Tiger Woods is depressingly good

January 24th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

Guess what: Tiger Woods is making his 2008 debut today, a factoid that took me a minute to process because it is so very, very cold in Chicago right now. How are they going to play golf in freezing weather? I thought, until I realized that the PGA Tour is not centralized around the Midwest and golf can be played basically year-round in warm locales across the world. It actually took me a minute to process this. It’s been that kind of day already.

Anyway, Tiger’s back today, and to celebrate the occasion, Slate has a pretty insightful little look at Tiger’s dominance . Turns out, when he’s in the field, golfers know:

If money motivates, then the prospect of winning the top prize should bring out extreme effort in golf. But when Tiger is playing and you’re not Tiger, you face a depressed prize schedule. If you assume Tiger is going to win, then the top prize available to you is $864,000 rather than $1.44 million. That beats the heck out of steak knives, but it’s significantly less than the winner’s take. Second place—among players who are not Tiger—gets $544,000 rather than $864,000, and so on. While Tiger certainly doesn’t win every tournament he enters, he does frequently shift the reward schedule for most of the field. Of the 219 tournaments he’s played in during his first professional decade, Tiger collected 54 PGA wins, finished in the top three in 92, and in the top 10 in 132.

Analyzing data from round-by-round scores from all PGA tournaments between 2002 and 2006 (over 20,000 player-rounds of golf), Brown finds that competitors fare less well—about an extra stroke per tournament—when Tiger is playing. How can we be sure this is because of Tiger? A few features of the findings lend them plausibility. The effect is stronger for the better, “exempt” players than for the nonexempt players, who have almost no chance of beating Tiger anyway. (Tiger’s presence doesn’t mean much to you if the best you can reasonably expect to finish is about 35^th—there’s not much difference between the prize for 35^th and 36^th place.) The effect is also stronger during Tiger’s hot streaks, when his competitors’ prospects are more clearly dimmed. When Tiger is on, his competitors’ scores were elevated by nearly two strokes when he entered a tournament. And the converse is also true: During Tiger’s well-publicized slump of 2003 and 2004, when he went winless in major events, exempt competitors’ scores were unaffected by Tiger’s presence.

In case you don’t want to read all that blockquote, or the article in full, let me sum it up best I can: If you’re a golfer, and you’re playing in the same field as Tiger Woods, whether subconsciously or not … you don’t even fucking try. There’s no incentive in it. You’re going to finish in the high middle of the pack anyway — why hit a few extra balls at the range? Tiger’s playing!

That tells me a couple of things: Tiger is so dominant he not only wins, he demoralizes entire fields of the best golfers in the world; and being a golfer not named Tiger is as competitively depressing as any lot in sports. Unless you call American Gladiators a sport, in which case, golf is a pretty close No. 2.

{HT: snissen}