10

Metallurgy

In early May 1981, a little-known touring pro won a rain-shortened second-level tournament . . . and forever changed the way golf was played.

Ron Streck, a twenty-six-year-old journeyman out of the University of Tulsa, shot a third (and final) round 62 to beat Hale Irwin and Jerry Pate by 3 strokes at the rain-truncated Michelob Houston Open. Streck was the definitional journeyman. From 1977 to 1986, he kicked around the minor stops, picking up checks where he could. His only top-ten finish in any major was at the 1979 PGA, when he came home fourth, 4 strokes behind champion David Graham. There’d be no reason to run a peak Z score for Streck, but if you did it would encompass the years 1979–83, include a missed cut at the 1979 Masters, and come out to +0.64. In other words, he was a below-average tour player

What made Streck’s 1981 Houston victory profound wasn’t his talent but his equipment: he won it using metal woods.

From virtually the game’s dawn until the late 1970s, professionals and amateurs alike had used woods that were made of the eponymous material. The wood in question was usually persimmon, but it might also be cherry or hickory. Of course, players, perpetually in search of an advantage, tinkered. Back in May 1924, Sir Harold Delf Gillies, a noted plastic surgeon, showed up for his opening-round match in the British Amateur at St. Andrews with two pieces of equipment that were nothing if not innovative. The first was a nine-inch-long wooden tee with a rubber tip. The second was a driver with a three-inch-high face. When a thorough scan of the rules produced nothing prohibiting the use of such outlandish implements, tournament officials conceded Sir Gillies’s right to tee off . . . although before he did so they issued a strongly worded memo encouraging “all players” to abide by the spirit as well as the letter of the equipment rules then in effect. Sir Gillies won his match. The next morning, presumably having heard a few earfuls from his fellow competitors, he shelved the gargantuan driver and tee—and lost 3 and 1.

By the time of Streck’s arrival on tour, a start-up equipment company called Taylor Made had begun marketing something designed by a fellow named Gary Adams—a “wood” that was made of metal. Adams persuaded Streck and a handful of other pros—generally underachieving ones with little to lose—to try the club in competition.

Within weeks of Streck’s Houston victory, other pros began using the metal woods, and amateurs naturally followed. They benefited from the fact that metal clubs could be made lighter with larger heads and a greater coefficient of restitution, providing both enhanced accuracy and greater clubhead speed. That translated to greater ball speed, which in turn translated to distance. Because the PGA Tour was only then beginning to measure driving distance, we do not know the precise extent of the gain. But we do know this: Taylor Made quickly eclipsed makers of wooden clubs in market share, and in short order “woods” made of actual wood were all but obsolete.

The replacement of wood by metal was only one of several vital alterations taking place during that time in one of the most basic aspects of golf, the club. A year or two after the metal wood showed up, Karsten Solheim, already well known as the inventor of the Ping putter, introduced perimeter-weighted, cavity-backed irons. Different from traditional iron designs, where the metal (and therefore the weight) was more or less evenly distributed across the clubhead, Solheim’s cavity-backed irons focused the weight on the club’s perimeter. That translated to a more forgiving result, both in distance and in accuracy, for shots struck off center.

In short order, the pros discovered what hackers around the world were also learning: a bag equipped with metal woods and perimeter-weighted irons made them both longer and more accurate.

Seve Ballesteros

Severiano Ballesteros was a dashing, dark-haired Spaniard with wild eyes and a wild game. This Don Quixotish figure not only tilted at windmills but was a threat to hit them. But whether playing from the fairway or the parking lot, Ballesteros did it with a continental flair.

Ballesteros’s play was intense in the way the Armada was intense, the difference being he often won. His recurring strategy was high risk, relying on his fabled imagination. His incessant reliance on “Seve shots,” unorthodox, intemperate, and often spontaneous hacks along questionable flight lines, may not have suited technicians, but they brought Ballesteros five major championships and trophies from more than seventy professional tournaments around the world.

The golf community knew nothing of Ballesteros when he qualified for the 1975 British Open as an eighteen-year-old. He missed the cut. They knew little more of him when he qualified for the event again in 1976. This time Ballesteros opened their eyes with consecutive 69s to take a 2-stroke lead after thirty-six holes. Despite a third-round 73, he still led Johnny Miller by 2 entering Sunday play when the pressure finally caught up to him. He shot 74, Miller shot 66, and Ballesteros faded into a tie for second with Jack Nicklaus. The knowledgeable looked past the collapse to the accomplishment: a nineteen-year-old from a country with no golf tradition had just tied the great Nicklaus and made a legitimate run at winning the game’s most historic event.

Seve Ballesteros had arrived.

That Open won Ballesteros an invitation to the 1977 Masters. He could not repeat his success. But he did learn, and the experience acquired playing both in the United States and internationally paid off when Ballesteros came to Royal Lytham for the 1979 British Open. Late in the tournament, leading Nicklaus by 2 shots, he drove the ball well off course and into a parking lot. No problem for Ballesteros, who knocked his second shot from amid the cars onto the green and holed out for a birdie on his way to a 3-stroke victory. He became the first continental European to win the championship since Arnaud Massy in 1907.

Seve returned to Augusta for the Masters in 1980, but this time as British Open champion, and won by 4 strokes. In 1982 he missed a playoff with Craig Stadler, the eventual winner, and Dan Pohl by 1 shot. A year later there were no misses; Ballesteros cruised to a 4-shot win over Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite, his 280 total equaling the best since his own 275 in 1980. His second British Open title came in 1984, a 2-stroke victory over Tom Watson and Bernhard Langer at St. Andrews.

He came to the final round of the 1988 British Open back at Lytham in contention for a fifth major win and displayed the full variety of his game. The closing 65 included an amazing eleven-hole stretch: two pars, two bogeys, six birdies, and an eagle. From behind the eighteenth green, Ballesteros finished off a still-hopeful Nick Price with a chip that stopped inches from the cup for a tap-in birdie and a 2-stroke win. By year’s end, he had climbed to number 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking.

Always more committed to the European than American tour, Ballesteros capped his career by winning the 1995 Spanish Open. After 1995 he confined his major appearances to the Masters and British Open, and even those soon became largely ceremonial, Ballesteros last making the cut in 1995. Soon after his final Masters appearance in 2007, he was diagnosed with brain cancer, the disease that killed him in 2011.

The long, slow decline of his play muddies Ballesteros’s career Z score, which deteriorated from +0.17 in 1994 to +54.48 by his last Masters appearance.

Ballesteros in the Clubhouse

Tournament Finish Score Z score

1983 Masters

1st

280

–2.24

1983 U.S. Open

T-4

286

–1.76

1984 British Open

1st

276

–2.65

1984 PGA

5th

279

–1.59

1985 Masters

T-2

284

–1.58

1985 U.S. Open

T-5

281

–1.42

1986 Masters

4th

281

–1.46

1986 British Open

T-6

288

–1.42

1987 Masters

T-2

285

–1.56

1987 U.S. Open

3rd

282

–1.52

Note: Average Z score: –1.72. Effective stroke average: 69.44.

Ballesteros’s Career Record (1975–2007)

Ayako Okamoto

(Tie) Number 15 Peak

When golf experts confront the question of “best player never to have won a major,” their attentions generally fall on a small coterie of names: Lee Westwood, Luke Donald, and, until the 2017 Masters, Sergio Garcia. None of those answers are even on the right continent. They’re also sexist. Hands down the best player never to have won a major was a slightly built Japanese woman few recall today.

The striking aspect of Ayako Okamoto’s record is how consistently and how narrowly she missed that coveted major title.

For the nine-season period between 1983 and 1991, Okamoto finished among the top ten in more than half the contested women’s majors, that record including six runner-up finishes and a dozen placements among the top five. Twice she lost majors in playoffs. Between 1986 and 1987, Okamoto finished among the top five in seven consecutive LPGA majors without winning any of them. In the four 1987 majors, she never finished below fifth place, and only nine strokes separated her from completing a Grand Slam.

Okamoto came to golf from a unique background for a touring pro: softball. As a youth, she was rated the best left-handed pitcher in Japan. One day a friend tossed a golf ball in her path, handed her a right-handed club, and suggested she have a whack. Okamoto did, and within a few months she had qualified for the Japanese tour. She finished just outside the top ten in her first professional competition, won the 1979 Japanese LPGA Championship, and by 1981 was—with eight victories and six seconds—clearly the country’s best player.

Eager for tougher challenges, Okamoto qualified for the U.S. tour on her first attempt and a few months later claimed her first U.S. victory, the Arizona Copper Classic. By 1984, boosted by a second-place finish in the du Maurier and three tour victories, Okamoto rang up $251,000 in earnings, third best on the U.S. tour.

Through it all, Okamoto was modest about her easygoing success. “I’ve been very lucky,” she told reporters at the height of her popularity in the mid-1980s. In that respect, Okamoto proved a far poorer analyst than player, for her achievements were too consistent to be influenced by mere fortune. She won twice more in 1986 and narrowly missed claiming the du Maurier, losing to Pat Bradley in a sudden-death playoff. Achieving millionaire status during a four-victory 1987 season, she continued her frustrating pursuit of a major win, losing the U.S. Open in another playoff, this one to Laura Davies and also including JoAnne Carner. She lost the du Maurier by two strokes to Jody Anschutz, finished four behind Betsy King at the Dinah Shore, and came in three behind Jane Geddes at the LPGA.

Today, given the international nature of the modern LPGA Tour, it seems odd to consider that Okamoto’s success did not spur a generation of aspiring young imitators in Japan, as Se Ri Pak’s 1998 arrival soon would in Korea and eventually throughout Asia. But it did not. During the decade in which Okamoto was an active tour member, she never competed regularly against a fellow Asian LPGA member. She returned to Japan in 1993, and her name quickly faded into relative obscurity. Still she could point to seventeen victories on the LPGA tour and sixty-two worldwide. Not bad for a left-handed pitcher.

Okamoto in the Clubhouse

Tournament Finish Score Z score

1985 LPGA

T-5

286

–1.21

1986 LPGA

T-3

279

–1.99

1986 U.S. Open

T-3

288

–1.81

1986 du Maurier

2nd

276

–2.43

1987 Nabisco Dinah Shore

T-5

287

–1.64

1987 LPGA

T-3

278

–1.81

1987 US Open

T-2

285

–2.18

1987 du Maurier

2nd

274

–2.81

1988 LPGA

T-3

284

–1.54

1989 LPGA

2nd

277

–2.77

Note: Average Z score: –2.02. Effective stroke average: 69.00.

Okamoto’s Career Record (1982–2000)

Nick Faldo

(Tie) Number 24 Peak

England proper—and is there any other kind?—produces frontline international golfers in numbers that are disproportionately small relative to its importance to the game. For more than three decades following Max Faulkner’s 1951 victory, only one Englishman, Tony Jacklin, laid claim to the British Open golf championship. Then in an eight-year span beginning with Sandy Lyle’s victory at St. George’s, Englishmen won four championships. The other three all went to Nick Faldo, at his peak the best English golfer since Harry Vardon.

Faldo was a technocrat in the Ben Hogan mold. Never an especially long hitter, he tried to make up for physical shortcomings with the precision of his swing, his approach to the course, and its translation to the scorecard. In that sense, possibly the defining round of any golfer’s career was Faldo’s final one at the 1987 British Open at Muirfield. On a day when he needed to shoot par golf to claim his first major title, Faldo not only did it but did it meticulously—with pars on every one of the eighteen holes.

When he was a youngster, Faldo’s athletic propensities were hard to miss. At six-foot-three, he excelled at sports and seemed to show a special fondness for cycling. His parents bought him an expensive racing bike. But they had not reckoned with Faldo’s other proclivity, the one that involved figuring out how things work. Faldo proceeded to dismantle the bike. He was, observers often said, the same way with his golf swing . . . forever taking it apart and putting it back together. Faldo credited watching Charles Coody win the 1971 Masters on television with spurring his interest in golf. By 1975 his game had developed to the point where he was good enough to win ten amateur titles. He joined the European tour in 1976, the same year he debuted at the British Open, finishing in an anonymous but perfectly credible tie (with, among others, Gary Player) for twenty-eighth place. Faldo won $603.

Over the next five years, Faldo became a familiar face in European golf circles, although his visibility in America was largely limited to whatever exposure he gained from the British Open. That exposure could be more than casual. He tied for seventh place in 1978 and in 1982 tied for fourth, just 2 strokes behind Tom Watson’s winning 284. His 1978 showing qualified him to fulfill his youthful dream by playing at the Masters, where he made the cut but was not a factor in the outcome. In 1981 he began to split time between the European and American tours, playing about a dozen events here and winning just under $50,000.

It was not until his 1987 victory at Muirfield that Faldo leaped to American attention. But that victory marked his arrival both as a celebrity and as a player. Between 1987 and 1995, Faldo won six major championships, three Masters, and three British Opens. His name was perennially near the top of the leader board. Beginning with the 1988 U.S. Open and continuing through the 1992 PGA, Faldo landed in the top twenty in nineteen consecutive major events.

Possibly because of his technical virtuosity, Faldo seemed impervious to the pressure that affected other players. His par-heavy winning round at the 1987 British Open was one illustration. At the 1989 Masters, he won in sudden death with a long putt at the second extra hole. In 1990 he beat Ray Floyd in another playoff. In 1992 at Muirfield, Faldo lost a 5-stroke lead on Sunday but rallied with late birdies to win his third British Open by 1. He was ranked number 1 in the world at the conclusion of both the 1992 and the 1993 seasons.

The epitome of Faldo’s tenacity was the 1996 Masters, when he trailed Greg Norman by 6 strokes entering the final day’s play. Other players might have pressed, but Faldo let Norman do that. The tactic worked; Norman’s early mistakes built some self-imposed pressure, which Faldo exacerbated with a couple of birdies. By day’s end, his 6-stroke deficit had turned into a 5-stroke victory.

There was no such suspense at the 1990 British Open, when Faldo dismantled St. Andrews with a four-round total of 270, 18 under par, winning by 5.

Always a man of the golfing world, Faldo cut back his U.S. appearances substantially after 2002 to concentrate on the European tour, a workload he reduced again after the 2005 season to focus on television analysis and other teaching endeavors.

Faldo always performed superbly on his home soil. In thirty British Opens between 1976 and 2005, he beat the field average twenty-two times, including nineteen straight between 1978 and 1996.

Historically, Faldo is one of the first players for whom there are some individual skills data that can be correlated with his results. The data, however, are from the proto era of tour stat analysis, the pre–Strokes Gained period, and, as noted in chapter 1, those data just aren’t very refined. The second problem is that because Faldo was an on-and-off competitor on the American tour, the data are only partial and generally biased toward the end of his career. For what it’s worth, the data are in line with the characterization of Faldo as a mechanic. Between the early 1980s and mid-1990s, his driving distance was generally a bit below average. Accuracy was another matter. In 1989 Faldo hit fairways at an exceptional rate of 76.11 percent, 1.8 standard deviations better than the tour average of 64.74 percent. In 1995 he hit 77.81 percent of fairways—the tour average was 69.5 percent—and followed that up by hitting 68.55 percent of greens, nearly a full standard deviation better than the tour average for that skill. He also scrambled for pars or better at a rate nearly 2 standard deviations better than the field average. As he aged, Faldo’s correlational skills declined. By 1998 he was below average in all of them except fairway accuracy, where he never did lose his edge.

Faldo in the Clubhouse

Tournament Finish Score Z score

1989 Masters

1st

283

–1.82

1989 British Open

T-11

281

–1.05

1990 Masters

1st

278

–2.40

1990 U.S. Open

T-3

281

–1.48

1990 British Open

1st

270

–3.09

1992 U.S. Open

T-4

291

–1.29

1992 British Open

1st

272

–2.54

1992 PGA

T-2

281

–1.68

1993 British Open

2nd

269

–2.36

1993 PGA

3rd

273

–1.91

Note: Average Z score: –1.96. Effective stroke average: 69.09.

Faldo’s Career Record (1976–2006)

Greg Norman

Anywhere outside the United States, Greg Norman’s was as fearsome a presence as his nickname, the Great White Shark, suggests. In America it was often a different story. Norman sometimes appeared baffled by the U.S. game.

That was as much a matter of perception as reality. After all, he did win eighteen times over fourteen seasons in North America. And they weren’t all cheapies: Norman won the 1984 Kemper and Canadian Opens, the 1988 MCI Heritage, the 1990 Doral and Memorial, the 1994 Players Championship, and the 1997 World Series of Golf.

But in the majors, Norman’s reputation rose and fell depending on which side of the Atlantic he happened to be playing. In England or Scotland, he won two Opens and beat the field average in thirteen consecutive championships between 1983 and 1996. He ran up a career Z score of –13.32 in the world’s oldest ongoing major golf competition. Elsewhere, the picture was different. Norman’s career Z score was +7.62 in the three U.S.-based majors. He never won any of them, and some of the failures raised the question, “What shark?”

Born in Queensland in 1955, he was raised in a golfing family; his mom was club champion. That and a reading of Jack Nicklaus’s 1970s instructional book moved him to take up the game seriously, starting as an assistant pro.

The club pro’s life, though, was never what Norman had in mind. He joined the Australian-Asian tour and was an immediate flash, winning the Westlakes Classic at age twenty-one. With almost no world-level experience, he qualified for the 1978 British Open and managed to tie four players, among them Lee Trevino, for twenty-ninth place. At the 1979 U.S. Open, Norman tied for forty-eighth. His tenth-place finish at the British Open a month later was debutant level. In 1981 his flashy appearance at the Masters won him the nickname that would stay with him; his game won him fourth place and $16,000.

Now Norman was going somewhere. Both aggressive and charismatic, he parlayed the fame that came to him into regular appearances on the U.S. tour, a labor that would produce $10 million in career earnings and three Vardon Trophies (1988, 1989, and 1994) in addition to those twenty victories. He was Player of the Year in 1995. At the end of seven different seasons—1986, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1995, 1996, and 1997—he was ranked number 1 in the world.

There was an “agony and ecstasy” element to Norman’s game. It first surfaced at the 1984 U.S. Open at Winged Foot when he battled Fuzzy Zoeller for the title. Coming to the final hole needing a par to get into a playoff, Norman faced a fifty-foot putt . . . which he promptly made. So impressed was Zoeller, waiting in the final fairway, that he memorably waved a white towel in mock surrender. In the playoff, though, it was Norman who surrendered, shooting 75 to Zoeller’s 67.

Norman’s fate in the United States and Britain was superbly summed up in his adventures during 1986. He won one major that year and could with not much more luck or effort have won all four. In fact, he led going into Sunday play in all of them. At the Masters, Jack Nicklaus’s memorable final-round 65—with a back nine of 30—overtook Norman, who even so came to the eighteenth hole needing only a par to tie. He missed the green with his approach and made bogey instead. At the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, Norman shot two rounds in the 60s to lead Lee Trevino by 1 entering Sunday play. But a final-round 75 sent him sputtering back to a tie for twelfth, 6 strokes behind champion Ray Floyd. At the PGA in August, a closing 76 allowed Bob Tway to erase most of a 4-stroke deficit coming to the final hole at Inverness. When Tway dropped his third stroke from a bunker in front of the final green for a birdie 3, Norman was consigned to runner-up status again. He did win the British Open at Turnberry, opening up 5 shots on the field with a second-round 63. Despite the final-day failures, Norman’s 1986 record works out to a seasonal Z score of –1.92, the best of his career.

His bad luck continued in 1987. At that year’s Masters, Larry Mize holed a long chip at the second playoff hole to defeat Norman for the green jacket. In 1993 Norman defeated his recent major demons, besting Nick Faldo by 2 strokes at the British Open at St. George with a closing 64. That victory marked the beginning of Norman’s best stretch of play in the majors. Between the British Opens of 1993 and 1996, Norman’s thirteen major appearances showed just one victory, but three runner-ups and nine top-ten finishes.

Yet even that stretch yielded frustration and embarrassment. He lost a playoff to Paul Azinger for the 1993 PGA title. Then in April 1996 Norman seemed finally assured of a major win on U.S. soil, shooting an opening 63 and carrying a 6-stroke advantage into the final round at the Masters. Instead, he turned in one of the worst closing rounds of his career, a 78 that let Faldo pass him comfortably. “The best way to put it; I played like crap,” Norman said afterward.1

“Sometimes I think I have an almost perverse love of being down, even being defeated,” he wrote of the failures. “I know it will spur me on to greater things.” They may not have always been greater, but they were always more interesting.2

Norman in the Clubhouse

Tournament Finish Score Z score

1993 British Open

1st

267

–2.73

1993 PGA

2nd

272

–2.11

1994 U.S. Open

T-6

283

–1.32

1994 PGA

T-4

277

–1.51

1995 Masters

T-3

277

–1.65

1995 U.S. Open

2nd

282

–1.80

1995 British Open

T-15

287

–1.11

1996 Masters

2nd

281

–1.77

1996 U.S. Open

T-10

283

–1.32

1996 British Open

T-7

277

–1.25

Note: Average Z score: –1.66. Effective stroke average: 69.53.

Norman’s Career Record (1977–2004)

Betsy King

(Tie) Number 24 Peak

For a dozen years in the 1980s and 1990s, no woman golfer in America was consistently better than Betsy King.

That would have come as a profound surprise to those who saw King grind out a golf living through the 1970s and early 1980s. Playing ten tournaments in 1977, King won just $4,000, netting nothing higher than a tie for fifteenth. In 1978 she played a full schedule of twenty-nine events, reaching the top ten eight times and winning $44,000, but never contending for a trophy. In thirty-two events in 1979, she managed eight more top tens, one of them a playoff loss at Wheeling, and $54,000. But she backslid in 1980, with just one top-ten finish in thirty-two tournaments and just $27,000 in winnings. The 1981 season produced five top tens, including another runner-up finish, and restored her earnings power to about $55,000. Still, the most you could say of King was that she had become part of the field.

That didn’t change until the 1984 Women’s Kemper Open when King, twenty-eight, held off Pat Bradley by a stroke. A month later she won by 2 at Orlando, this time over Alice Miller. That season’s LPGA amounted to a breakthrough when she broke par by a stroke and finished in a tie for seventh place. The Women’s Open gave her another confidence boost: she tied Patty Sheehan for fifth in her best big-stage showing to date. The du Maurier followed by two weeks, and King did better still, taking third, just 2 shots behind Juli Inkster. From virtually zero visibility, she had claimed three top-ten finishes in majors, two of them in the top five. She finished the year as the LPGA’s leading money winner and won its Player of the Year Award.

Suddenly, King had something going. In 1987 she beat Sheehan in a playoff for the Shore, her first major victory. She capped a solid 1989 with a 4-stroke win over Lopez at the U.S. Open and then in 1990 enjoyed a season reminiscent of Bradley’s rush through 1986 and Lopez’s spectacular 1978. It began at the Nabisco, which King entered on the heels of second- and third-place finishes the previous two weeks. She built a 5-stroke lead after three rounds, and though she staggered home with a closing 75, it was enough for a 2-stroke win. At the Open in July, King won again, this time making up 9 strokes on Patty Sheehan over the final thirty-six holes. A fifth at the LPGA preceded two more tour championships and a net gain to her purse of more than $650,000. Between 1984 and 1990, Betsy King had won twenty-six tournaments, going from winless to the winningest player, man or woman, active in top-level professional golf.

And once having reached the top, King broached no letdown. In 1992 she mounted a historic performance at the LPGA, routing the field by 11 strokes with a four-round score of 267, 17 under par. Her total was 3.52 standard deviations below the average for the week, a level that has been surpassed just eight times in the history of men’s and women’s professional majors. She was 22 strokes below the field average for the tournament and led runner-up JoAnne Carner by as much as Carner led the five players who tied for thirty-fifth place.

King won her thirtieth championship, qualifying her for the LPGA Hall of Fame, in 1995. She was forty-one when the 1997 season began, but age had never been her problem. So it should not have surprised anyone when she won the Nabisco a third time—her sixth career major.

Since King joined the tour in the mid-1970s and peaked between 1987 and 1991, all of our individual skills correlative data postdate her prime. From 1993 onward, King was a relatively long driver, averaging 0.8 of a standard deviation longer than her competitors. She missed fairways at a rate 0.4 of a standard deviation more often than her fellow pros, but the average standard deviation of her performance in hitting greens in regulation during those seasons was consistently close to the upper third. King’s late-career performance on the greens was acceptable if not remarkable, averaging 0.334 standard deviations better than average.

King continued to play at least ten events per year until reaching her fiftieth birthday in 2005. By then her skills had eroded. Indeed, after 1997 King never beat the field stroke average in majors and missed the cut in ten of the last twenty-eight major events she started. Age is hell . . . but then for King, so was youth. That middle part was pretty sweet, though.

King in the Clubhouse

Tournament Finish Score Z score

1986 U.S. Open

T-3

288

–1.81

1986 du Maurier

T-3

281

–1.69

1987 Nabisco Dinah Shore

1st

283

–2.25

1987 LPGA

2nd

276

–2.15

1987 du Maurier

7th

280

–1.69

1987 U.S. Open

T-4

289

–1.54

1989 du Maurier

T-2

280

–2.03

1989 U.S. Open

1st

278

–2.41

1990 Nabisco Dinah Shore

1st

283

–2.13

1990 U.S. Open

1st

284

–1.92

Note: Average Z score: –1.96. Effective stroke average: 69.09.

King’s Career Record (1977–2005)

Laura Davies

Number 19 Peak

For a time following her arrival on the American tour, Laura Davies seemed capable of taking over. As a big woman who hit big drives, she always had the intimidation factor going for her. Davies was capable of backing up her appearance with action; in fact, she won the U.S. Open before qualifying as an LPGA Tour member. So imposing was Davies’s growing reputation that the LPGA—judging its regular tour needed Davies to draw fans—simply rewrote its eligibility requirements to make her immediately eligible for events without having to go through the usual qualifying process.

The most successful player in the history of British women’s professional golf, Davies made a name for herself at regional and national tournaments. She qualified for the British Curtis Cup team in 1984, turned pro in 1985, and led the European women’s tour in money winnings that season and again in 1986. She also won the Women’s British Open, although at the time the event had not gained a stature anywhere near comparable with its masculine sibling.

Having established a continent-wide reputation, the twenty-three-year-old Davies branched out in 1987, committing to play in the Nabisco and the U.S. Open. Her 287 in the Open tied JoAnne Carner and Ayako Okamoto for first place, and Davies produced a 71 in the playoff for a 2-stroke victory over Okamoto, 3 over Carner.

Davies joined the tour regularly in 1988 and played in twenty events, winning two of them. But consistency avoided her. Davies missed the cut in the LPGA and then finished second in the du Maurier. She bobbed and weaved into and mostly out of contention in major events for the next five seasons.

Her game clicked into place in 1994. After finishing second in the Nabisco, Davies won the LPGA in May with a final-round 68. The leading money winner on the U.S. tour that season (at slightly more than $687,000), she claimed victories on five tours worldwide that year. Davies missed repeating her LPGA title by 1 shot in 1995 when Kelly Robbins fired her own final-round 68, but made it two titles in three seasons in 1996 in an event shortened to three rounds by weather. Davies won four times in the United States that season and nine times worldwide.

Davies’s skills are firmly etched in the numbers. Between 1994 and 1998—her peak—her drives averaged 259.2 yards, beating the 233.6-yard field average by 2.8 standard deviations, that is, way out on the good edge of the bell curve. She built on that advantage by hitting 69.4 percent of her greens in regulation; the tour average was 62.6 percent. Davies was never much for fairways, hitting them at a less than normal rate every season between her debut in 1993 and 2011. But with her length and ability to find greens, driver accuracy didn’t matter.

The rise to prominence of Annika Sorenstam did matter. It sent Davies’s reputation into something of an eclipse after 1996. She won one 1997 event and finished fourth in the LPGA, but her earnings fell by more than half. In 1999 she went winless in the United States for the first time in seven seasons, claiming only two top-five finishes in a major after that while missing twenty cuts.

The effect is to give Davies one of the least complementary sets of ratings of any big-name player. Her peak score, measured by her ten best tournaments between 1994 and 1998, approaches –2.00, according her top-twenty status all-time. Yet her +49.27 career score is poor. Her career graph describes Davies’s performance in a way that words cannot: a deep midcareer trough giving way to more than a decade of nondescript paycheck collecting.

Davies in the Clubhouse

Tournament Finish Score Z score

1994 Nabisco Dinah Shore

2nd

277

–2.32

1994 LPGA

1st

279

–2.37

1995 Nabisco Dinah Shore

T-3

287

–1.65

1995 LPGA

2nd

275

–2.72

1996 LPGA

1st

213

–2.16

1996 U.S. Open

6th

281

–1.47

1996 du Maurier

1st

277

–2.54

1997 LPGA

T-4

284

–1.89

1998 Nabisco Dinah Shore

T-3

283

–1.88

1998 U.S. Open

T-11

295

–0.91

Note: Average Z score: –1.99. Effective stroke average: 69.04.

Davies’s Career Record (1986–2013)

Juli Inkster

Number 19 Career

What a marvelous beginning to Juli Inkster’s professional career . . . a victory in only her fifth start and two major championships in barely a year. And what a conclusion . . . four major titles after her thirty-ninth birthday.

The ostensible prime? That was occasionally shaky. But Inkster could cite a legitimate excuse: motherhood.

Few players arrived with expectations as ratcheted as Inkster, who came out of Northern California to win three Women’s Amateur titles between 1980 and 1982. A collegiate All-American at San José State, she was a member of the 1982 Curtis Cup team.

Inkster joined the tour in 1983, winning the Safeco Classic less than two months later. Her first major as a pro—she had played in five U.S. Opens as an amateur—was memorable enough; Inkster beat Pat Bradley in a playoff to pocket the $55,000 first-place check at the 1984 Dinah Shore. Later in the summer she added the du Maurier in her debut at that event. This golf business is easy.

After 1984 the rest of the tour caught up with the young star, although victories continued to come Inkster’s way in lesser tournaments. She won once in 1985, added the Women’s Kemper and McDonald’s Championship in 1986, and repeated in the Safeco in 1988. By 1989 she had twelve tour trophies counting that season’s Nabisco, which she won by a comfortable 5 strokes over JoAnne Carner and Tammie Green.

Motherhood complicated the picture in 1990. “Until I had kids, for almost my whole life my whole day was being Juli Inkster,” she said later. “It was about me. And then that all changed.”3 Inkster tried to play through the obvious division of interests, but her game showed the effects of diminished attention. That year she missed the cut in the U.S. Open, LPGA, and du Maurier. She missed the Open cut again in 1991. In 1992 Inkster rebounded but lost both the Nabisco and the U.S. Open in playoffs, the first to Dottie Pepper and the second to Patty Sheehan. The playoff failures initiated a five-year victory drought that continued until the 1997 Samsung World Championship. This was due in part at least to the reduced schedule she accepted in deference to the needs of her two young children. In 1994 Inkster played in just sixteen tournaments.

Inkster turned thirty-nine in 1999, but given the time she had laid away from many of the game’s competitive stresses, it was a young thirty-nine. She proved it that June with a 5-stroke victory in the U.S. Open. Later in the month, Inkster shot 68 in the opening round of the LPGA, a round played on her birthday. Rounds of 66, 69, and 65 followed, giving her a 4-shot win over Lisolette Neumann and a more substantive gift, the winner’s check for $210,000. It also completed the career Grand Slam.

These back-to-back major titles would have been impressive as valedictory performances . . . but Inkster was only just hitting her professional stride. She reprised her LPGA Championship in 2000, surviving a two-hole playoff against Stefania Croce. At the 2002 Open at Prairie Dunes, her experience guided her to a 2-stroke victory over Annika Sorenstam on a course that maximized the importance of cerebral play. Fourth a few weeks later at the LPGA, she added an eighth place showing at the 2003 Open. Inkster was forty-three at the time, but her game had never been better.

During those prime seasons of 1999 through 2003, Inkster was strong in every measured facet of the game. At that peak, Inkster was 1.24 standard deviations longer off the tee than the average LPGA pro and 0.64 standard deviations more accurate. She hit greens at a rate 1.46 standard deviations better than the norm and was 1.13 standard deviations better than the field average in putts taken. It’s an extraordinarily balanced portfolio for any tour pro, much less one entering her forties, which Inkster was when her prime began.

Inkster in the Clubhouse

Tournament Finish Score Z score

1999 Nabisco Dinah Shore

6th

283

–1.23

1999 Women’s Open

1st

272

–3.11

1999 LPGA

1st

268

–2.61

1999 du Maurier

3rd

283

–1.65

2000 LPGA

1st

281

–2.73

2000 du Maurier

T-5

286

–1.78

2002 LPGA

T-4

285

–1.78

2002 U.S. Open

1st

276

–3.39

2003 U.S. Open

8th

287

–1.31

2003 British Open

T-43

291

+0.31

Note: Average Z score: –1.93. Effective stroke average: 69.13.

Inkster’s Career Record (1983–2007)

Payne Stewart

When sports figures die before their careers have ended, it is tempting to ponder what might have been. In the case of Payne Stewart’s golfing life, what might have been probably parallels what was.

Stewart was forty-two years old when he perished aboard that oxygen-starved aircraft in October 1999. He had won the U.S. Open the previous June, but otherwise his recent career had not been memorable. Since 1994 Stewart’s twenty-one other major appearances had produced one top-ten finish—second at the 1998 U.S. Open—two other showings in the top twenty, and five missed cuts. Aside from the Open victory, he had won twice in official tour events, the 1995 Shell Houston Open and the 1999 AT&T. But his five-season peak Z score, –1.49 between 1989 and 1993, was only –0.76 from 1995 onward.

Yet Pinehurst showed that he remained capable, as most on tour are, of winning in any given week. Thus, there exists a residue of wonderment.

Even during his best seasons Stewart’s tour record always tended to veer toward the haphazard. One of his best seasons, 1993, was bracketed by two of his worst. In 1992 he missed the cut at the Masters, performed unremarkably at the other majors, and accumulated a seasonal Z score of +1.27. In 1994 Stewart missed the cut in each of the first three majors.

Even during those peak seasons of 1989 to 1993, that was Stewart’s modus. He might deliver big, but he was a shaky bet. His 1989 PGA title capped one of Stewart’s better seasons: a tie for twenty-fourth at the Masters, for thirteenth at the U.S. Open, and for eighth at the British Open. His average 1989 Z score of –1.05 was fourth best among those who played at least three majors, behind only Scott Hoch, Faldo, and Norman.

The 1990 season was less memorable. Stewart followed a lackluster performance at the Masters, tying for twenty-sixth, by shooting 73-75 at the U.S. Open and failing to make the cut. He did salvage a runner-up showing at the British Open, but it was 5 strokes behind Faldo. His average 1990 Z score was +0.49. Another uneven season followed in 1991: a missed cut at the Masters, then his first U.S. Open win, then placing thirty-second and thirteenth at the Brit and the PGA.

Stewart’s +22.83 career score reflects the up-and-down nature of his résumé. Unlike peak Z scores—which count only the best performances within a defined high point of a player’s chart—career scores encompass the good and bad equally. That means they can get pretty bloody, and Stewart’s does. It’s a trait he shares, by the way, with an unusual number of players from his era. Tom Kite, Nick Price, Davis Love, Paul Azinger, Ian Woosnam, José María Olazábal, and Curtis Strange, all from the 1980s and 1990s, all also produced career Z scores in excess of +15.0.

He had a second trait that tended to hurt his overall record, an aversion to Augusta National Golf Club. Stewart teed it up there fourteen times and beat the field average only five of those times. He missed the cut more times (three) than he hit the top 10 (two), and his average finish on the eleven occasions he did play the weekend was twenty-ninth.

Stewart in the Clubhouse

Tournament Finish Score Z score

1989 U.S. Open

T-13

284

–0.89

1989 British Open

T-8

280

–1.21

1989 PGA

1st

276

–1.87

1990 British Open

T-2

275

–1.98

1990 PGA

T-8

292

–1.08

1991 U.S. Open

1st

282

–2.32

1991 PGA

T-13

285

–0.93

1993 Masters

T-9

285

–0.98

1993 U.S. Open

2nd

274

–2.32

1993 British Open

12th

276

–1.10

Note: Average Z score: –1.47. Effective stroke average: 69.81.

Stewart’s Career Record (1981–99)

The top-ten golfers of all time for peak rating as of the end of the 1990 season.

Rank Player Seasons Z score Effective stroke average

1.

Arnold Palmer

1960–64

–2.31

68.57

2.

Jack Nicklaus

1971–75

–2.302

68.59

3.

James Braid

1901–10

–2.18

68.76

4.

Tom Watson

1977–81

–2.17

68.78

5.

Ben Hogan

1950–54

–2.13

68.84

6.

Bobby Jones

1926–30

–2.11

68.87

7.

Walter Hagen

1923–27

–2.10

68.88

8.

Sam Snead

1947–51

–2.07

68.93

9.

Mickey Wright

1958–62

–2.06

68.94

10.

Harry Vardon

1896–1904

–2.03

68.98

The top-ten golfers of all time for career rating as of the end of the 1990 season.

Rank Player Seasons Z score

1.

Jack Nicklaus

1962–89

–104.86

2.

Walter Hagen

1913–40

–73.94

3.

Patty Berg

1935–68

–73.21

4.

Sam Snead

1937–62

–68.69

5.

Louise Suggs

1947–72

–60.31

6.

Mickey Wright

1954–84

–59.67

7.

Gene Sarazen

1920–51

–58.09

8.

Ben Hogan

1938–62

–53.09

9.

Tom Watson

1972–90

–45.05

10.

Byron Nelson

1933–60

–44.88