Tiger, Scott, Paddy and the urns Way back I rabbited on at some length about the essential statistical nature of golf, punditry to the contrary. The standard line on Tiger was that he "willed" putts in, chipped in out of sheer superior "clutch" performance etc.. Nonsense. He was just a lot better than everyone else so he won more. Two things have started to happen over the last three years: the bell curve is catching up and he's no longer so much better. Going back to my traditional statistical illustration, Tiger used to get his ball in the last urn an overwhelming proportion of the time. Say there are usually ten balls in that urn - i.e. ten contenders. Everyone has a 1/10 chance of winning. I haven't gone exhaustively through his career but I'd be surprised if he did much better than 15% over his first 100 tournaments. But I think he did do a little better than chance; now he's doing a little worse than chance so his distribution of wins is tending to the Bell curve. He's also not getting his ball in the last day urn as much. He is going to win, just not as often and his chances in the majors are dropping because, by definition, the fields are stronger and there are more rivals for the last urn. Regarding the recent British Open at wonderful Lytham I believe Scott that nerves didn't do him in. Even under pressure all the top pros have certain circular error probability distance for each shot (e.g. 50% of 9 irons will land in a circle of ten yard diameter). Scott just had a bad run of shots that were at the bad end of the distributions. Padraig Harrington let the cat out of the bag when he won at Carnoustie (that Sergio would have won if his putt on the 72nd hadn't lipped out): winning didn't seem any different than losing - it was just his turn on that day.