In June 1914, amid open discussion of the imminent prospect of war, Charles Carlos Clarke—a respected member of the London Stock Exchange—put pen to paper in a letter to the editor of the Times. Mr. Clarke was alarmed that the young men of Great Britain might prove incapable of the tasks so certainly to be demanded of them. “We all know what the Duke of Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo being won upon the Eton playing fields,” he wrote. “There was no golf then, and I do not think that boys and young men playing golf only and neglecting cricket, football and, if possible, riding to hounds is likely to lead to the winning of the V[ictoria] C[ross].”1
Aside from being erroneous—golf significantly predates Waterloo—Mr. Clarke’s complaint about the threat to the nation posed by the game is hardly original. The sport has at times been termed slow, unathletic, the province of the rich, sexist, environmentally wasteful, and—supposedly by Mark Twain—a good walk spoiled. Whatever truth is contained in that indictment, it and Mr. Clarke overlook plenty of evidence mitigating in golf’s favor, not least of which is its competitive nature.
This book is about golf’s competitive nature.
It is one of many golf books on the shelves today. Generally, they follow one of three models. The most common are instructional, written by expert teachers or popular touring pros. You will find within these pages not a whit of instruction on how to hit a golf ball.
A second category includes the pretty picture books. They feature photos, maps, and illustrations of famous and fascinating golf holes the world over. For $75 or $100, they will take you vicariously to the institutional layouts of the United States, England, Australia, and elsewhere. No pictures in this book . . . just charts.
Finally, there are the bio books. John Daly wrote one about how he screwed up his remarkable talent. Alice Cooper wrote another about how golf nearly derailed his renegade musical career. John Feinstein wrote several, stealing the title of one from Twain. This book confesses to being interested in golfers—at least the best of them—but it is in no sense a diary.
This book is about the ways and means of answering a seminal question regarding golf performance: Who was the most dominant golfer of all time and why? For as long as people have been playing golf—back into the seventeenth century and professionally since the mid-nineteenth century—nobody’s ever actually attempted a statistics-based analytical approach to providing that answer.
As with many questions pertaining to golf success, subjectively answering such a question isn’t terribly difficult. It’s asked and answered often—not necessarily correctly—in taverns, fairways, and locker rooms across the nation. The subject came up during a dinner table argument of which I was a participant a while back at an exclusive Georgia golf locale—no, not that one, the place on the state’s western border. (And let me take this occasion to offer a delayed apology to any who might have been within earshot for the increasingly strident tone of that particular discussion. Such topics do tend to be argument starters.)
My verbal adversary adopted the position that various advances—in the physical nature of man, in technology, in equipment, in course design, in training—meant that the question essentially answered itself. The best golfer of all time, he contended, was the winner of the most recent tournament. It’s a superficially logical position, if subject to change on short notice.
The basis for this book—which I argued at that conversation—is for a more relativistic consideration of the answer, acknowledging (indeed embracing) the game’s changing nature. Obviously, if Bobby Jones were returned to life and health and then given his old hickory-shafted mashie, persimmon-headed driver, and rubber-core ball in a match against Jordan Spieth, the outcome would be foreordained. But what if the impact of the training, clubs, balls, courses, and traveling conditions could be normalized in order to create a condition-neutral measurement of Spieth in his prime against Jones—or Hagen, Palmer, or Hogan, in their primes? What if the question were viewed as one of individual dominance against their contemporaries? Who would win then?
And could any of those men achieve a greater dominance over their peers than Annika Sorenstam, Mickey Wright, Nancy Lopez, or Kathy Whitworth—again assuming a condition-neutral and nature-neutral outcome? There is no reason such an inquiry needs to be pertinent to one gender and one only. Nobody asserts that the best woman could be expected to beat the best man head-on in a contest over the same course length and using the same equipment. The pertinent question is which player has come closest to maximizing the inherent ability of the human species under the times and conditions in which he or she actually played. That would represent a true and honest measurement of the best golfer of all time.
The bulk of this book pursues the answer to that question by way of a largely statistically driven analysis of the careers of seventy of the best-known and most successful players in the professional game’s history. Those seventy do literally span that history, from Old Tom Morris, the first recognized “great” tournament player of the 1860s, to Dustin Johnson and Spieth, the numbers 1 and 2 players in the Official World Golf Ranking as of the conclusion of 2017. For each of the seventy, there is a basic career outline that is followed by a three-part synopsis of the player’s rating: a chart of each player’s best major tournament performances during his or her “peak” seasons, a career summary of major tournament performances, and a line graph showing the player’s development across the length of his or her career. If the player ranks among the top twenty-five players of all time based on either peak or career value, that fact is noted at the outset of the analysis. The above sentence contains several words or phrases requiring definition; the full explanations are found in chapter 3 and also in the appendix.
Unless otherwise cited in the text, the data forming the basis for the rating of each player are not particularly mysterious or exotic. Golf is a results-driven game; it’s measured by a score, and those scores are a matter of public record. The trick lies in how one views those scores. Historically, golfers have viewed scores as a counting exercise, which during any given tournament is precisely what they are. Low score wins. That assumption breaks down, however, when one attempts a cross-era comparison, influenced as such comparisons are by developments over time. For such cross-era work, one is forced to abandon an attachment to raw scores in favor of a measurement that one might term relative dominance. That is to ask, “How much better was Player A than all the other players against whom he or she was competing?” In that context, the question of one golfer’s superiority over another—irrespective of eras, gender, equipment, weather, or other factors—becomes answerable.