Oh, and I updated the article-that-shall-not-be-linked-to to try to clear up the points that TonySinclair brought up.
In what universe? Yes, golfers lose less of their talent as they age than in just about any sport, but they do lose it. Our new British Open champion, for example, before said Claret Jug became his again, missed 4 cuts in his previous 10 majors, with only 2 top tens. Contrast that with his record from 2000-2005, with 14 top-tens in 20 majors.
You seem to think Tiger’s recent struggles are the exception as a golfer moves into his late 30’s, but they are in fact the rule. In another thread I outlined how many majors were won by golfers past their 36th birthdays, and Hogan had 8 (yes an amazing feat), Snead had 5, and Jack had 4. Many greats didn’t win any after that date. And Tiger doesn’t inspire confidence with his continual fades in major after major; to get 4 majors from here on out (to merely tie Jack) won’t be easy at all. And he’ll be 37 next year.
I’m curious as to why you give a lot of weight to overall tournaments won, but virtually no weight to top 5’s (top 2’s, 3’s, 10’s or whatever) in majors? Seems less like someone who is interested in the actual truth of the matter and more like someone who has already made up his mind and is cherry-picking stats that favor his champion. They are evidence-they may not be worthy of being the most heavily weighted, but they most certainly do count. And Tiger, when he wasn’t winning, didn’t have a ton of top-whatevers. And I recall being impressed by Jack’s record in this sense years ago, so that doesn’t wash either.
I guess that makes Jack Nicklaus himself dumb, since he made the conscious decision to focus almost solely on the majors (yes, with his familial concerns factoring into that somewhat, but only somewhat).
Oh, I’ll give Tiger props if he can pull it off, but so far yet he hasn’t quite done it, but it is close. I still remain firmly convinced that the numbers of elite players that he had to fight off to win majors during his prime weren’t that significant (based on the almost total lack of duels with said alleged players, win or lose), giving him a freer chance at winning more of them, even if the total field depth was greater than in Jack’s day (IMNSHO these two factors probably almost exactly balance each other out). How do you quantify that? I’m not sure, but the evidence so far would seem to favor that viewpoint, pretty strongly.
Wow, I strongly disagree. All he did was link to a site that had nothing but stuff relevant to the thread — no ads, no solicitations, no nothing. How is that worse than all the millions of HuffPost links people post?
If it hadn’t been his own site, I guess it would have been fine, right? So can I link to it?
As I said, it was his own link (same name as his username here) in his very first post on these boards. So it’s hard not to think or see that as coming here just to shill one’s own website.
Actually, since it was his first post, posting a link to try to get people to visit any website would have been frowned upon and seen as possible spam.
As I said, he’s free to put it as his homepage or in his signature…it would still be accessible.
Actually, Jack played a schedule very similar to Tiger’s. Even though he began his PGA career at age 22, and Tiger began his at age 20, Jack had played more PGA events by age 34 than Tiger has to date (at age 36). The first year he played less than 15 events was when he was 39.
Tiger’s schedule is very selective. In fact, Tiger’s schedule now consists almost entirely of the very strongest events on the PGA Tour. He plays the four majors, the four (counting the new HSBC) WGCs, the four FedEx Playoff events, and the strongest invitationals – Memorial, Bay Hill, and Quail Hollow. He then adds his own ATT invitational (strong, but a notch down from the other three), and a couple random events to address the complaints that he never plays the less prestigious events.
Considering his strength of schedule, if he breaks Snead’s record for career wins, which now seems inevitable, IMO it will be a greater feat than beating Jack’s majors record, because less luck will be involved. I realize that I am very decidedly in the minority with that opinion.
But back to Jack, although he played more often than Tiger, he did play less often than most of his peers. While the other pros were slogging it out at the Podunk Open, Jack was scouting out the major venues, playing practice rounds weeks in advance. Nobody else did this, because nobody knew that majors would become the standard. In fact, nobody but Jack even played all four majors every year. His approach to the majors gave him a big advantage over the competition.
Today, of course, all the top players prepare for the majors the way Jack did, which makes it much harder to win a major today.
About eight months ago, Tiger was leading the weak-field Australian Open after two rounds, but then faded. Experts like Brandel Chamblee wondered if he could ever put four good rounds together again. Six months later, Tiger had four wins, counting his unofficial Chevron win.
That’s the progression Tiger talks about. First you do it on the range, then in practice rounds, then in competition, then on Sunday in competition, then on Sunday in majors. He was on step 3 eight months ago, now he’s on step 4. IMO he’ll be all the way back by next year, but I wouldn’t bet against him at the PGA next month.
His progress in majors is obvious. In the last six majors, he has gone:
2011 US Open — DNP (injury)
2011 British Open — DNP (injury)
2011 PGA — MC
2012 Masters — T40
2012 US Open — T21
2012 British Open — T3
You don’t need a math degree to see that he is trending upward. To say that his failure to win last week is an indicator of his future chances, when he is obviously still adjusting to his swing changes (especially in his wedge game, which is way off), is superficial at best. And he was a lot closer last week than the score indicated — one not especially lucky bounce, putting him in that same bunker but a couple feet farther from the face, might have let him save par instead of making triple, and he wouldn’t have had to take as many chances coming in. I know, ifs and buts.
To say Tiger won’t win in his late 30’s because other golfers didn’t is not persuasive, because Tiger has been doing things that no other golfer has done all his life. Hogan was in the top ten in every major he played in from age 37 to 44, and won six of them, even though his shattered legs (and his disdain for all but one British Open) left him only two majors a year. If Hogan can do that, so can Tiger, because there is simply no comparison in their careers before age 37. I think Tiger will have 20 majors when he’s 40, and possibly 25 by age 45.
Um, because nobody else does? Be honest, if Jack had 18 wins, four seconds, and five thirds, and Tiger had 14 majors, 15 seconds, and 16 thirds, and a Tiger fan made a chart like the other fellow and claimed it proved that Tiger had more “major points” than Jack, how far do you think he would get?
Like I said, I think the “major points” are interesting, and I’ve always thought that Jack’s total of top tens was impressive. But show me a post, magazine article, video clip, editorial, or even fanfic from before, say, 2008, from anyone, including you, that based an argument about anything on how many times a guy placed fifth in a major. I can see it on a list of possible tiebreakers, but it would be pretty far down.
Horseshit. Except for one-time stuff like Rookie of the Year (which Tiger also won), I am using every PGA year-end stat or award that has always been recognized as significant. Most wins in a season, most earnings in a season, lowest scoring average, Player of the Year. Basically, every stat you see when you look up “PGA Tour” in wikipedia. Tiger compiled more of each of them in 13 years than anyone else did in an entire career. How is it cherry-picking to use every significant award available?
I could make a case for a lot more stuff than I’ve used. Tiger was clearly the best player in the world for 11 years (1997, 1999-2003, 2005-2009). Jack was probably in the top three for 20 years or so, but he was the obvious best player in the world for only about five years of his career (1965, 67, 72, 73, and 75). I’ll be glad to debate any year you dispute, either way (i.e. too many for Tiger, or too few for Jack).
And most of Jack’s majors, at least into the mid-70’s, had only about half of the best pros in the world — the Americans mostly skipped the British Open, and the internationals mostly skipped the other three. Meanwhile, Tiger has 16 WGC wins, against all the best players in the world, to go with his 14 majors.
Would you agree that a win in a WGC is as impressive as a 5th in a major? Do you know that only one other player has won 3 of them, and only four others have won 2?
On the contrary, it makes Jack the smartest golfer who ever lived.
In 1963 Jack told reporters, “My aim is to win more golf tournaments than anybody who ever lived. I want to be the greatest.” By the early 70’s, he saw that he was probably not going to catch Snead, but he was about to catch Bobby Jones (just last week, Jack told a BBC interviewer that he had never counted the majors he had won before 1970). So he did the impossible — he picked his best stat, namely major wins, and he lobbied to get it accepted as the standard for all other golfers, even the ones who played when there were only one or two majors existing. And damn if he didn’t pull it off, with the able assistance of Dan Jenkins, who was then SI’s chief golf writer, in an era where that was relevant.
I can’t imagine Tiger having the audacity of trying to get people to accept WGC’s as the standard, and he would never pull it off. But I have a feeling that if Tiger breaks both Jack’s and Snead’s records, that whoever tries to replace Tiger as the greatest ever will have to do the same.
This (Hogan’s record, which is nonetheless still pretty incredible) contradicts your constant contention that fields are much deeper now (one which I agree with-in part). I see a former elite player struggling to regain his former form, and not quite succeeding, with the clock ticking against him. And yes it IS persuasive because nobody has done it in 50 years now-golfers age more quickly than the conventional wisdom says they do.
I’ll take that bet-I don’t think he has 4 majors left in him, but if he does get the 5 he needs you win. 25 is an absolute fantasy.
But that isn’t the case here-Jack beats him in all of those categories. Wins do count (and count a lot), but we are looking for evidence of a player’s overall excellence, and the close ones are evidence, even if you declaim that it is. I don’t care what some pundit somewhere claims (and never have, be it golf or baseball or whatever). If it was 18/17/14 vs. 19/4/5, then yes it would be a point in favor of the former player.
If you are using absolute earnings, well purses have skyrocketed in the interim. I assume you are not tho…
I do hope that you aren’t (once again, having already had it debunked) using the Vardon Trophy as a stand-in for scoring average. Even then, I’m not sure we can do cross-era comparisons of scoring averages (given how they have gone down over the past 40 years). Jack lead that 8 times anyway, even if the Vardon Trophy people didn’t deign to recognize it.
In any event a lot of this stuff just double-counts what a player has done in any given season, so no, I’m not going to just take every one of those categories and give each of them significant weight. For me, it’s majors first, overall wins second, followed, at a fair distance, by close finishes in majors. The rest is window dressing and/or giving him double credit for the same accomplishments.
Again, as I’ve pointed out before (ad nauseum), this favors Jack. During Tiger’s prime, he simply didn’t have the stiff competition for the top spot that Jack did-the people who did win majors over the past two decades also tended to have a lot of them outside of Tiger’s prime (1997-2009), such as Els. I’ve already pointed out how Tiger curiously hardly ever dueled any of these people (Els, Mickelson, Vijay et al.) down to the wire in a major, win or lose. And one Lee Trevino or Tom Watson (or Phil Mickelson) is worth 25 Charles Coody’s or Lucas Glover’s (i.e. I put much more weight on the elite players than I do on anyone in the “field”, even if said field is deeper now).
That’s why your little list of years is faulty, because Jack was dealing with Arnold Palmer on the front end, Lee Trevino in the middle, Tom Watson at the end, and Gary Player most of the way. These four players won 28 majors (c. 20 during Jack’s roughly 20 year prime), along with a bunch of regular tournaments, a record which puts Tiger’s rivals to shame. Mickelson is his best rival, but he only won his first major after Tiger had won his 8th.
Recalling that you said “clearly”, I’d dispute 1966 (Jack won 2 majors), 2003 (no majors for Tiger, and I’d take Vijay), 1963 (again 2 majors), 1973 (he and Miller still won one each, and 7 regular tourney wins isn’t slouching), and perhaps even 1980 (2 majors for Jack once again) or 2009 (no majors for Tiger, tho he did win 6 other tourneys).
The WGC hasn’t been around very long. And once jets became common most Americans did cross the pond for the British, which was earlier than the “mid-70’s”.
Forget most of the preceding-I want you to directly address my contention that Tiger had few elite rivals while he was on the top, and this mostly explains the edges (relatively insignificant as they are) that you put forth in Tiger’s favor. So far all I’ve seen is you dodging and evading this issue, one which is probably the most important one in this discussion.
I am gravely insulted that you would even hint that I might be comparing Tiger’s $million-plus paydays with Jack’s $ten grand paydays straight across, even if I hadn’t said FOUR DIFFERENT WAYS that I was looking at the year-end awards. But I’ll say it a fifth way: I am talking about the yearly awards the PGA hands out to the player who, for example, won the most money that season, or had the lowest scoring average, or won the POY. The ones that are listed for each year in the wiki entry for the PGA Tour. Tiger has more yearly money titles, more yearly scoring titles, more years where he won the most events that year, and more POYs, than any other golfer. Those awards indicate dominance over your contemporaries, especially when you win all of them the same year, as Tiger has done several times, and as Jack has done zero times.
And I don’t care about the Vardon rules, either. Palmer, Casper, Trevino, and Watson all won Vardons under those rules, and Jack had more time to prepare for majors by playing less rounds, so that was his choice. But even if you grant his eight imaginary scoring titles, Tiger has nine official scoring titles. And he could award himself two more, for years he didn’t play enough rounds, but he doesn’t have the arrogance to do that.
If winning less money titles, scoring titles, POYs, etc. favors Jack, then Ty Tryon must be the greatest of all time, because he didn’t win any.
So what? Jack didn’t worry about how many more chances at majors he had than Hagen did.
Ridiculous. Trans-Atlantic jet service was available before 1960, but I defy you to list even half a dozen top pros, other than Jack, who played four majors a year, every year, from 1962 to 1975. Or even for any five consecutive years during that time.
I like you, so I’ll help you out on the European side – I went through the list of Order of Merit winners from 1955 to 1975, to see how many American majors they played from 1962 (when Jack turned pro) to 1974. Guess what the grand total of US Open and PGA starts were for all those guys combined in those 13 years?
If you guessed a positive number, you were too high. Of all the players that won the OOM during the years 1955-75, all but one of them never played either tournament in their lives. The one who did, our old pal Peter Oosterhuis, never played them before 1975.
As for the Masters, Oostie also played four of those in the 13 years we’re talking about. Two other OOM winners played it twice, and three others played it once. That’s it.
And there was a lot more incentive for Euros to play US majors than for Americans to play the British, because the American majors paid about ten times as much.
But I’ll help you out with the Americans, too. Phil Rogers was a contemporary of Jack, and he played the Open more often than most. He played majors from 1956 to 1977, and won his first PGA event in 1962. But he only played the Open 7 times.
Arnold Palmer is credited with rescuing the Open from obscurity. Hardly any Americans played it before he revived it, and he won it twice. But he skipped it five times in those 13 years.
Billy Casper was better than Jack in the late 60’s, and he played majors from 1956 to 2005. But he only played the Open five times.
Tom Watson might be the greatest Open champ since Vardon. He played his first Masters in 1970, but he played his first Open in 1975.
Or maybe the greatest Open champ was Aussie Peter Thomson, who also won it five times. He had an almost unbroken string of top tens in the Open that began in 1951 and ended in 1972. But he never played the PGA, he never played the US Open during Jack’s pro career, and he played only one Masters during Jack’s pro career. And Oz is closer to the US than to Britain.
Heck, just name ONE pro besides Jack who played all four majors for any consecutive five years before 1975. I think the best you can do is Doug Sanders, who was probably second to Jack for most Opens played by a pre-1975 American, and is also second to the “agony of defeat” ski jumper for biggest disaster that got replayed a million times, when he pushed an 18-inch putt to lose the Open. But even he couldn’t string five consecutive four-major years together.
The data I just listed is your answer. Jack and Arnie and Gary and Lee were big fish in a small pond. Even if we assume that golfers are the only athletes who haven’t improved in the last 50 years, even if we ignore all the reasons Jack listed in his book that make it harder for the best players today to separate themselves from the pack, we are left with the fact that before the mid-70’s AT LEAST, there were seldom more than about half the best players in the world playing in any one tournament.
If you don’t think that makes a huge difference, look at Tiger’s winning percentage in majors, non-majors, and WGCs before 2010. I’m tired after looking up all the OOM winners, so I’ll just do this from memory, but I don’t think it’s off more than a point or two:
Majors: 28%
Non-majors: 27%
Stroke play WGCs: 63%
His winning percentage zooms in WGCs, because their fields are only half the size of the majors (about 75 for WGCs, about 150 for majors, except the Masters, which is why it’s the easiest to win). And the missing 75 players are all WORSE than the 75 players in the WGC. Now imagine that instead of the bottom 75 players being gone, you start at the top and remove every other player, so you are missing 37 of the top players, and 37 of the bottom players.
I doubt that it worked out exactly like that when most Americans didn’t play the British, and most internationals didn’t play the US majors, but it’s probably a good approximation. And that’s all you need to know about why the top players racked up big numbers back then.
There are more of the world’s strongest players in any of half a dozen regular tour events, and all the WGC’s, than in any of the majors in Jack’s day.
Huh?
London to NYC is ~3500 miles
Melboune to Honolulu is ~5500 miles
That’s fascinating, but they don’t play majors in Honolulu, and you seem to have missed a “to.”
The relevant figures are:
Melbourne to Augusta, Ga is ~9800 miles.
Melbourne to St. Andrews is ~10500 miles.
I just noticed that Wikipedia’s list of Order of Merit winners only goes back to 1971, so some people may be wondering what I was smoking when I talked about the winners from 1955 to 1975 in my post above.
I suppose that Wikipedia does that because they first started calling it the “Order of Merit” in 1971, the year the European touring pros split off from the club pros and founded their own organization, but they have playing pro golf in Europe rather longer that. The award the OOM winner receives is called the Harry Vardon Trophy, and it goes back to 1939. It is, of course, completely different from the PGA of America’s Vardon Trophy, which is awarded to the PGA member with the lowest scoring average for the year.
I used the list of Harry Vardon Trophy winners from thissite. The winners from 1955-75 are:
1975 Dale Hayes
1974 Peter Oosterhuis
1973 Peter Oosterhuis
1972 Peter Oosterhuis
1971 Peter Oosterhuis
1970 Neil Coles
1969 Bernard Gallacher
1968 Brian Huggett
1967 Malcolm Gregson
1966 Peter Alliss
1965 Bernard Hunt
1964 Peter Alliss
1963 Neil Coles
1962 Christy O’Connor
1961 Christy O’Connor
1960 Bernard Hunt
1959 Dai Rees
1958 Bernard Hunt
1957 Eric Brown
1956 Harry Weetman
1955 Dai Rees
And if you’ve never heard of most of them, it’s for exactly the reason I gave above — although they were officially recognized as the best golfers in Europe, most of them never played in the US, except for an occasional Masters or two. Pro golf is completely different today.
I will concede the British Open thing; purses started skyrocketing in the late 70’s, but before then a transatlantic plane ticket (+ associated costs) would have represented a significant percentage of most touring pros budgets. Nonetheless, Americans were probably significantly deeper and better than the international contingent was back then, and the main evidence for that was their performance in the British from Arnie’s wins onward, despite their low numbers. Today the international guys have caught up and probably surpassed the Americans, and that needs to be factored in, yes, but the American fields back then were pretty deep in and of themselves.
I still contend that, despite deeper fields overall, few elite players challenged Tiger during his prime, and I believe these two factors (mostly) balance each other out, with probably today’s field depth being slightly more significant, but not overly so. The main reason why is that the elite players typically win a large proportion of all majors played, then you have the intermediate players (Angel Cabrera, Jim Furyk, Hubert Green, Larry Nelson et al.) who all told will pick up quite a few, and the “field” (using the gambling parlance sense of the term here) not quite so much, and this is still mostly true today, tho in the past few years the field has exerted itself pretty strongly, yes. That will only last until another great player comes along, tho. I thought McIlroy would be the “one”, but he has mostly spun his wheels this year.
The ultimate reason why 2nd’s and 3rds belong in the discussion is that they represent other majors that could have been won, times when Tiger or Jack were at the tops of their games, and lost anyway. Tiger most certainly deserves credit for winning most of his close ones, but, equally, the Mickelsons and Elses and Singhs deserve blame for not challenging him (recall the so-called “Tiger Effect”?). I just find it exceedingly odd that this literally never has happened, win or lose; to never truly duel the best players of his generation down to the wire? That says a lot about how hard (or easy) it was for him to win majors, and says a lot about his top competition.
If you go and examine all 2nd place finishes where Jack or Tiger was at least 2 additional strokes ahead of everyone else, you’ll see Jack losing to Trevino (3 times), Watson 3 times, and Palmer once, 9 times all told. Hint: the same exact guys Jack kept losing out to in your little seasonal competition a few posts back. Jack also finished 3rd 3 times one stroke out of a playoff, Tiger only once. And as an aside both Trevino and Watson probably had the ultimate personalities to be able to beat a Jack or a Tiger while the latter were at their best; plucky perennial optimists who simply didn’t let outside factors affect them at all. Contrast that with Mickelson’s travails before he finally broke through in 2004. [I wonder how things would have been different for David Duval if he hadn’t been injured-hometown rooting interest for me I will note. For 3 years he won a ton of tourneys.]
Meanwhile, who was Tiger losing to in such contests? Rich Beem, Michael Campbell, and Yang Yong-eun, journeymen all. And that’s it: 3 times total. Likewise in 3 playoffs he has participated in (all wins), he also beat 3 journeymen (Mediate, May and DiMarco). If Els or Mickelson had stayed with him a few times, it’s quite possible that Tiger would have only 10 or 11 majors. Likewise if Trevino or Watson never existed, Jack might have 21 or even more. Fine, you say, switch their eras; then Jack with today’s deeper fields probably loses a few majors, Tiger gains a few against weaker ones (not bringing in the Lee Elder/Charlie Sifford/Masters discrimination thing, understand), and we are back to even.
At this point we are at an impasse: I’m not sure how to (A) fully quantify the overall depths of fields, (B) see how this affects the chances of winning for players of various abilities, nor © identify precisely who was elite, then and now, and what their chances were. I can probably get a handle on the (A) a bit by examining the spread of strokes in the top tens over the years (some preliminary work does indicate some large gaps in the 60’s, declining a bit starting in the early 70’s, somewhat tighter now). © would probably involve balancing a lot of subjectivities and intangibles, tho it could be done if all parties agreed on definitions beforehand. (B) is likely going to be a bear (no pun intended), involving estimates for a number of overall major fields over the years.
The ultimate test is how Tiger does for the next 10 years or so-yes whenever he is close I almost reflexively pull for him (unless Lefty is in the mix too), but the last 4 years certainly don’t inspire confidence, even given his resurgence this year. I’m tempted to launch a poll here, but need some interest expressed by the peanut gallery first; most golf journalists probably would vote for Jack based on their careers so far.
[An aside about Tom Watson. He was actually in contention during the 1975 Masters-paired with Jack in fact-until he dumped 3 balls into the pond in front of the 16th green. Many players would have let that destroy them, but to Tom’s credit he came back and won the Open Championship later that year and then beat Jack in 2 majors in 1977.]
Ok I did miss a word, but the fact is that 700 miles is not that all that much when you are talking about 10,000 miles.
And we are talking 1950’s and 1960’s era. I think traveling to London from Australia was far more common than to Los Angeles.
And the PGAT of the 1950’s was not very tolerant of foreign interlopers taking their prize money. Vis a Vis Bobby Locke
Alright, in an attempt to gauge overall field strength, I did a study comparing the top tens in the various majors from 1970-1979 vs. 2001-2010 (I omitted 2000 for obvious reasons, tho I’ll list it below anyway). I calculated the average number of strokes that golfers in the top 10 were behind the leader (ties leading to a playoff were counted as zeroes, and I included all ties for the 10th spot after some deliberation), as well as the standard deviation of said strokes.
In the 1970’s, the top ten averaged 5.47 strokes behind the leader, with a 2.00 SD.
In the 2000’s, the top ten averaged 5.28 strokes behind the leader, but with a 1.73 SD.
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.
[One additional way of gauging field depth might be to count how many people managed to finish in the top ten of at least one major. I’m done here tho.]
I think that at the same time that the international guys were surging, the US players were declining pretty severely (the last 13 or so Ryder Cup results bear that out pretty strongly: 8 European wins, 4 US wins, 1 tie). Since 1990 US players haven’t won that many majors, and this past decade it’s gotten worse; aside from Tiger and Mickelson no American player has won more than one since 1998. Even in the 1990’s you had just Lee Janzen & John Daly (2 each), Payne Stewart (3), and Mark O’Meara and his big 1998 season where he won two.
The 1970-1990 American contigent puts that to absolute shame: in addition to Jack and his 11, Watson and his 8, and Trevino with his 5*, you also had Hale Irwin’s 3 US Opens (the first two being very impressive), Ray Floyd’s 3* (incl. his huge 1976 Masters win), Larry Nelson with 3, and a bunch of guys with 2 (Fuzzy, Andy North, Johnny Miller, Ben Crenshaw, Curtis Strange, Hubert Green, and Dave Stockton). Fine, you say, a stronger international field takes some of those away. But if you were to take that group, put them all in their prime playing conditions, and set them loose against the 1990-2010 gang, the latter would be slaughtered, since the depth simply wasn’t there. They’d probably kill the 1990-2010 international guys too.
Now, worn out from doing all this and with some other personal priorties coming up today for me, I will say that from a quick glance that the 1960’s the standard deviation was definitely larger than either of the other two decades. I realize that, in addition to the travel issues, there was some politics going on (Bobby Locke was blacklisted from the PGA Tour in 1950). But the international gang from 1950-1970 did play in some American majors.
And their results were decidedly unimpressive, other than Gary Player of course: if I take a look at all of the British Open international winners from those 2 decades, and see what they did in the US (only through their 50th birthdays), I count exactly one win, by Tony Jacklin in the 1970 US Open, at the very end of this period. Locke had 6 top tens in 12, not too bad a record; Peter Thomson tho had just 2 in 11; Kel Nagle, 2 in 16; Bob Charles 4 in 36; and Roberto De Vicenzo 6 in 19 (including his tragic 2nd in the '68 Masters when he signed an incorrect scorecard). This all seems rather unimpressive to me and indicates just how strong the Americans were during this period. Would I have liked to have seen how more internationals could have done, given the chance? Of course. But the ones which were given the chance didn’t do very well, aside from Player, who indicated that a very talented international golfer could have done it.
[*Both Trevino and Floyd won one major each in the 60’s.]
I don’t know what to say to you guys when the “refutations” you offer hurt your case and help mine, whether it’s DiFool’s standard deviations, or NMM’s point that the PGA actually banned some international players (and Bobby Locke was arguably the best player in the world at the time).
Look, there are two basic explanations for why Arnie, Gary, and Lee won more majors than Phil, Ernie, and Vijay. Either there were more great players back then, who consistently beat fields as strong (or stronger) as today’s, or there are more great players now, and/or they have tougher fields to beat, either of which makes it harder for the top players to win as often as they used to.
If you don’t think the fields are stronger today, you have to explain why not, when athletes are MUCH better than they were 50 years ago in every sport that can be timed or measured, like track and swimming. And the effect should be even greater in golf, since they have had track meets since the first Olympics in 776 BC, but some of the early British Opens only had 8 people in the field, and golf participation dramatically increased after TV and Arnie and Jack made it more popular.
I was just watching the Olympics online, and some woman won the 100M Butterfly in 55.98 seconds. She probably would have been half a second faster if she hadn’t lost her swim cap halfway through the race. But even so, her time was 3 tenths of a second faster than the world record Mark Spitz set for men almost exactly 45 years ago today (56.29 sec on July 31, 1967).
And the record for men is now 49.82. If a swimmer today swam no faster than Mark Spitz, the hero of the 1972 Olympics with enough gold medals to choke a horse, he wouldn’t make it through the prelims today, and might not have even made the team.
How in the world can anyone look at data like that, at the way golf grew after 1960, at the number of foreign players who contended in majors after Seve began the avalanche in 1979, at the sophisticated coaching and video analysis that college players get today, and say, “Golf is different, the fields are no stronger now than they were in 1960?”
Other than Gary Player, only one US major (the 1970 US Open) was won by a foreign player in over 30 years, from 1948 to 1978. Just since 2000, even with Tiger and Phil winning 13 US majors between them, foreigners have won 16 US majors.
DiFool says that’s because the American players got worse. Why would they get worse, when the sport is growing so the talent pools are larger, the coaching is getting better, and the prize money makes more athletes choose golf as their first sport? The Ryder Cup results are not evidence of US decline, they are evidence of European improvement, and they are evidence that it’s harder to beat a team that has the best players in all of Europe than a team that only has the best players from the British Isles.
I realize that neither of us can prove our case, but I think any objective person would say that the data is all on my side — the really dramatic improvement in athletes where direct comparison is possible, the very low participation rates of foreign players in US majors and vice versa, and even the data you guys are citing in your refutations.
It’s POSSIBLE that international golfers got worse after the sport became much more popular in their countries, and that US players got even worse than that, so they started losing majors and Ryder Cups to those worse international players, but why would anyone think that? Doesn’t it make a lot more sense that MORE great players were attracted to the sport as its popularity and prize money increased, and therefore approximately the same number of tournaments had to be divided among two or three times as many great players, and therefore the number of wins any one of them had went down accordingly?
I forgot to address this.
You have to remember that the US players had three home games, and the internationals had only one. And for whatever reason, when the internationals did play US majors, it was hardly ever the PGA, and often not the US Open (that whole list of OOM winners I went through never played in either tournament, except for Oostie, who never played them before 1975). It was the Masters that invited them most often, and it had to be a shock to them when they grew up playing links courses, and suddenly arrived at Augusta where they encountered a course that demanded a high trajectory, and greens twice as fast as they had ever seen.
And remember the ball was different then. I don’t mean different from now, I mean that they used a larger ball in the US than they did in Europe. The smaller ball went farther, was less affected by wind, and of course was easier to make putts with. So suddenly playing a larger ball made the game harder; going the other way, the US pros in the Open found the game easier. It’s as if the Americans trained with weights before they competed in the Open, while the Euros suddenly had to play with weights in US majors.
It took a while to get the hang of it, and most of the internationals didn’t play enough US majors to do it. But if the Euros were as weak as you claim, then Jack should have won more British Opens than any other major, since so few Americans were playing against him. But instead, he won less of them than any other major (he won 3 BOs, 4 USOs, 5 PGAs, and 6 Masters), even though he played the same number of each as a full-time pro.
And here’s a fun fact: you talked about how many times Jack had to face Arnie or Gary or Lee or Tom for a major, but how many times did he literally have to beat them in order to win, i.e. how many times did they finish second to him? The answer is 4, and only one of them was a true battle. He beat Arnie in a playoff to win his first major, beat both Arnie and Gary by nine in IMO his best week ever, the 1965 Masters, and beat Arnie by four in the 1967 US Open. And that’s it. Trevino and Watson never finished second to him, and Player only once, when it wasn’t close. Arnie three times, but only one was close.
I say all that in a post about foreign players because the man who finished second to Jack in a major the most often was Aussie Bruce Crampton, who did it four times. If he finished second to Jack in as many majors as Arnie and Gary and Lee and Tom combined, he must have been pretty good. But his record in the British Open was poor. No top tens in five tries, and only two top 20’s. So you can’t write off half the world based on a very small sample of results.
I got a nominee for the most ridiculous reason why Jack is not the best ever golfer.
Bruce Crampton (and not Palmer, Player or Watson, or Trevino) finished 2nd to Jack in 4 of Jack’s 18 majors.
In fairness, Woods lost to Rich Beem.
I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to save face by making people think that your previous displays of poor comprehension were not due to misreading my posts, but were more along the lines of mocking sarcasm that never intended to address what I actually wrote.
Who knows, it might work.
That reason is just stupid and even mentioning is ridiculous.
Just as stupid and ridiculous as a person who once argued that none of Tiger’s US Open wins were on the Private golf courses. Just as stupid and ridiculous as none of Tiger’s win at the British Open were under Bad weather conditions.