds makes me seriously doubt your sincerity or honesty at actually trying to arrive at the truth.
I’ve already addressed your mistaken opinion about my conclusion-where did I hand wave it away? I said (straight from your quoted part) that “you [now] have 2, maybe 3 more players within 6 or so strokes of the lead.” What this study showed was that there were more people in contention (or, more properly, on the edges of contention) than before-that’s unequivocal. I then made a different point, that the effect I saw was NOT sufficiently huge so as to denigrate the accomplishments of both Jack and his rivals, since, by your own standards, they won as much (Jack vs. Tiger thru age 36), or more (Jack’s rivals vs. Tiger’s rivals) in the biggest tournaments of the year.
I think I’ve also said that they are very evenly matched, so much so that the data needs be carefully sifted through. There’s probably plenty more that can be done here. You can’t just sit back and smugly say, “Oh the demographics show that today’s Tour is a Hall of Giants vs. the Midgets of Yesteryear, so there!”, but you need to (as that big thread in ATMB indicates) provide cites-that’s how the Dope works. Yes, the British Open fields were pretty shallow through c. the mid late 70’s at the very latest, I already acknowledged that; the American majors of the time tho were much tighter.
Then do me one better. If your hypothesis that the fields are much deeper (not the 20-30% I found, but the 100% or more that you assume-tho I can’t tell since you still refuse to quantify that in any way shape or form, even as a starting hypothesis), THEN DEMONSTRATE THAT. Go and use your own choice of tournaments if you wish, but either do something or provisionally concede the point for now.
I’m not ignoring them-provide me with the data. So far I’m the only one checking things out, while you just pontificate from on high. And the majors have ALWAYS counted for more than just about anything else, be it from the perspectives of fans, journalists, or even the players themselves. Your lone perspective here counts for very little. If Tiger were to win said upcoming contest, and you asked him to candidly provide his opinion on his own play this year, he undoubtedly would bemoan the lack of major wins on his resume as why it was a disappointing year.
I don’t think I ever used the number “half-a-dozen” in this context (more straw men I see)-in general there are very rarely more than 2 historically elite players at any one time, not 6. What I see instead now is a small number of very good players, not much larger than before, who get lots of top tens (indicating that they have the basic talent level to rise above the pack) but few actual wins as compared to their precessors (indicating that they often are unable to close the deal, for whatever reasons-more competition bubbling up from the lower levels and/or simple failures in execution at critical times-you say potayto, I say potaato).
I want to now address the American talent pools then vs. now, but I’ll post this big thing first.
This will just be a short, general answer, because I’ve lost interest in this.
Nobody cares about your “studies.” There are only three people still participating in this thread, and after this post, it will be two or less. Mensa won’t have a clue about what you’re trying to show. I have a math degree, but I’m not going to bother to try to make sense of your posts, because there is no reason to believe your stat is valid.
At the very least, the sample size is too small, no matter what you say. Also, it should take course rating and (especially) slope into account, and that’s not possible, even if you were willing to research it, and even if the courses weren’t set up harder for a PGA event than for their regular rating, because the published slope is tuned to amateurs rather than pros. In general, the harder the course, the more separation between the good and great players, but you are comparing the scores on different courses, with different (but clearly more difficult now than then) setups, and just assuming that technology wipes those differences away, and that there is no need to account for the difficulty of the various courses. It’s possible that your numbers show something, but it’s something that needs to be established, not just assumed.
I also think an analysis of an event’s top ten should discard the winner, because most weeks there is usually one guy who has a career week and plays like Hogan, and doesn’t win again for five years or more. Which also means that you really need to look at the top 100, not the top ten, because the fields are so deep now that a Ben Curtis, world ranking 396, can still win the British Open.
All that is just my first impression, so don’t hold me to it. I honestly don’t know what you would have to do to make what you’re doing valid, but the point is, neither do you. If it were a valid stat, you wouldn’t have had to make it up. The network stats guys can tell you when Player X last made three bogeys in a row while within five shots of the lead, and the PGA website shows stats for everything anyone thought was important, so they would have your stat if it meant anything.
Which is why I very strongly suspect that nobody has read your dissertations, and I doubt very many even skimmed them.
As for your demand that I give quantitative data, I did:
-
The combined total of PGA and US Open starts before 1975 by players who won the European Order of Merit from 1955-1975 was precisely zero.
-
The combined total of Masters, US Opens, and PGAs played during Jack’s pro career by Aussie Peter Thomson, who won five British Opens (the last in 1965), and got top tens in them almost every year from 1951-1971, was precisely one.
-
The number of Americans in the field when Jack won his first British Open was precisely nine.
Those are not made up stats I pulled out of my ass, those are facts that very clearly show that even if you assume there were as many good players in the 60’s as there are today, many of them skipped the US majors if they weren’t Americans, or the British Open if they were. If you think there were as many world class American players as the rest of the world combined, then there should have been at least 65 Americans in the field of the 1966 British Open instead of 9, so it seems that only about one in seven of world class pros were willing to play majors outside their country (or Commonwealth, as some top Aussie and South African golfers played the British Open, but not the American majors).
And if you think it was exclusionary policies, rather than lack of interest, that kept international pros from playing US majors, you might be right, but that doesn’t help your case, or the fields.
In any event, whatever is my feeling too (I think I did admit that the 60’s were even thinner, so that’s not news). And as for “made up stats”, that just shows your ignorance, as people have been doing that for years for baseball, and entire websites are devoted to stats which have been carefully designed for both consistency and validity, so that’s a complete non-starter (and yes I’ve done it for years in said community, and there are people 100x as hardcore as me about it). I guess there isn’t such a market or interest for golf. <shrug>
I’ll just say two more things, and then I’ll shut up.
The number of baseball centerfielders that will be elected by the BBWAA from 1980-c. 2030 is likely to be one-Ken Griffey Jr. The next could very well be Mike Trout (20 years old in 2012) for all we know-there isn’t anyone else on the horizon (if you mention the name Johnny Damon I will laugh uncontrollably), and the other contenders are likely to be one-and-dones (Lofton, Andruw Jones, and Edmonds). If the number of true greats at a position can see such a dry spell, contrasted with the wealth they had in the 50’s (Mays/Mantle/Duke/Ashburn/Doby), then I see no reason why such fluctuations can’t be true of golf as well. Your assumption that such is flatly impossible is simply not borne out. This is important because a single elite golfer can have a big effect on the chances of the others in the field (beating the dead horse into cutlets by now).
And you mentioned demographics, but never deigned to actually provide any hard data. You assume that the trends across all countries have been steadily going upward in terms of participation, in terms of actual numbers if not a percentage of the population. Well if you did, I can see why you might have file-drawered it, because the demographics for young golfers in this country is pretty poor, to be honest.
First, most sources seem to indicate that somewhere between 25 and 30 million play golf in the US-a number however that has been declining for some years now (predating the recession BTW).
Age profile
<30 = 5%
30-39 = 12%
40-49 = 22%
50-59 = 24%
60-69 = 18%
70+ = 19%
The 5% figure for the under 30’s should be particularly interesting to the unbiased here. It doesn’t apparently count junior golfers, however.
Here’s another with juniors figured in, with 28%-the strange thing is that it also shows the same tiny proportion of golfers in their 20’s, which might indicate that many of the juniors drop the game when they become adults.
This however estimates junior participation at 8% or perhaps somewhat higher, which better passes my smell test. If you want to explore this further, knock yourself out.
This very much is an old-person’s sport by now. You see, golf in the US already experienced its demographic explosion-40-50 years ago when Arnie showed up and started winning in dramatic fashion, fathers all over the country got their sons interested in the game, and the result was the Young Guns of the late 60’s and early 70’s. They were also part of the Baby Boomers too I will note, which is undoubtedly another demographic advantage they have. [I don’t think other countries necessarily had their own baby booms at this time, but they could have.] The country’s age profile has been skewing older ever since; even if the overall population has increased, that isn’t going to be 100% correlated with the number of potential young golfers.
Now, the press was all over itself predicting a similar effect for Tiger Woods, and, while more juniors did appear to take up the sport, the surge was apparently short-lived, and more to the point, seems to have had virtually no effect on recent leaderboards. The percentages for the twentysomethings above is probably very telling; since Payne Stewart won his 3rd major in 1999, no American not named Phil or Eldrick has won more than one (won’t bore people with the names). Tiger’s 09-12 dry spell? Americans won 6 of 14. 2002-2008? Jim Furyk is the best US major winner, by far, other than the Big Two. [To be fair, some of those guys are still young enough to make a longer-term mark. Not holding my breath tho even while I admit how much I love rooting for a guy named Bubba.]
I am 100% convinced that the American 70’s contingent, in a competition akin to the Ryder Cup, would totally wipe the floor with their 00 counterparts, and it wouldn’t be pretty. Jack and Tiger probably would duel to a draw, Mickelson might get hot, but after that the likes of Hale Irwin, Ray Floyd, Johnny Miller and Ben Crenshaw would probably win 75% of the remaining matches. Since then, yes the international crowd got much better (and/or had more opportunities), but the American’s domination came to an end and most importantly their depth (both intermediate and fringe) plummeted.
The real reason I got started on all this (other than the fact that yes Jack was my idol) is that to posit that every single advantage falls in Tiger’s favor really sparks my Skepticism Meter. So I wondered, if it was true that fields today are that much deeper, what would be the effects? I examined what data I could, and concluded that they weren’t that deeper, not enough to dramatically affect the chances of the great players winning significantly fewer majors. And if that is the case, then no, Phil’s 4 could not possibly be remotely equal to Tom Watson’s 8, and thus Tom was more of a threat to Jack’s chances of winning than Phil was to Tiger’s.
Going to take a long effin’ nap now…
Shit, this is like heroin, I can’t resist, especially when I’m watching golf on TV and have nothing else to do.
But your latest post is a perfect example of why any stats you come up with can pretty much be dismissed out of hand. You just cite whatever numbers you think might help your case, without any effort to select for, you know, relevance.
Overall participation in golf is not relevant. Obviously, with all the tax cuts and job losses, municipal courses are struggling, and recreational golf is down. I live in a very small town, and the green fees at our local course (open to the public, but not a muni) are nearly a hundred bucks. I don’t see how an average Joe can afford it, and I can understand why there are less duffers playing.
But the high school team still gets to play all day for free. What’s relevant to strength of field in PGA events is the number of SERIOUS, TALENTED golfers, and a good indication of that is the number of entrants in the US Open. As I’m sure you know, entries have for many years been restricted to either professional golfers, or amateurs with a very low handicap (currently 1.4 or better, and they tighten it every so often to try to keep the number of entrants manageable).
It turns out to be surprisingly hard to find historic data online, but on Morning Drive a few months ago, a guy named Rand Jerris was on. He is the USGA Museum director, and is their expert in golf history. He had a bunch of stats on US Open qualifying. I DVR’d it and wrote them down, so they are not from my feeble memory, even though I can’t give you a link.
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In 1913, they began on-site qualifying for the US Open. You showed up early to prove you could play. That lasted until 1923.
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Jones won his first US Open in 1923, and that caused a mini boom that necessitated offsite qualifying, for the first time, in 1924. They had two sectional qualifier sites that year, to handle the 360 total entrants.
And here are the other milestones for the number of entrants:
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The first year they had 1000 entrants was 1928.
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The first year they had 3000 entrants was 1968.
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The first year they had 5000 entrants was 1982.
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The first year they had 9000 entrants was 2005.
So there you are. Even in percentage terms, the number of serious, talented players has increased as much between the Jack era and the Tiger era as it did between the Jones era and the Jack era. And in absolute terms, it increased three times as much.
It has leveled off right around 9000 since 2005. The record was 9086 in 2006. There were 9052 in 2010, and 9006 this year. It’s easy to find cites for the last ten years or so:
http://www.usga.org/news/2010/April/Near-Record-Entries-For-2010-U-S--Open/
http://www.usga.org/news/2012/April/USGA-Accepts-9,006-Entries-For-Open/
Incidentally, 2005 was the first year the USGA had sectional qualifying outside the US (just one day each at two sites), but that didn’t cause a huge spike in the number of entries, because they had a record 8726 entries in 2004, so they were nearly 9000 and increasing even without the foreign sectionals.
http://www.usga.org/news/2004/May/U-S--Open-Entries-Close;-64-Golfers-Currently-Exempt/
What the foreign sectionals DID do was let guys enter who wouldn’t have endured the time and expense of traveling to the US to qualify. And one of them was Michael Campbell, who was completely off anyone’s radar, and who has explicitly stated that he would not have entered if he couldn’t have qualified overseas. He went on that year to sink a bunch of 15-footers and win by two over Tiger. He only played that well one week in his entire life, but it just happened to be the week of a major.
Arnie and Jack didn’t have to worry about guys like him. But when even a guy like Jack wins less than one in five majors in his prime, and recently you had 15 or whatever it was majors in a row won by different guys who just had one hot week, you can see how even having the players ranked below 100th in the world being better now than then makes a big difference, even if you never hear from these guys again. The problem is not that there are less Trevinos today, the problem is that there are a lot more Orville Moodys and Charles Coodys.
So yeah, recreational golf is declining, and serious golf is leveling off. But data much more relevant than yours indicates that there were three times as many serious golfers in 2005 as in 1968.
If anyone is interested, I’ve found an official source for historical US Open entry data for every year. Since it’s off topic for the PGA, and I don’t want it to be buried at the bottom of this dead thread, I started a new thread for it:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15426719&postcount=1