Tiger 2000 >>> Jordan 2015

One of the announcers on the early coverage of the last round of the PGA Championship suggested that if Jordan Spieth were to win, for his third major championship of the year, he would have had the best year ever. Ahem. This is ridiculous. Here's what Spieth has done so far this year. He's won four tournaments, two of them majors, the others both relatively minor tournaments (the Valspar Championship and the John Deere Classic). He's finished second three times, third once, and in the top 10 thirteen times overall out of 20 tournaments. He's missed two cuts, one of them at the Players Championship, and has finished outside the top 25 four times in all. Now, that's a really, really great season.

But in 2000, Tiger Woods won, including three consecutive majors, nine total tournaments. He won his three majors by a combined 23 shots, compared to the 5 by which Spieth won his first two (and he doesn't look to add more than another couple today, if he does win). Overall Tiger won those nine tournaments by a combined margin of 46 shots, including three wins by at least 8 shots; both of Spieth's non-major wins were in playoffs, so he's got a combined margin of victory of just 5. Also, Tiger missed zero cuts; in fact, he didn't once finish outside the top 25! Only three times did he miss the top 10, compared to Spieth's seven (and counting). He led the Tour in GIR%, holes per eagle, birdies per round, scoring average (adjusted or otherwise), total driving, ball-striking, all-around ranking, par-3 scoring average, par-4 scoring average, par-5 scoring average, birdie percentage on par 4s and on par 5s, bounce-back, birdie conversion percentage, par breaker percentage, scoring average in rounds 1, 2, and 3, front and back nine scoring average, total eagles, lowest round, and, of course, the official money list. He was also World #1, by an enormous margin. Like, practically a 3-1 margin. Also he finished second in driving distance, putts per GIR, and final round scoring average, and was third in scrambling. His all-around ranking (the sum of his ranks in eight key statistics) was 40% lower than the second-place finisher, David Duval.

Spieth, meanwhile, leads the Tour in the following statistics, of those that existed in 2000: birdie average, scoring average (actual and adjusted), putts per GIR, one-putt percentage, putts per round, putts per round in round 2, lowest round, par breaker percentage, round 2 scoring average, back 9 scoring average, scoring average and birdie percentage on par 4s, lowest average, and, of course, the money list. That's a lot! But it's not as much as Tiger; in fact, Tiger led every single one of those stats except for the putting stats (and he was second in putts per GIR, the best putting stat that existed back in 2000). Meanwhile, Spieth is 55th in GIR%, 42nd in total driving (including 76th in distance and 85th in accuracy), 25th in par-3 scoring, 20th in par-5 scoring. Oh, and he's third in all-around ranking, with a figure about 30% above Will Wilcox's leading figure. (What?!)

The point is that, obviously, Jordan Spieth is a great player, and is having a great year, but he isn't coming close to dominating the Tour, either in terms of performance or in terms of statistics, the way Tiger did. If we're talking best years ever, and we're excluding Bobby Jones's 1930 for some reason and don't consider Hogan's 1953, or any of the years when he or Byron Nelson or whoever won double digits of tournaments, then there just isn't any question. Tiger's 2000 was the best year anyone has ever had, and I daresay it will continue to be for a long, long time.

What Would You Say Was the Cause of Death?

There's a scene in a certain episode of one of my favorite TV shows where one character asks another to say what he thinks the cause of death was for a bunch of apparent corpses. After the other character makes a few guesses, all wrong, the first character divulges that there was no cause of death, because they're not dead. I was reminded of this when I heard a European Tour announcer say, during the broadcast of the Turkish Open, that slow play is "killing the game, at all levels." Now, look, I know everyone seems to hate slow play with a fiery vengeance, but in order for that statement to be true it first needs to be true that the game is dying, or at least shows some sign of being done substantial injury. Is that true? I dunno. I'm not sure how you'd try to measure that. Maybe "number of golfers worldwide," though I don't know how good the data is there. Maybe the ratings for big tournaments? Maybe the number of applicants to the U.S. and British Opens, which I believe keep setting all-time highs each year? Nothing I've seen as an ardent fan and a player myself suggests that golf is losing the interest of the general public, and that's really just in the U.S., let alone Asian countries where the game is booming. People love to gripe about slow play, but I'd like to see some evidence that it has actually damaged the game, as opposed to just annoying people around the top echelon of the game and the subset of amateur players more likely to have business appointments forcing them to be in a hurry while on the course. It's not killing the game, in other words, because as best I can tell nothing is killing the game.

How Not To Prevent a Tie

In 2002, the Major League Baseball All-Star Game ended in a tie. With the score at 7-7 through 11 innings, both the American and the National League teams discovered that they had run out of pitchers. They were only carrying eight pitchers per team; now the leagues each take more like 13 pitchers. In any event, people decided that this tie was a catastrophe, because apparently someone has to win everything. MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, therefore, came up with a way to prevent ties in the future: make the game count! The idea is that by tying home field advantage for the World Series to the result of the All-Star Game, there will be an extra incentive to avoid a tie. But can you spot the problem? Raising the stakes doesn't actually change what happens when each side runs out of pitchers. Literally not at all. If an All-Star Game goes 20 innings and all 13 pitchers on each side have gotten into the game, and the current pitchers are just plain finished, there's just nothing you can do. At some point the logic of a tie becomes inexorable; at some point a tie becomes necessary, no matter what the stakes. Now, expanding the rosters does a lot to reduce the chance of a tie, and I think it's very unlikely we'll ever see the kind of game necessary to exhaust that kind of pitching staff, but that has nothing to do with the "this time it counts" nonsense. It's a supposed mechanism to prevent ties that actually does nothing whatsoever toward that end.

Interestingly enough, the very next year there was another tie in a major exhibition event, the Presidents Cup. The Cup ended in a tie, with both the United States and the International teams winning 17 points. Tiger Woods had just defeated Ernie Els, the biggest International name, in a marquee match to avoid an outright loss of the Cup. The procedure for breaking the tie was that each team had placed one player's name in a sealed envelope, and in the event of a tie those envelopes would be opened and those two players would play sudden death until a winner had been determined. The designated champions were, of course, Tiger Woods and Ernie Els. And in some of the most compelling golf ever, as darkness crept over the Links Course at Fancourt, Woods and Els fought each other to a draw three times in a row. Three holes, all halved, and as the last light disappeared, still no result. So Captains Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player agreed to share the Cup for the next two years.

And when the two teams reconvened at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in 2005, there had been a rule change. Like the change to the All-Star Game, its purpose was to avoid a tie. If anything, though, it does even less to accomplish that goal. Traditionally at both the Presidents Cup and the older Ryder Cup between America and Europe, as well as all other less prominent international competitions modeled on the Ryder Cup, when a match was all square after 18 holes it was over. In an individual match-play tournament you would need sudden death at that point to determine who advanced to the next round, but at these international tournaments the match is simply halved, and each team received one-half of a point. The last match of the '03 Cup had been halved, with the Woods/Els match having been second to last. Accordingly (or something), it was decided that on the last day of the Presidents Cup, halved matches would not be tolerated until the Cup had been won. Until one side had at least 17.5 points clinched out of 34, any matches all square through 18 would go to sudden death. Indeed, Phil Mickelson thought he had sunk a putt to halve his match and clinch the '05 Cup, but was informed that he needed to go to sudden death instead. It was weird.

And it also doesn't do a bloody thing to avoid a tie. Well, conditionally it either does or doesn't. If the result of the first four sessions sends the Cup into the Sunday singles with a score involving half-points, say, 12.5 to 9.5 or something, the no-halved-matches policy will prevent a tie. But suppose the score entering Sunday is 11-all. And then suppose that in half the matches, American players win the first ten holes, and in the other half of the matches, International players do the same. Then we would just have 17 points for the United States and 17 points for the Internationals, and nothing about preventing individual matches from being halved would come within eight holes of relevance. There's just nothing about forcing each match to produce a whole point for one side or the other that in the slightest prevents those points from falling equally on each side. Nothing at all, unless, as I say, it would take a non-integer score on Sunday to achieve a 17/17 tie. Today, for instance, the score was something like 14 to 8 entering the singles competition. As I'm watching the tape-delayed broadcast the score is USA 17, INT 12, with five matches still on the course. If the Internationals sweep those matches, it's a tie, right? Would we do another Woods/Els battle to the death? (Okay maybe not with Tiger, his back has tightened up on him...) There's just nothing about the "no halved matches" rule that helps us if we wind up in a flat-footed tie based on whole points for each match. Half of the time, in other words, the rule will be if anything counterproductive for its stated ends, and at best useless. This anti-tie frenzy appears to just remove people's ability to understand the connection between policies and outcomes. Maybe we should just be okay with the idea that sometimes exhibition matches are tied.


Also, holy shit, Phil Mickelson just (on tape delay) hit a shot from the slope twenty yards right of the fairway that clipped the tree he was trying to bend it around, fell into the water, and skipped out of the water onto the bank! If the Cup ends up coming down to his match, wow, that'll have been one hell of a break.

Jeez, Slow Down!

Sort of continuing the theme from my recent post arguing against the insane, over-the-top rhetoric about slow play, I thought I'd share an anecdote from my round of golf today. My dad and I were playing at our local course, and we both played pretty badly. I shot a 60 for nine holes, and he had a 58. We finished our round in slightly under two hours, maybe 115 minutes overall, so less than one minute per aggregate group stroke. (As my dad points out, it's not clear that there isn't some causality from rushing the play to the poor play, but that's beside the point right now.) Now, there isn't a formal par time for this course, but I definitely feel that a four-hour eighteen hole round is very much the standard. At the somewhat-tougher course my family plays in Cape May, there is an official par time and it's around 2:12 or 2:15 for each nine. My dad and I played in under par time today, in other words, I'm fairly certain. You definitely couldn't accuse us of slow play; I was actually surprised how fast it all went, given how awful I in particular was.

But that's all measuring against what I might call the objective or absolute standard, comparing our overall time performance against a theoretical ideal. The typical way to measure pace of play on a golf course, however, is subjective/relative: are you keeping pace with the group in front of you? Now, that's not always relevant, if your group is a foursome who tee off just behind a fast single or whatever, but what is true is that if you do keep pace with the group in front of you then you are doing nothing wrong in terms of pace of play, though the converse might not hold. Today, the group in front of us was a foursome, so we, being a twosome, should have had no trouble keeping up with them. And, as I said, we were not playing shamefully slow; we were playing rather, though not incredibly, quickly.

But they left us in their dust. They were in carts, we were walking, and after a few holes we just lost contact with them, and were playing as if there were no one in front of us. They must have been playing insanely fast, given that they were a foursome, basically just zipping from one shot to the next in their carts and not taking much time over anything. There was another twosome behind us, also in carts and therefore waiting for us on most shots, and the fact that we had failed to keep up with that foursome made the whole thing feel a bit uncomfortable, despite, as I keep reiterating, the fact that we were not playing overly slowly.

And that's really the point of the whole anecdote. If most of the groups out there on public courses are playing at such a hectic pace, using carts and a lack of care over their shots to achieve times way below standard, it creates an environment in which a twosome of conscientious golfers playing the game seriously and trying to hit each shot as best they can, i.e. taking time over their shots, but not playing slowly are constantly made to feel rushed. And, of course, as the authorities of the game encourage impatience and hurrying of one's neighboring fellow golfers in the name of combating slow play, one increasingly must assume that the people in the group behind you are in fact getting very impatient, and probably even feeling self-righteous about it. They may or may not be, but that is increasingly held up as the honorable, appropriate reaction for people in that position. It makes the whole thing very uncomfortable, and needlessly so: is it really that onerous to take the full four hours to play a round of golf? I get not wanting to spend five hours on something you expect to finish an hour earlier, but if you only have three hours or three and a half, don't go out expecting to play eighteen holes of golf. You'll have to rush yourself, and worse, you'll end up rushing the people around you. And that is at least as much a sin as making the group behind you wait a few extra minutes to finish their round.

The Leads Tiger Has Almost Held

The third round of the 2013 British Open Championship just concluded, and it concluded with a late stumble by Tiger Woods. He had played very steady golf all day, sprinkling in a birdie here to counterbalance a bogey there, while Lee Westwood surged and fell back; at one point Westwood had a three-shot lead open in about a fifteen-minute span which he then lost in the next half-hour. But after a Westwood bogey on 16, which featured a great putt holed just to salvage the bogey, the par-5 17th hole proved a bit of a turning-point. Playing into the wind, Tiger failed to get his fairway wood lay-up shot over the cross-bunkers, and had to pitch out. He and Westwood both hit to the fringe just left of the back-left pin, but with Westwood lying three to Tiger's four. Tiger missed, Westwood drained it, and all of a sudden Lee had a two-shot lead and Tiger wasn't going to be in the final group tomorrow any more.

And he wasn't going to hold a share of the lead.

That bit is the crucial bit, or, well, so we're told. Famously, in each of his fourteen major championship victories Tiger has at least been tied for the lead after three rounds. The stat was even stronger before the 2009 PGA Championship, when it was an if-and-only-if proposition: all fourteen times Tiger had held the 54-hole lead, he won, and he had never won without holding the lead. Then, of course, he held the 54-hole lead at Hazeltine National but lost the tournament to Y.E. Yang. In retrospect that was the beginning of his decline. And now he has a chance to break it. The television coverage was discussing his highest positions through three rounds of a major since his last win at the 2008 U.S. Open. Obviously Hazeltine, where he was leading outright, was his best position, but he's been in the top five a few other times. He's tied for second now, but even more important, I think, is the indicator given by a personally-invented stat of mine, Total Shots Trailing. This is a very simple concept: for every player ahead of you in the field, you add the number of shots by which you are behind them at any given point. Today, for instance, Tiger finds himself tied for second, so there's only one person ahead of him, and that person is Lee Westwood, whom he trails by 2 shots, so his TST is 2. I feel like this metric does a good job of combining the information contained in "he's X shots off the lead" with the information in "he's in a tie for Yth place," and though I haven't seen any large-scale empirical studies on the subject I imagine it does a good job predicting how plausible a player's comeback is.

To get a bit of a sense of how Tiger's done when he's been incredibly close to the lead with 18 holes to go in a major but wasn't leading himself, I examined every major he's played as a professional when his 54-hole TST was less than 10 strokes, obviously excluding the ones where he won the tournament. Actually I haven't done the examining yet, just generated the list, so I'm as curious as you are what I'll find, or probably more curious, actually, since it was my idea in the first place. Tournaments will be listed in descending order of Tiger's TST, so starting with the 9-shotters if there are any and finishing up with those where he was in the best non-leading position possible.

While We're Young?

While I'm on the theme of golf, let's talk about this whole new "While We're Young" campaign. It is, perhaps, the natural result of the years-long obsession with "pace of play," but it's got an added new element: obnoxiousness. The obnoxiousness comes from this scene in the movie Caddyshack:

Because this movie is famous, and a lot of people find it very funny (although honestly I don't think that scene in particular is particularly funny, having just actually watched it), it is apparently considered acceptable to adopt that line as the slogan for the anti-slow play campaign. And the golfing authorities are running lots of ads now on this theme, that involve famous players either telling other people or being told by other people, "While we're young!" Some of these are actually kind of funny: a few involve Arnold Palmer saying the line, which is funny since he's, you know, eighty; another features Tiger Woods carefully studying a putt, and then being told by a group of young kids who are waiting behind him on a miniature golf course to hurry it up. He misses the putt, they say something about how he thinks it's a major, and then he mutters, "no respect."

"Champions Tour" Is Just A Much Worse Name

This is kind of random, but I'm sitting here watching the U.S. Senior Open Championship and I heard someone mention that so-and-so had joined the Champions Tour earlier this year, and I had the following thought. The impetus behind the switch from "Senior Tour" to "Champions Tour" is the idea that it's more complementary to the players. "Senior Tour" sounds like a tour with a bunch of old dudes on it, guys who are washed up, past their primes, etc. "Champions Tour" sounds, or is at least trying to sound, like a tour full of all the great champions of yesteryear.

But there's a problem with this, and there is scarcely better demonstration of it than Michael Allen, the man currently leading the Senior Open by several shots. His career PGA Tour win total is... zero. He had one European Tour win, one minor-tour win (I believe the minor tour was called the NIKE Tour at the time), and that was it. He played in 369 total PGA Tour events, managed 17 top 10s including three runner-up finishes, and never managed to win a tournament. He was not what you'd call a "champion." Then, on January 31st, 2009, he turned fifty, so though not a champion, he was a senior. And he received a special invitation to play in the Senior PGA Championship (all the majors have kept the traditional "Senior" designation), because though he never won anything he did have a solid career earnings on the PGA Tour. He won that tournament, his first Champions Tour event. Since then he's won three other senior tournaments, has nine further top-10 finishes in the senior majors, and is leading the Senior Open right now.

And it is my impression that quite a few players on the so-called Champions Tour fit this profile. They never won any of the "real" majors. Maybe they snuck a tournament victory here or there, but not many. Some of them may not have been touring professionals in their youth at all. And some of them go on to have spectacular careers after turning fifty. The list of players with the most Senior Tour wins confirms this: Hale Irwin and Lee Trevino, No.s 1 and 2, are definitely "champions," but Gil Morgan, Miller Barber, Bob Charles, Don January, Chi-Chi Rodriguez, Jim Colbert, and Bruce Crampton, who occupy the 3 through 9 spots, had a total of one career men's major to their credit (Bob Charles' win at the 1963 British Open, the only left-handed major winner until Mike Weir in 2003) and 64 PGA Tour wins. They won a total of twelve Senior majors and 156 Senior tournaments. They got better, competitively speaking, after turning fifty. Each of these guys were solid players, but you wouldn't have thought of them as great champions. Others like Bruce Fleisher, Mike Hill, Loren Roberts, Jim Thorpe, etc. fit the same pattern: decent Tour players for a while who turned 50 and then started winning.

And, in my opinion, this creates a dual problem with the "Champions Tour" name. For starters, it's dishonest. These are not all the great players of yesteryear. It's some of the great players of yesteryear, the ones like Fred Couples or Tom Watson who wanted to keep playing full-time competitive golf and whose games stayed in pretty good shape, and some guys who maybe you would've heard of twenty years ago if you followed the Tour closely, but not if you were just a casual fan. But also, and perhaps more importantly, it's insulting to the players, specifically to those players who aren't Couples or Watson or Nicklaus or Irwin. It's insulting to the guys like Michael Allen, or Gil Morgan, or Loren Roberts. It suggests that the point of the Champions Tour is to watch the guys who were the greatest champions when they were all in their prime, not simply to watch the best golfers who are old enough that it doesn't make sense to ask them to play against guys half their age. And that suggests that guys like Michael Allen don't belong, that they aren't the point. They're interlopers, or a distraction, because they weren't great champions on their initial golfing life.

Of course, it's not a very strong implication, and it's sufficiently indirect that I'm probably the only one who's noticed. But still, I think it's abundantly clear that they should've just stuck with calling it the Senior Tour. Because that's what it is, and a Senior Tour is cool enough on its own terms.

Golf is a Zero-Sum Competition, Guys

Phil Mickelson just (i.e. several hours ago, but they just showed it on a tape delay) missed a par putt at the Wells Fargo Championship at the Quail Hollow Club. One of the announcers commented that that was not the visual that Nick Watney, Phil's playing partner and up-until-then co-leader, wanted to see before stroking his own par putt. Watney, of course, sank his putt, and is now ahead of Phil and, in fact, the outright leader. The announcer's comment is a common genre, most frequently heard on the intensely watery par-3 holes like the 12th at Augusta or the 17th at TPC Sawgrass. If the first two players in a group, say, have hit the green, or have gone in the water, the announcers will say something about how that gives the third player a good/bad visual. Now, on a Thursday or a Friday or something, where the pairings are pretty much random and the odds that two players in the same group will be in direct competition come Sunday are pretty small, I can sort of see that. But on Sunday? In one of the late groups, among people vying for the tournament? They're in a cut-throat, zero-sum competition for millions of dollars. Every stroke your competitor throws away is money in your pocket. If I were in contention at the Masters on Sunday, say in the final group or something, and my playing partner hit in the water ahead of me, I'd be ecstatic. I wouldn't feel like that meant I was going to do the same thing, or something: I'd feel like it meant I had an opening to make up some serious ground on one of my chief rivals just by hitting a non-disastrous shot. Now, at the same time, I never have been in that situation, so I could be wrong. Maybe the PGA Tour professionals, the guys who, after all, are playing the game for a living and are supposed to have good competitive mindsets, really do get rattled when things happen that, on paper, ought to be pretty directly beneficial to them. But it would kind of surprise me.

Golf is Hard, Y'All

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who is generally rather awesome, recently tweeted the following:

"Golfers want silence when hitting stationary balls at their feet. Baseball batters, in screaming crowds, hit 90 mph fastballs"

Yeah, we do want silence, and yeah, people who play team sports play in massive screaming crowds, they hope. That's because golf is harder, precisely because the balls we're hitting are stationary. We don't have anything to react to. This is not just my idea; it's a common element of why people who play other sports say that golf is harder than their chosen profession. And so yeah, golfers need quiet. The batter can hone in on that incoming fastball, and react to it, and let the homogenized roar of the crowd fade into the background. For a golfer, there's nothing outside your own mind controlling your timing; since crowd noise would be the only remotely changing thing commanding the attention of your senses, it would make creating an internal timing more or less impossible. Also, of course, in the team sport situation, everyone is playing amidst the exact same crowd noises, and the games are precisely zero-sum, at every stage. In golf, you'd never have the noise evenly distributed around the course, so some players would have it worse than others.

Over the course of the past few days, as the Masters has momentarily commanded the nation's attention, I've seen a bunch of discussion by not-actual-golf-fans that's struck me as rather wrongheaded, for instance this Josh Levin column at Slate (rightfully) condemning people who called for Tiger to disqualify himself in the wake of his somewhat unusual ex post facto penalty, but going beyond that to condemning the game of golf for its insistence on rules like "don't ground your club in a hazard." I'm not sure what it is about golf that makes it so easy to misunderstand. Is it because so much of the game takes place entirely in the minds of the individual players, rather than in the much-more-visible interactions among players? For whatever reason, it seems like people who don't play golf and/or aren't serious fans just can't really imagine what it's actually like to play it, or the logic of the rules of the game, or what makes it exciting. That's okay, of course, in the grand scheme of things, but as someone who is very serious about golf, it's kind of frustrating.

Match Play Is Awesome

Right now it's snowing (at certain altitudes) in Marana, Arizona. Marana, Arizona happens to be the place where the PGA Tour is right now. And they're not exactly playing right now, since there's snow accumulating on the greens (!), but if the precipitation turns into, say, a nasty wintry sleet, they'd be able to squeegee the snow off the greens and they would then start play. There are probably some tournaments where wintry mix would get them to stop playing, but this week is match play, and the great thing about match play is that you can get away with murder in terms of the conditions. Since the only thing that matters is who of two players gets a better score on a given hole, playing it at the same time, concepts of "fairness" don't apply. That usually just applies to the course set-up; for instance, I remember one year back when this was held at La Costa Resort & Spa when the fairway of some par-4 was flooded, so they moved the tees forward and played it as a par-3. Obviously, that's sort of a combination of conditions and course set-up, but the key point is that you could never just wantonly play a par-4 as a par-3 some given day in a stroke play tournament. Why not? I'm not sure; after all, everyone has to play the same course as everyone else. Nevertheless, you couldn't do that; there's some ethos against it. Likewise, when you get things like the 1974 Massacre at Winged Foot, people call it unfair, and when you get things like the 2011 U.S. Open at Congressional, where Jason Day posted a score that would have won almost any Open in history but finished eight shots behind Rory McIlroy, well, it's not called unfair exactly but it makes people start thinking about how these scores need to be reigned in.

In other words, people care about the score in stroke play, and they don't just care about relative scores, but absolute ones as well. Turning a par-4 into a par-3 would mean that the scores from that day were "wrong" somehow. Excessively hard or excessively easy conditions make the absolute scores look like they're calibrated wrong. Playing in snow will artificially inflate everyone's scores, and is particularly bad because it hits some people and not others. But in match play, you don't have to worry about any of that. Everyone's making birdies? Great! Lots of holes are being halved with birdies, or won with eagles. The course is mangling the field? Great! Lots of holes are being halved with bogeys, or won with pars. The first half of the field played in sleet, and then the clouds parted and the second half of the field played in warm sunshine? Great! Basically, because competition is broken up into tiny discrete units that don't communicate with one another, the world gets much simpler. Each unit of competition is the same as each other one: here are two people, here's a tee, a few hundred years that-a-way is a hole, let's see who gets there quicker. It's almost impossible for anything to alter the competitive nature of that concept. This makes match play much more flexible than stroke play, in practice, both in terms of what kinds of courses it can be played over and in terms of how wild the conditions can tolerably get. It's just one more reason why today, assuming they ever start playing again, is one of the most fun days in the golf year.

Rocco for the Hall of Fame!

Okay, it's a little early to be advocating that explicitly. But we can always hope! The occasion for the hope is the fact that, in Rocco Mediate's Senior (er, um, Champions) Tour debut, he just shot an eleven-under 61 to take a three-shot lead heading into the last round. He's a decent bet to win. Now, people always win their Senior Tour debut, or at least it's kind of a thing that happens a lot, because the youngest players on that tour have a noticeable advantage and one typically debuts immediately after turning 50. Still, Rocco could be one of those people who goes out and has himself a great Senior Tour career after only a decent PGA Tour career.

And the thing is, according to the rules, you're eligible for the Hall of Fame if you have 20 wins between the regular and Senior PGA Tours. Rocco only won 6 times on the regular tour, so he'd need 14 Senior Tour wins to qualify; that would place him T17 on the current list of players with the most Senior victories. Now, most of the people who are qualified for the Hall of Fame ballot through the combined regular/senior wins criterion and most of whose wins have come from the Senior Tour are not in the Hall of Fame. Hale Irwin has the most Senior wins all-time, with 45 and 7 majors, and is in the Hall of Fame, but on the strength of his 20 PGA Tour wins and 3 US Open Championships. Lee Trevino's second with 29 wins and 4 majors, and is also in the Hall of Fame, but on the strength of his 2 US Opens, 2 British Opens, and 2 PGA Championships. Then we get Gil Morgan and Miller Barber, with senior careers totalling 25 wins, 3 majors and 24 wins, 5 majors, respectively. But neither of them won a regular major, or won more than 11 PGA Tour events, and neither is in the Hall of Fame. Rocco would be very much in their category, even if he has a great senior-tour career. So, why do I think he might sneak his way into the Hall of Fame when other players with similar resumes to his potential have not?

Because of Torrey Pines. Because of Tiger Woods. Because of the 2008 U.S. Open, and the playoff, and the agony. Because he was the foil for one of the greatest moments in golf history, and because if one shot had gone differently over those first 90 holes he would've been the protagonist of an at-least-as-great moment. Because he's Rocco, and he is genuinely famous. Yeah, he's famous for one moment, not for a long glorious career. Roger Maris, who spent a very long time holding the single-season home run record, is not in the baseball Hall of Fame, and never came that close to it. But if Rocco really does have a renaissance on the Senior Tour, and racks up well over a dozen wins with some majors thrown in, then you could add to his single shining moment a genuinely great senior career, and given that there exists a Senior Tour ballot-qualification pathway, that ought to count for something. Neither the shining moment nor the senior resurgence would on its own justify his enshrinement, but if Rocco can combine them, I think he would deserve it.

Phil's Dominant Week

Okay, the week isn't officially over yet, but the bookmakers at Ladbrokes are giving Phil Mickelson 1/14 odds, i.e. predicting that he'd win the Waste Management Phoenix Open 14 out of 15 times from this position. It's about as close to being over before it's over as a golf tournament can be. That, not surprisingly, is a bit of a testament to how good Phil Mickelson has been playing this week. He's at -24, and holds a six-shot lead over Brandt Snedeker. He's led the tournament wire-to-wire thus far, opening with a 60 that could've easily been a 59, following it up with a 65 that could've been a whole lot better had he not driven the ball into the water on 18, and adding a 64 today to effectively put this thing away. In fact, it's felt like every single day Phil's had one of the best rounds of the entire field. And he has! In fact, it's kind of impressive how well he's been doing compared to the best round anyone else has had.

How Streaky is Tiger Woods?

The first PGA Tour event of the year, each year, is the tournament whose ancestral name is the Tournament of Champions. (It currently sports a "Hyundai" before that phrase, having emerged from the depths of being called the "Mercedes Championships.") It's played in Hawaii, and its field consists of all and only those players who won a tournament the previous year (and who want to play in it), as you might expect from the name. This year, Dustin Johnson won the Hyundai Tournament of Champions, but he did it in slightly odd fashion. Or, well, the whole tournament happened in slightly odd fashion. For some reason, apparently, the Tour decided to shift the TOC to a Monday finish. But then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday all featured ridiculously high winds that made it impossible to play any golf. (Actually they played a few holes and then cancelled play, erasing the scores that had been put up in the little half-rounds.) Eventually they were able to play on Monday, when they got in 36 holes, and on Tuesday, when they got in another 18, making a 54-hole tournament that they could call official. And Dustin Johnson won it. My dad and I had been speculating that, if Dustin were to win this week's Hawaiian Open with a nice low score, he might set an all-time record for furthest under par in a span of seven days, since he would get in an unusually high seven rounds in that span.

Except... a few minutes ago, Dustin withdrew from the Hawaiian Open with flu-like symptoms. He had been playing rather miserably anyway, and was going to miss the cut. Ah well.

It got us thinking about how likely it is for a player to win in back-to-back weeks. You could imagine that players would feel awfully drained after a win (though not as much as if they didn't get any time off, as Dustin did here), but you could also imagine that someone who was playing well in Week X would be likely still to be playing well in Week X+1. The problem in trying to analyze this is that most players scarcely win any tournaments at all. Dustin Johnson, for instance, has 7 wins in 120 events (not counting this week, which'll push the denominator to 121). That's a winning percentage of 5.83%, or .058 in baseball format. That's low. If you assume that the two weeks are purely independent of one another, and that the 7-for-120 winning percentage represents Dustin's "true talent," he would have only an 0.34% chance of winning both of any two arbitrarily-chosen tournaments, including if those tournaments are in back-to-back weeks. In other words, if a player like Dustin Johnson played his whole career and never won in back-to-back weeks, we shouldn't be too surprised, and the difference between his having 0 back-to-back wins and having 1 or 2 of them wouldn't really be that significant.

There is one player, however, for whom that concern does not apply: Tiger Woods. He has 74 career wins in just 293 events, for a winning percentage of 25.3%, or .253, which is higher than that of the 40-120 1962 New York Mets. Each of the Mets' contests was against one other opponent, so without knowing anything else we'd expect them to have won 50% of their games. Each of Tiger's contests tends to be against over 100 other players, so knowing nothing else we'd expect him to win less than 1% of his tournaments. And yet, Tiger's got a better winning ratio than those Mets. Man they were bad, and man he's good. And, in particular, he's good enough to permit meaningful analysis of his winning tendencies when playing back-to-back weeks.

If you assume independence, Tiger should be winning both tournaments about 6.4% of the time that he plays in consecutive weeks. Also, he should fail to win a tournament about 55.9% of the time that he plays in consecutive weeks, leaving an expected 37.8% of the time that he'd win one but not the other. Over the course of his long career, he has played two weeks in a row 91 times. (Note that some of those windows overlap, i.e. if Tiger played three consecutive weeks, I count that as two separate windows, both of which include the middle week.) Our expected percentages under an assumption of independence would work out to about 5.8 two-win windows, 34.3 one-win windows, and 50.8 no-win windows. Instead, Tiger has 9 two-win windows, 28 one-win windows, and 54 no-win windows, which translate to percentages of 9.9%, 30.8%, and 59.3%, respectively.

Rory McIlroy and the Ghost of Bobby Jones

During the final round of last week's TOUR Championship, Rory McIlroy was in genuine contention to win the 2012 FedEx Cup, the payout for which is $10 million. Then, on a certain hole, he was setting up to his approach shot when his ball moved. According to Rory, he put his club behind the ball, and then backed away for some reason, possibly because he was afraid the ball would move, and then somewhat more than 10 seconds later it did in fact move. He called an official over to ask whether he had incurred a penalty. In the course of this discussion he said very clearly that the ball had moved because he put his club behind it, though there had been a substantial time delay involved. The rules officials decided the time lag was the controlling factor, and declined to penalize him.

Now, the TOUR Championship is held at East Lake Golf Club these days, which is where the great amateur golfer Bobby Jones learned the game. Among other things, like being the most dominant golfer of all time including Tiger Woods, Bobby Jones was famous for his extreme devotion to following the rules of the game. More than once he called a penalty on himself for having moved the ball at address when no one else on the planet could've noticed the movement, in the heat of competition in major championships. So, being somewhat of a Bobby Jones fan, I commented at the time of McIlroy's ruling that Bobby Jones did not approve, thinking to myself that it would be poetic justice if McIlroy played poorly from that point on. Which he did, and Brandt Snedeker won the FedEx Cup. Good for Sneds*.

But now I'm not sure if I didn't have the angle on Rory's little incident backwards. After all, McIlroy himself was basically saying that he had moved the ball. It was the officials who overruled him on this issue. In my opinion it's wrong for rules officials to hear a player say something like, "it was definitely because I put my club behind the ball" and then conclude otherwise, and I have a feeling that Rory McIlroy might agree with me there, and that this might have been at least somewhat responsible for his poor play thereafter. During a certain practice round with my high school golf team, I hit a beautiful long drive on the second hole to a great position, only to find my ball sitting at the very bottom of a big ol' divot. Now, normally I'd have looked at that as an interesting challenge, but I happened to be playing with my in-general-really-cool coach, who instructed me in no uncertain terms to remove my ball from the divot and place it on some nice ground nearby, on the grounds that the shot out of a divot is not an important one to practice. Of course, I obeyed him, as he had formal authority over me, and of course I hit that shot badly and of course I played badly for the next nine holes. Until, that is, the next round, when on that very same second hole I again hit a really nice drive that again went into a divot. Only this time I played the ball as it lied, I hit a nice shot, and I was back to playing well again.

To those of us who have a deep internal commitment to the rules of the game and to the spirit of those rules, getting an unfairly favorable ruling can feel much worse than getting an unfairly unfavorable ruling. (This is one of the things that mystifies me about a game like baseball, where gaining an unfair advantage by tricking the umpires into thinking you were safe or the other guy was out or whatever is considered somewhere between acceptable and obligatory.) It can weigh on your spirit, and having something weighing on your spirit makes it hard to play good golf. In a way, then, it was the ghost of Bobby Jones that caused Rory McIlroy to play his last several holes of the 2012 PGA Tour season badly, but it was the ghost of Bobby Jones as internalized by Rory McIlroy himself.


*This is actually what he's called. His cap says "SNEDS" on it. The first time I ever heard of him, at one of the majors several years back, one of the announcers said that "his friends and family call him Sneds." I find that quite unlikely, but it's still an awesome line.

Tiger Didn't Will the Ball Into the Hole, He Was Just a Great Putter

While Tiger Woods played the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass this morning, which he birdied, the announcers on the Live@ coverage of the 17th hole (that's what it's called!) talked about his recent lack of ass-whupping. They had a pretty general consensus that his swing looks good right now, but his mental confidence and the way that relates to his putting are what's holding him back. Now, I agree that confidence is a big part of it, but I think that's at least as important for the full swing as for putting. But they were discussing, as people are so wont to do, the impression that in his heyday Tiger would just make every clutch putt and could "will the ball into the hole," and that this ability has subsequently escaped him. But there's another explanation for his recent putting woes: especially because of his recovery from several injuries, he's been having to work incredibly hard on his full swing. And he's said on several occasions that this has prevented him from doing as much work as he would like to on his short game and putting. And putting is a skill! You can be good at it, you can be bad at it, you get better at it when you work on it and worse when you don't. Perhaps the reason why Tiger made so many clutch putts in his glory years is that he also made a hell of a lot of putts in less spotlit situations as well. He was just a good putter, and that came from solid technique maintained by the same countless hours of practice he spent on his full swing. What he needs to get his old form back, if this theory is correct, isn't just to suddenly start believing in himself again or whatever, but to have an extended period when his swing feels comfortable and he doesn't have to work on it so damn hard. Then he'll be able to get into a normal routine of practicing the long game, the short game, and putting in a balanced way, and hopefully be able to get every aspect of his game firing at once more often and thus resume his dominant winning ways.

Phil Mickelson is Very Good at US Opens

Phil Mickelson has, famously, never won a US Open. Instead, he's finished second five times. But consider, for a moment, what this means: he's really, really good at playing the US Open in few strokes! Five top-2 finishes is more than nearly everyone in the history of the universe can claim. In fact, I've devised a metric that suggests Phil is a better US Open player than several players who won it twice.

It's tough to try and add up cumulative performance in a golf tournament. If you just add together finishes, then a score of 10 could be five second-place finishes, or one 10th-place finish, and there's no good way to handle missed cuts or simply missed tournaments. One could use the career money list, but that gets into tricky inflation problems. Or one could try and create a time-neutral points system similar to a money list, and that's basically the premise of my system. The basic idea is this: if your finish in a tournament can be described with a positive integer n (ignoring ties), you get 1/n points; otherwise, you get 0 points. So Jack Nicklaus, for instance, has a career performance number of 11.048 at the Masters: 1 point each for his 6 wins, half a point each for his 4 runner-up finishes, etc. This is not, of course, a perfect system, but I think it works pretty well. (Incidentally, the next-best finisher at the Masters is Arnold Palmer, in the 6.75 region. Jack was good!)

So Phil Mickelson's US Open Career Performance Number is, by this reckoning, 3.536. And that's without any wins! So far I've computed these numbers for several two-time champions of the tournament, and have found that Billy Casper (3.235), Cary Middlecoff (2.982), Ralph Guldahl (3.334), and, perhaps most surprisingly, Lee Trevino (3.520) do worse than Mickelson. If Phil were to win and finish second (again!) in the next two US Opens, and Tiger Woods miss the cut (which had bloody well better not happen), he'd overtake Tiger, who's at 5.063. It's really amazing, when you think about it, that he hasn't won this thing yet.

Who You Calling Hype?

Over the three preliminary days of Masters week, I've seen at least two articles on pgatour.com surface with exactly the same theme: the hype around Tiger Woods at this 76th Masters Tournament is excessive, there are nearly a hundred other players in the field with eyes on a victory of their own, this won't just be some coronation. Maybe Rory McIlroy is included in the hyped category, as in a hyped Woods vs. McIlroy confrontation. Of course the articles themselves are sportswriter-y in the extreme, but that's not even my main problem with them. They're posted on the most prominent website in American championship golf! What are they if not hype? In general I've noticed a tremendous amount of spinning from the golf establishment this year against Tiger Woods, his resurgence, and the idea that he might just start winning tournaments and majors again like he always used to. It's a little funny, then, to see that same golf establishment complaining about how much everyone thinks Tiger's the only person in the field!

Another Year, Another Masters

Today, Wednesday April 4th, is the day before the start of the 76th Masters Tournament, so I just thought I'd take this opportunity for a little bit of statistical analysis. People often say that experience at Augusta National is key at the Masters, and in particular that former champions have a huge advantage. And they're right! Compared to the other two U.S.-based majors, the Masters is vastly more favorable to repeat champions. The numbers are as follows: the 20 multiple winners of the U.S. Open have won just 50 of its 110 playings, or 45%; at the PGA Championship, the 18 multiple winners have 46 of 93 wins to their credit, for 49%; but at the Masters, the 16 multiple-time champions have 45 wins out of just 75 tournaments. That's 60%! At both the Open and the PGA, your average multiple champion has around 2.5 wins. At the Masters, that figure is more like 2.8.

In fact, we can restrict our gaze to just those players with at least three wins, and the pattern remains just as stark. Only 5 players have achieved this level of excellence at the PGA, and just 6 for the US Open. At the PGA, they combine for 20 wins, or 21.5% of the total; at the Open, they have 22 wins, exactly one-fifth of the total. But at the Masters, the eight dominant figures (Nicklaus, Palmer, Woods, Player, Snead, Faldo, Mickelson, and Demaret) have 29 wins. Not only is this more than the figures for the (older) Open and PGA, but it represents nearly 39% of all Masters. So if you're someone who likes Augusta, you probably really like it.

But you'll note I've been talking just about the American majors, and there's an obvious reason for that. At the British Open, the 26 repeat champions of the past 150 years combine for 87 wins out of 140 tournaments. That's 62%, higher than the figure for Augusta. But there are 19 three-time Champion Golfers of the Year, who have a total of 73 Open Championships to their credit. That's more than half. So while it's definitely true that the Masters selects for a certain Augusta-friendly type of player year after year, that's nothing compared to how thoroughly the British Open rewards the same group of links-loving golfers.

Perhaps some more analysis coming later. For now I'll just note that the weather seems to be favoring Tiger: the course will be playing easy, as it has each time he's won it (well, okay, in 1997 he was the only one who thought it was easy, but he's been double-digits under par all four times), and the skies should be nice and clear tomorrow morning while he's playing, and then get nasty for McIlroy and Mickelson's afternoon rounds. Let's hope he can take advantage!

Rory McIlroy ≠ Tiger Woods

Not yet, anyway.

McIlroy just won the Honda Classic in convincing fashion, with a charging Tiger Woods running out of holes and thus coming up two strokes short in his comeback bid. As Rory was finishing up his victory, as this tournament is at a very prominently Jack Nicklaus-designed course and Jack had been in the broadcast booth earlier, Johnny Miller mused about whether we might one day watch McIlroy mount a serious challenge to Jack's record of 18 major championship victories. More broadly, the day was in large part a comparison between the greatest player of the generation whose era is currently fading and the (anticipated) greatest player of the generation whose era is currently just beginning. But I think it's worth pointing out that, although Rory McIlroy appears to be a very good player and although when he's playing well he looks like he's playing about as well as anyone, that he's not Tiger Woods. He's not even Tiger Woods at the equivalent stages of their careers.

Tough Pars

Nate Silver writes (actually, tweets, but it is a form of writing, after all!):

Obama has a lot of pars on a tough course. Certainly could be much worse. But very few birdies.

This is part of an argument with Matt Yglesias structured around the difference between Andrew Cuomo's ability to exert effort and reap praise in the simple-majority NY Senate versus Obama's apparently more low-key leadership in the filibustered US Senate. They're sort of arguing over whether Obama has any particularly challenging and credit-worthy accomplishments that seem as much like an act of leadership as Cuomo's. I think it's actually a very apt metaphor. Roughly speaking, Nate's saying that Obama's playing the U.S. Open.