Mark your calendars, because this is the one and only time that this blog will school the casual world on golf.
I personally believe that golf is an impostor sport. I place it on a level only slightly higher than bowling and darts, and that’s just because it’s played outdoors. Apart from John Daly, there isn’t a single interesting personality on the tour. Eldrick Woods (I refuse to join the world in calling a grown man “Tiger” without batting an eye) is the least engaging figure to ever dominate his profession/activity. And before any of our readers get after me for that statement, I would remind you all that he is a Magic fan.
I bring this up because the sports world is currently having a collective aneurysm over the fact that Eldrick missed the cut at the British Open today. Was it just a bad weekend? Has Eldrick rushed back too soon from his surgery? Will he ever be dominant again? These are the types of questions that sports pundits are hammering away at right now with Pearl Harbor-level drama.
Here’s the one gem I can drop to all of you golf fans out there: the most likely scenario is that it has very little to do with Eldrick and everything to do with the tournament itself.
I took an interdisciplinary class on sports my senior year of college at the University of Chicago. The concept was that every week to two weeks, a different professor from a different discipline would lecture on their particular niche interest in sports. Sociology, psychology, medicine (I’ll save the insights on the future of PEDs for later), economics, and of course, statistics.
The stats professor - Stephen Stigler - had a particular interest in two sports: baseball and golf. As has been well-documented on this blog, baseball is universally accepted as the friendliest sport for statisticians to analyze because people have been collecting data on it the longest. Basketball is in the process of catching up. But golf is actually the second favorite sport of stat geeks. This is only partially because it’s the only one at which someone not athletic enough to jump over a piece of paper can excel.
The point that I remember most vividly from Stigler’s golf analysis concerned my favorite sports topic: regression toward the mean, AKA “the law of averages” in my dad’s universe. I’ve covered this in one of my previous posts about basketball, but rather than dig back through the archives for it, I’ll just repeat the idea quickly.
When applied to the sports world, regression toward the mean is based on the idea that sports performance is a combination of two general factors: the athlete’s skill and “luck.” In small sample sizes - say, a single game - there is a greater chance that “luck” can tip the scales of the outcome. But in the long run - say, an entire season, or even a seven game series - luck will normally average out and allow the player or team with the greater skill to win. This is why so many people love the early rounds of March Madness. In a “one and done” tournament, the underdog has a vastly better chance at beating a higher-seeded opponent than if they had to play that team multiple times. In contrast, the most skilled team will almost always win its conference in the regular season because “luck” rarely holds up over the long run.
This is also why in golf tournaments, you’ll very often see some bizarre name atop the leaderboard after the first day or two of tournament play. The “excitement” and “surprise” thrown around when this happens at every PGA major makes me roll my eyes every time. It’s not a coincidence that almost every time, those unexpected titans that energized Sports Center and thousands of people in polo shirts fade back into obscurity by the time Sunday rolls around.
Back to the point…”Luck” in sports is a catch-all term for the sum of a variety of different factors. Some of these factors are universal - for instance, is the athlete in good health on game day? Others, though, depend on the sport being played. For outdoor sports, the elements are one of the biggest factors that determine “luck.” Without turning this into a gargantuan post, suffice it to say that there are certain annual events in which it’s been statistically proven that the weather is often not only a factor…it’s the deciding factor.
In other words, there are a select few competitions in the sporting world where a player’s skill can be consistently canceled out by environmental conditions.
What is the prime example of these events? You guessed it: the British Open.
Now, looking back at the list of the past 15 British Open champions, I see some big names: Eldrick (three times), Ernie Els, Nick Faldo, Greg Norman, and my boy John Daly. But I also see some golfers I’ve never heard of before: Todd Hamilton in 2004, Ben Curtis in 2003, Paul Lawrie in 1999, Justin Leonard in 1997. This would suggest that every British Open is not equal, as the acknowledged greats have certainly managed to come through and win in recent memory.
However, my guess is that if you looked at the top finishers in those years where the unknowns took home the prize, they would be much more bizarre overall than on the years where the most skilled players won. My thinking being, of course, that the unknowns won in years where the conditions were so horrendous that “luck” overcame skill. If so, this would affect the overall field as much as the top 2 or 3 competitors. Whereas in the years where the expected names came out on top, the most skilled golfers would have performed better overall.
This is why no one should be all that surprised by the fact that Eldrick - still universally recognized as Golf Jesus - didn’t manage to make the cut this year. If he hadn’t made the cut at the US Open or the Masters, THAT would be cause for concern. But this hiccup in Eldrick’s career comes during the tournament where statistically we should all expect strange things to happen.
It’s also no concidence that right now, a 65 year-old man is the co-leader of the tournament. Granted, Tom Watson has also won the British Open 5 times before, which would suggest to me that he may be better at adjusting his game to compensate for poor weather than the average ’elite’ golfer.
That said, luck or not, I defy anyone to argue that any activity where a 65 year-old man can be dominant at the halfway mark qualifies as a true athletic competition (see: sport)…but that’s all I’ll say on that front for now.
The bottom line here is this: no one should be surprised when wacky shit happens at the British Open - least of all people who are actual golf fans. Great golfers will miss the cut there. Strange names will worm their way out of the woodwork to win there. That’s just the way this event is - and if you don’t believe anything I’ve said above, I’d encourage you to read today’s ESPN recap of the tournament with an eye toward how many times ‘luck’ and the concept of ‘playing by feel’ come up in the players’ interviews.
Most of all, I will predict that if weather conditions stay as is, there is a very good chance that a sextegenarian raises the trophy on Sunday. I will also predict that Tom Watson never again enters into the conversation for the lead in any other major tournament. But seeing him win the British Open at his age is not going to be shocking. After all, it’s not an alternate reality. It’s just the British Open: the Sports Twilight Zone, where the best lose, the odd win, and even someone completely bored by the game can have a little insight.
-T
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