After the end of Friday's play a colleague of mine was moved to recall a press room scene from the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. Moments after Tiger Woods finished up his first-round 65 that year, a British journalist pushed his chair up to his computer, nodded his head, and said, to no one in particular, "Well, that was a nice U.S. Open."
Woods' 63 yesterday summoned that kind of memory, and those kinds of feelings. Although it was the second round (as opposed to the first) it seemed to slam the door shut on the championship, annulling the possibility that anyone else might win.
It's hardly unusual to see Tiger looking invincible before Sunday. Every golf fan knows that Tiger has held the Saturday night lead at all 12 of his major victories. Less well-known is that he's 7-0 at majors when he has a Friday night lead.
Which leads to our principal, Big Think Piece-type theme.
For a few weeks I've had in the back of my mind a piece John Hawkins penned in Golf World just before Carnoustie. Titled "Comeback "(S)kid," it pondered the fact that Woods, unlike Jack Nicklaus, had never come from behind to win a major. This has always been a head-scratcher, the weird obverse to Woods' unbeatability with a Saturday (or Friday) night major-week lead.
I kind of wish I'd written the piece, because I think I have the answers to this particular mystery.
The first reason Tiger hasn't come from behind to win a major is that nowadays it's too hard to mount a Sunday charge, simply because major set-ups are so difficult.
The second reason relates directly to this week. Tiger doesn't come from behind at majors because if he has it that week-- if he's on his game, and playing well enough to win-- he's already in the lead by Saturday, or well before then. Come Sunday, he'll play more or less the same way he played on Saturday, and Friday, and Thursday. It's all there on paper: if you look at Woods' scores at his major victories, there is seldom much variance between the four rounds-- 66's are usually followed by 68's, 68's by 70's, and so forth.
If, on the other hand, you look at Jack Nicklaus's major-winning scores, you see 72's followed by 65's, and 68's followed by 76's-- you get a kind of variance you never get out of Woods. Another way to say it: Tiger has tended to be more consistent on a day-to-day basis than Nicklaus during their major-victory weeks.
There have, of course, been exceptions. Winning his first Masters in 1997, Woods went from 70 to 66 on the first two days. At the '05 Masters Tiger opened with a 74 and followed with a 66. Yesterday, of course, Tiger's 63 followed a 71. But these three cases have something in common-- they were big drops in score between the first round and the second. When there's a big swing with Tiger, it's almost always the golf equivalent of coughing up an early-week fur ball. With Nicklaus the swings could be up or down, and could also happen on the weekend. The important point: with Tiger the swings are never down, and never happen on the weekend.
This morning the amateur statistician-slash-Math Geek in me decided to see if I could formalize these observations and demonstrate Tiger's steadiness with a single numeric comparison. I looked at the individual round scores for the five majors each man won after reaching age twenty-five, and looked at the standard deviations between scores for each week's play. (You can think of the standard deviation more or less as the average difference between rounds.) Tiger's average major-week standard deviation-- let's call it his "Majors Consistency Index," based on that five-major sample-- was 2.53. Nicklaus's was 3.10. (No, I didn't crunch the numbers with my slide rule. I just plugged them into an internet SD calculation tool.) I don't doubt that if I worked all their majors through-- including the ones they didn't win-- the portrait would be just the same, with Tiger being more consistent from day to day than Jack.
The lesson of all of this? I guess it's that considering that consistency, Tiger has probably shot his high and low rounds for the week, and will probably shoot two 67's this weekend (his average thus far, producing the lowest possible standard deviation) and walk the championship out of Tulsa.
Standard deviation is pretty heady stuff for a golf guy. I'm impressed. Plus, looking back, you called it. Not 67-67, but 69-69, between the high and low rounds like you noted. Hey, no matter how you do the math, that same guy wins.
Posted by: Neil Sagebiel | August 14, 2007 at 02:09 PM