Well, crap. Looks like it might be over. But what a great run.
I think the best analogy is with tennis. Even as a Federer fan, I have to admit that when they played head to head at full fitness, Nadal had his number. However, Fed has a superior overall career record. Which of them is the greatest? It’s just personal opinion really.
Similarly, had Tiger had fewer injuries it seems highly likely he would have 19 majors by now. Of course, you could argue that (like Nadal) it is precisely his style that won him so much glory that has also contributed to those injuries.
I appreciate it’s not a perfect analogy by any stretch, because unlike Federer and Nadal, Woods and Nicklaus never competed directly with each other (well, not in Nicklaus’s prime). I also tend to be swayed by all the previous stats posted by TonySinclair that demonstrate Woods is objectively better. Nevertheless, I wanted to see him break Nicklaus’s record and while I was still confident two years ago, and optimistic one year ago, now I concede he’s odds against to do so.
Yeah, up to last year, I thought he still had a decent chance to win more majors, and an excellent chance to break Snead’s wins record, but now I’m hoping he will be able to walk without pain.
I still think he’s the best ever, not only because he beats Jack in virtually every metric except “most majors,” but because at least 30 of his non-major wins had stronger fields (based on the number of top 100 players in the field, even if you don’t allow for generational improvement) than at least half a dozen of Jack’s major wins. But it has been made clear to me over the last ten years that most golf fans are happier if they can just look at one number.
I wonder why that is? Fans of other sports can easily get their heads around dozens of stats, and give them more or less equal value, but somehow golf fans act like only one stat matters. And they could hardly have picked a worst stat than “most majors,” because a guy would only have to play well four days a year to shatter the record over his career, and before 1975 or so, the major fields were often weaker than regular PGA events, and before Jack, nobody even played all four each year.
It would be like making the only stat people cared about in basketball the number of 3-point shots hit, thereby eliminating from consideration anyone who played before 1979. That’s exactly what golf did, because Vardon, Jones, Hagen, Nelson, Snead, Hogan, etc. all played during eras when it was difficult or impossible to play four majors a year.
Oh well, at least I’ll have a lot more free time now.
I don’t how you can say that Nicklaus was not beating Top 100 players. What Top 100 players was not playing the PGATour during the 1960’s and 1970s? Possibly 10, definitely no more than 15.
Europeans? You mean the ones that Jack beat like a drum from 1963 to 1980 in the British Open? Approimately 25 unique players beat Jack during that time frame and most of those were Americans like Trevino, Miller, Watson, Lema, Weiskopf. He averaged a 3rd place finish in those 18 tournaments,.
IMO, Jack beat more top 100 players (in his time) in 75% of his wins than Woods ever beat in his limited field WGCs.
For one thing, the WGCs only have field from 64 to 78 players.
Correct. 64 for the match play, and those 64 are usually within the top 66. The field is usually 75 or so for the other WGCs, almost all of whom are within the top 100.
In the PGA Championships of the 1960’s, there were only 50-odd touring pros in the field; the rest were club pros, so there was a max of 50 top-100 players. In the British Opens of the 60’s, there were less than a dozen Americans, some of whom were amateurs or seniors, so according to your dismissal of the rest of the world, there were only about ten top-100 players in the field. And in the Masters of the 60’s, the fields were often only 70-80 to start with, and contained a dozen or more amateurs, seniors, and special invitees with no chance to win. So the WGCs are as strong or stronger than something around 75% of the majors played in the 60’s.
And of course, all that assumes that the top players of the 60’s were as strong, as a group, as the top players today. But as Jack himself said, the middle of the pack today (meaning 20 years ago, when he wrote it) is as strong as the top players of his era.
If you truly believe that the PGA had a monopoly on talent in Jack’s day, then you should be on my side, because that means that almost any full field regular event would have been much, much stronger than three of the four majors.
Yet another reason why “most majors” is a bad metric.
I do believe the PGATour had a monopoly of the talent.
And that is why I think Jack, week in week out, played more of the top 100 players than Tiger did.
About the time the WGC’s were in vogue, there became something mystical about the Top 50. A Top 50 player was World Class, and Number 70 was not worthy of being labeled as world class.
The WGCs stroke play tournaments were limited field no cut events. No cut events mean that they could not handle a 90-100 players so they exempted the Top 50 players plus some stragglers from the international tours (Its puts the “W” in WGC)
Everyone wanted to play them because it was a competitive disadvantage to not play them. They gave de facto appearance money which was deemed “official” on the Two main tour. Dead Last got 40000 dollars which was the equivalent of a 30-40th place finish in a regular event.
Why the number of Top 50 players got deemed a better field than the Number of Top 100 or Number 200 players. IMO there is not much difference between #41 Gary Woodland and #87 Harris English and #138 Will Wilcox. But OOOOH, Woodland is a top 50 player and Wilcox (One of the leaders in the All Round last season) is a nobody.
The OWGR Strength of Field formulas are top heavy. There is no way an 18 player World Challenge is a stronger field than a 144 player Shriners Open that has 125 players with PGATour cards. But I can guarantee that the World Challenge will be rated higher than the Vegas Tournament a couple weeks ago.
You’re entitled to your opinion about the PGA monopoly. No way to prove you wrong, and nobody can know for sure, because so few Americans played overseas, and so few international players, especially from RSA and Oceania, wanted to spend the time and money to play in the US or UK.
I’m not sure whom you’re responding to in the rest of your post. My previous post consistently treated the top 100 as the cream of golf, so I don’t know who you think was saying the #70 golfer isn’t world class.
In fact, it’s the Jack fans who tend to say that it doesn’t matter how strong the golfers are outside even the top 25, because almost everybody but you acknowledges that the overall quality of play increases over time, but they say the important thing is that Jack had to beat Hall of Famers. As everybody knows, a win for Jack meant battling Hogan, Arnie, Lee, and Tom down the stretch, all in the same group.
For years, I’ve been making quantitative arguments that golfers ranked 100-400 definitely make the field stronger. Through 2009, and maybe even still, Tiger’s winning percentage in PGA events was the highest ever recorded for a long career, but his winning percentage in the WGC’s was about twice as high. So it’s twice as hard to win an event with 140 players as one with 70 players, even if the extra 70 players are all worse than the first 70. Which is the opposite of saying nobody ranked 70 or above matters.
And for the same reason, I’ve been arguing for years that the rankings formula should take field size into account. There’s no way an 18-man event should get more points than a decent full field event, even if it’s the top 18 players in the world. And even if Jack got an OFFICIAL PGA win in the 1976 World Series of Golf, with a field of 20. And even if that win over 19 guys gave him one of his money titles, because he got $100K for winning it, which was more than the first prize money for the Masters, US Open, and British Open combined.
As a Tiger hater, I have to admit I really miss him. I wish he would just get good enough again for all the Tiger sycophants to get all lathered up and then fall apart again.
It’s almost worth him hanging it up, just to put an end to posts like that.
Take it easy Tony. I just always need someone to pull against.
Except that is exactly what Jack did, and (for the most part) Tiger didn’t.
I realize that I am beating a dead horse here, but 7 times-SEVEN-he finished 2nd to Trevino or Watson, the two of them clear of the field. Tiger simply cannot match that, and it something you must take into account, if you are truly interested in a fair appraisal of both players.
It may make “the fields stronger”, but it isn’t clear to me that that equates to making it harder to actually, you know, win the tournament. Players in that group (70-140 or 100-400, or whatever) may make cuts here and there, but are rarely going to make their presences felt come Sunday afternoon. Which is the only thing that counts.
Now, if you want to say that the 20-50 group is stronger now than then, and that fact, specifically, makes it tougher to win now, vs. in bygone days, then yeah. No argument (note I once provided evidence to back you up on this, and of course, you prejudicially shot it down out of hand).
But, if given a choice of a do-over duel, against identical fields, I’ll take Jack’s greater consistency (and healthier body) over Tiger’s occasional bursts of sheer brilliance (and busted discs) any day. He put himself in a position to win a larger number of times, and that is what ultimately counts, whether they get to do it zillions of times over many space-time continua, or just once. And Jack had his moments, too.