Tiger, Tiger burning bright

In the face of the deluge of articles by the mass sports media on Tiger's "return to form" just before this year's last major - the PGA at Baltusrol, let me quote myself from a year ago.

There's a lot of rubbish in the sports media about Tiger Woods in the aftermath of the US Open at Shinnecock. While sports media are paid to "hype", in the belief that controversy increases media purchases, listening and/or viewing, which, in turn increasing adverizing revenues, the commentary on Woods is particularly bad. There is a systematic feature of the coverage of golf by the sports media that is prominent here.There's a fundamental misconception of the nature of winning at golf which focuses on single events and on individuals with respect to "clutch" performance. This is true of all sports journalism (although preoccupation with "clutch" performance is worst in Baseball. Let's take the "turning point" obsession. Which shot of Goosen's "won" him the US Open? Clearly the answer is "none of them". He won by hitting 278 golf shots to Mickelson's 280. ALL OF THOSE STROKES COUNTED, FOLKS! True Mickelson 3-putt the 17th in tht last round but I'm sure he one-putt some greens, too. The 17th seems significant because of the drama of the last few holes but that drama would have been absent had Mickelson not holed an awful lot of putts before then.What's the key point here? Like all sports golf has a random element. At the level of play of tour pros chance determines the outcome of x% of tournaments, where x is very difficult to figure out but my guess is in the vicinity of 50%. The remaining determinants are the relative strengths of the all-round game of the strongest players.

Think of the PGA tour as the urn beloved of statistics texts. Balls representing the 200 or so players are put into the urn each week and one of them is drawn as the winner. If the balls were identical and the selection process unbiased the winners would follow closely a uniform distribution, with equal probabilities of a win for each player. However, in a year there are only 30 or so draws plus the week-to-week composition of the draw changes. While over a ten year period, if the draw composition were fixed, we would expect wins to equalize over all players, in each year we would expect, by chance alone, some apparent anomalies, such as one player winning three or more times, possibly in closely adjacent draws.The phrase "at the level of play" is emphasized for two reasons:(1) the "balls" are not all the same, some players do have better games than others; and, (2) golf pros are on a completely different level than 999.9% of people who play golf. Taking the second point first, pressure is a huge factor for you and I but it isn't for tour pros. They wouldn't be there if they weren't all able to handle pressure. The way they handle pressure is all the same: they have techniques that are so well-honed that they have extruded the effect of nerves that keep everyone else off the tour. This is not to cavil at their mental strength, but no more so than their superior techniques in the wide variety of strokes that a pro must have in their repertoire. The first point brings us back to Tiger.Tiger is just better than the others. Just as Nicklaus was. Els is not as good as Tiger but better than everyone else, Singh is not as good a Els but ...and so on. How much better Tiger is compared to Nicklaus is the extended experiment that we're seeing played out. Whether either or both are "Bradman Class" is good issue for debate. What is not debatable is that both are or were much better than everyone else. This is reflected very clearly in their performance records: they finished in the top ten mcuh more often than their contemporaries and if you keep adding your "ball" to that smaller urn, you're going to get drawn as winner more often. Incidentally, Nicklaus has always said this, in non geek-speak; go back and check how many times he's been quoted as saying that to win tournaments you have to be on the leaderboard on the last day "to give yourself a chance to win". Easier said than done! Unless you're as good as Jack, which no-one has been until Woods. What we saw with Woods in his early years was partly a measure of his superiority and partly chance. We don't know how much to attribute to skill and to chance. We can say this: winning 7 of 11 majors in a stretch was an incomparable achievement. Whether chance will stretch out his "drought" to 9, 10,11 we don't know; the balls will keep going in the urns and the one labelled "T" will get its draws. Irrespective of what Butch Harmon says.

So, will Tiger win the PGA? I can't predict that but here's a high confidence prediction: he'll either win or be in the top 10. On the day (Sunday) Vijay's ball may get drawn from the small urn, or Retief's or someone else's but Tiger's ball will be in the urn, the others may not. That's the difference.