I won’t ask for a cite because you obviously missed the point of the hypothetical just whooooshed right by your head.
think big picture and don’t get bogged down in the details.
No it wouldn’t. Most people thought the opposite while discussing Federer as GOAT.
I didn’t say or imply it was a direct quote. But it is a fact that Jack is claiming eight scoring titles on his website, when he actually didn’t win any.
He is welcome to play as many or few events as he wants, but he can’t claim a scoring title unless he meets the rules, and he didn’t. To claim a scoring title under those circumstances is tantamount to saying that the rules were unfair to him.
Tiger is currently leading the scoring average for this season. He seems to be getting his game back (obviously he is not all the way back), so nobody will be surprised if he ends up with the lowest average at the end of the year. And yet, he can’t possibly win the Vardon this year, because he withdrew during the last round at Doral, and you can’t win the Vardon if you withdrew during a round (the “Calvin Peete rule,” although Tiger was obviously not trying to protect his average).
He also had the lowest scoring average, by far, in 2008, but his surgery forced him to miss the last half of the year, and he didn’t meet the required minimum number of rounds.
I defy you to find a claim for a 2008 scoring title on his website, and I’ll bet my house he won’t claim one for this year, either (unless the PGA Tour version of the scoring award allows a WD; I’m not sure whether it does or not).
Jack can’t have it both ways. Either he deserves a scoring title, or he doesn’t. Clearly, he thinks he does, so clearly, he thinks that the rules were unfair to him.
Sorry, you are just too cerebral for me. Rereading your post as best I can, I reluctantly concede that if you played golf on a pinball machine, a larger element of luck would be involved.
Now, what does that have to do with the greens Jack actually used?
Do the letters “IMO” mean anything to you? I am stating my opinion and the reason for it.
Jack also said that he pledged to Barbara that he would not spend more than two weeks away from home. and his outside business interests could not have helped his game.
I stand by my opinion. If jack played in 6-8 more tournaments per year during the 70’s and early 80’s, I think he would have won more tournaments. Jack was winning more tournaments per year when he was playing more tournaments. Jack won 38 toiurnaments in his first ten years, 31 touranments in years 11-20 and three in after year 20.
I do not think he would have won the same percentage.
I am saying that Snead’s record became less of a priority as he got into his career and Barbara had more and more kids.
and Yes I think TW would have won more tournaments as well if he didn’t get into Nicklaus schedule mode early in his career.
Like I said, I don’t follow tennis, but since this is the only argument I’ve seen from the guy that actually makes sense, I’m willing to go with it.
But the one thing I do know about tennis is that it seems to have more dominant players than any other sport I follow, except maybe boxing. It’s not like golf at all, because in golf, at least since they got rid of the stymie, there isn’t anything you can do to directly influence your opponent’s shot. In fact, it’s not uncommon for the winner to never even play in the same group as the guy who finishes second.
In tennis, every match is one on one, and you can deliberately attack his weak points. I conclude from that the the analogy is not very exact.
But at least it makes sense. All his other arguments seem to be pulled from his nether regions at best, and straw men at worst, so this one is by far his best.
sigh…My example was to show that there was much more randomness and rub of the green because of golf course conditions and inferior equipment. Good breaks and bad breaks. to consistently win and contend in that era tells me that jack was even better than his record indicates. Do you realize that only a total of 24 different player beat Nicklaus from 1963 to 1980 in the British Open. 18 years, only 24 different players beat him (some a couple of times). During that period, Arnold Palmer never beat him in the British Open. Gary Player only beat him in the two years that he won the Championship
That is entirely due to the fact that not many Americans played the Open in those days (especially in the early part) and the rest of the world sucked at golf.
He had the lowest scoring average 8 times. That is what he is claiming. He is not claiming Vardon Trophies
(He actually had a lower scoring average 9 times than the Vardon Trophy winner, but only claims 8 scoring titles)
The Vardon Trophy trinket was not important enough for him to to play a few more events but the fact remains that he outscored his peers 8 seasons. And IMO he would have won the VT if the same rules of 1988 where used during his career.
Trust me. The problem is not that your example is too complex for us mortals. The problem is that it’s a bad argument. It assumes conditions that were not there, and it has no way to quantify them even if they were.
By far, the worst greens ever must have been those in the 19th century British Opens. And they had many repeat champions. So obviously, either the breaks balance out, or they aren’t significant to begin with.
It was only fairly recently that you were even allowed to clean your ball on a green. When Bobby Jones was playing, if you hit a perfect shot to a soft green and the ball imbedded into the putting surface, you had to somehow dig it out with your next shot. And yet, Jones managed to get top tens in the US Open 8 out of 9 years. So much for your “randomness” theory.
Do you realize that except for the likes of Phil Rogers, hardly any Americans even bothered to play the British Open during Jack’s prime?
It was a joke until Arnie resurrected it. Hogan couldn’t play the PGA, so he could have played the British Open every year if he had wanted to. The one time he did, he won it. He probably could have won it ten times. It just wasn’t worth the bother to him.
By the same token, few foreign players played in the PGA during Jack’s prime.
That’s why some people say majors are harder to win today. Jack was the only player who even played all four every year in the 60’s. Today, all the top players build their schedules around them, so it stands to reason that they are at least as hard to win as they were in Jack’s day.
But you are the only guy I know of who’s ever claimed that the foundation for Team Tiger is the belief that 14 of his are better than 18 of Jack’s. Nobody says that. I think it’s obvious that the fields have gotten steadily deeper, with the exception of during and immediately after WWII, but it’s just an unwritten rule that you can’t quantify a difference in eras, so you assume that Jack and Tiger and Hogan and Jones could only beat the guys who showed up, and look at how dominant they were in their era.
And Tiger was the most dominant over a sustained period. You can argue that Jones had a better 1930, depending on how much weight you give to the very weak amateur “majors,” but that was just one year. Hogan had a great 1953, but he couldn’t have won the PGA, even if it had been played in October, so it’s not as good as Tiger’s 2000. And Jack never won more than two majors in a year, so he’s really not even in the running.
But none of that is the real reason that majors are a stupid standard. The real reason is that none of the all-time greats before Jack could even play four majors a year. Some hit their prime before the Masters or PGA were even founded, some played before travel across the Atlantic wasn’t ridiculously time-consuming and expensive, and all had several majors cancelled for one or two world wars.
It would be like Tiger declaring that weeks as #1, or WGC titles, should be the new standard. Just completely unfair to the other candidates.
It wasn’t important to Tiger, either. He was so far ahead in 2006 that all he had to do to win it was show up at the Disney, which was played a short drive from his home. He didn’t bother, and so he didn’t meet the minimum rounds, and Furyk won the Vardon that year.
So the fact is this: Tiger won more official scoring titles, without even trying, than Jack awarded himself by ignoring the rules. Given that, I don’t see why you’re pursuing this. Jack comes out on the bottom no matter how you look at it.
Oops, that should have been “top twos.”
You realize that these are arguments in favor of Jack, right? [If you assume they were in fact “better”, which is a number of cases I dispute, such as Miller, who only had a 2 1/2 year run at or near the top.] While overall fields are deeper than ever, yes, during Tiger’s prime nobody really challenged him the way that the players you listed challenged Jack, and frankly that counts for more than the overall field depth does, as the top players are the ones who are winning the majority of the majors (or, at least that was true until a few years ago). Lefty is probably his biggest rival, but Tiger already had won 8 majors by the time Lefty got his first (and I’ll point out that neither of these two men have ever really contended against each other at the bitter end of any major, not in the way that Trevino and Watson did vs. Jack). This isn’t the be-all argument in favor of Jack, but it is a definite point in his favor.
[Yes I used the same argument against Federer this past weekend, but it’s an even-stronger one in tennis where journeymen very rarely win majors, while in golf your Charles Coody’s and Larry Mize’s will regularly snag one here and there.]
I was actually only talking about one year for Miller, namely 1974. He was clearly better than Jack that year, and if you think majors are everything, you could say Player was even better, since he won two that year. But this isn’t about Miller’s place on the all-time list; it’s just a refutation of the idea that Jack dominated the tour throughout his prime.
You can be the best player in the world, like Luke Donald supposedly is now, and still not be dominant. You surely can’t be dominant if you’re no better than the third best player in the world.
You are not the first person who has attempted to cite Jack’s losing record against the likes of Trevino and Watson to prove he’s better than Tiger. I’ve never understood it. I suppose it’s possible that the five or six best golfers of the 20th century all hit their peak around 1970, but I think it’s more likely that there were five or six very good players, and then a rapid drop-off in quality that isn’t there today, so those guys feasted on the weaker fields. I guess there’s no way to prove it either way.
He changed his priorities, less golf, more other stuff.
“less golf” is not an attribute that would naturally apply to someone who is considered the greatest golfer of all time. “less golf” means fewer golf related achievements, which we use to judge how great a golfer is. When other golfers were golfing, he chose to do other things. That results in being ineligible for awards, fewer tour wins, etc. I’m not going to ignore the fact that he sat at home with his wife instead of playing golf, and pro-rate his achievements as if he golfed instead. If he wanted to get recognition for those sorts of achievements, he should have been on the course with everyone else.
He gets credit for what he did on the course, not what he could have done, if he had chosen to play.
So what?
No, this is a point in Tiger’s favor. Seems he was more dominant.
Yes, this is a chicken-and-egg thing at work here, but if you look at the close majors that Tiger won, he wasn’t beating the best players of his generation-he was either blowing everyone away (and deserves credit for doing so), or he was ekeing out wins against the likes of Sergio Garcia, Chris DeMarco, Rocco Mediate, or Bob May.
The best golfers of his generation (ranking by majors won which trumps most everything else mentioned in this thread) would probably include the following. After the number of majors won is what Tiger did in those tournaments:
Mickelson: 4 majors, 22nd, 3rd, 4th, 4th
Ernie Els: 3 majors, 19th and 28th
Vijay Singh: 3 majors, 10th, 5th, 24th
Padraig Harrington, 3 majors, 12th, DNP, DNP
Payne Stewart: 2 majors, 3rd* (he won his other when Tiger was an amateur)
Retief Goosen: 2 majors, 12th and 17th
Angel Cabrera: 2 majors, 2nd & 6th
Jose Maria Olazabal: 2 majors, 18th*
Lee Janzen: 2 majors, 18th*
Mark O’Meara: 2 majors, 8th, 3rd
That is rather underwhelming, frankly. In none of these cases was Tiger and his rival clear of everyone else-even in the lone 2nd place finish he was tied with another golfer. With Jack however not only do we have his numerous 2nd place finishes (17 to 6 for Tiger), I count 10 where there was only one other player to beat ('77 Masters, '60, '68, '71 & '82 US Opens, '67, '72 & '77 British Opens, '74 & '83 PGA’s). These, of course, include Gary Player in the '74 PGA, his duels with Trevino in the '71 US and '72 British Opens and with Watson in the '77 Masters and British Open and the '82 US Open, all regarded as some of the greatest tournaments ever played, 2 guys at the absolute peak of their games.
The point is that Jack could easily have had 5 or so more majors, if it weren’t for another great player rising to the occasion. The corrolary is that the best rivals of Jack’s peak I think were arguaby greater than Tiger’s rivals. Tiger simply doesn’t have that kind of track record-his rivals either wilted in the face of his greatness, or Tiger wasn’t equal to the task on those occasions when they didn’t fold. It’s much harder to find any “extra” hypothetical majors for Tiger, at which point you can argue that, positing today’s deeper fields transposed to the past, that another player or two might have horned their way into one of Jack’s duels. You can, but as I said upthread it’s often the best golfers of a generation who are contending and winning-as in I don’t think the deeper fields made that much of a difference, when you are by definition talking about the far right hand part of the bell curve (tho as of the past 6 years or so they finally appear to be doing so).
But how Tiger does over the next few years will probably settle the deal for most (including me), but I’ll just point out that majors for most great players become very scarce past age 35.
LOL, doesn’t seem like there’s any way for Tiger to get on your good side, is there?
John has a point. I looked at their first 15 years of play, starting with their first major win. That’s 60 Major tournaments
Tiger - 14 Wins (23%) - 29 Top 5 finishes (48%) - 35 Top 10 (58%)
Jack - 14 Wins (23%) - 40 Top 5 (67%) - 45 Top 10 (75%)
Jack was more often in the mix to win a Major, more often competitive in a Major. He also did face competition that did a better job of separating themselves from the pack. Guys who won Majors in bunches, or just excelled over the years, Palmer, Trevino, Watson, Player. Tiger didn’t have competitors like that.
I’m already on the record here as saying Tiger Woods is the best ever. That’s partly because of his phenomenal record and partly because I’m usually prejudiced in favor of modern athletes over the greats of the past. Even Stan Musial would surely agree that Albert Pujols is a bigger, stronger, faster athlete than he ever was, even in his prime. And even Jack Nicklaus would surely tell you “Tiger is a MUCH better athlete than I ever was.”
That said, I DON’T think “Jack was better” is a silly argument. It’s a perfectly valid point of view.
Nor do I see why any particular milestone should change anyone’s mind about ANY athlete in ANY sport.
MANY smart people think Rod Laver was the greatest tennis player ever. It’s not relevant to them that Roger Federer has more majors.
MANY smart people think Babe Ruth was the greatest hitter ever, and it’s not relevant to them that Henry Aaron had more careers hits and homers.
MANY smart people think Jim Brown was the greatest running back ever, and don’t CARE that Emmitt Smith has more career yards.
There’s rarely anything magical about any one number that automatically makes ANY athlete the best ever.