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kilfara

Do great courses produce great champions?
« on: October 07, 2001, 05:47:00 PM »
Matt Ward, in the "Pebble Beach is weak" thread, comments:

Great courses produce great champions. It's possible that Jack, Tom and Tiger could have won anywhere that particular week but PB brought out the best in their respective games. That's not coincidence ... that's fact! Clearly, a plus to PB. Isn't the same thing said about the greatness of The Old Course and the roster of champions it has produced over the years? I guess that must be coincidence as well.

I would argue that PB's roster of champions is no less coincidental than the Olympic Club's (Fleck, Casper, Simpson, Janzen). By and large, you're looking at very small sample sizes here. Statistically speaking, analysis of the winners of three major championships at one golf course will prove to you very little about that golf course, no matter how many inferences you may draw.

Start taking a look at courses which have held more majors than Pebble or Olympic, and you'll begin to see my point (I think). The Old Course has held 19 British Opens between since 1895 (the first Open at St. Andrews played over 72 holes instead of 36). Many of them were won by the greats of the game, among them Taylor (twice), Braid, Jones, Snead, Thomson, Nicklaus (twice), Ballesteros, Faldo, Woods. But it also produced a playoff between Denny Shute and Craig Wood, and another between John Daly and Costantino Rocca. Richard Burton won in 1939 (presumably not THAT Richard Burton!).   Bobby Locke, Kel Nagle and Tony Lema also won there - good players, but not in the pantheon of all-time greats. So what you're left with is a quality of winner which is perhaps slightly above average in terms of greatness relative to the median major championship winner. Seems to fall within the bounds of probability for a sample size of 19. In fact, as the greats have a funny way of hogging much of the available major championship glory for themselves, this probably works out just about right.

But you wouldn't want to try and prove something in a scientific sense with only 19 entries, so let's move on...to Augusta National, which has conducted 65 Masters tournaments. Who has won the Masters? Pretty much everyone you could imagine: the Nicklauses, Hogans, Nelsons, Palmers, Sneads and Woodses are out in force, of course, but you've also got any number of Larry Mizes and Craig Stadlers and Charles Coodys and Tommy Aarons to talk about as well, all the way back to Horton Smith's two wins in 1934 and 1936. If I picked the Masters tournaments from 1972, 1982 and 2000 - to match the years the US Open has been played at Pebble - we get Nicklaus, Stadler and Singh as our winners. From the years the US Open was played at Olympic we get as Masters winners Middlecoff, Nicklaus, Mize and O'Meara. By this slim evidence you might infer that Augusta isn't a great course, because it produces dodgy Masters winners. But you could just as easily pick a random sequence of years and hit nothing but Nicklauses and Palmers, Players and Woodses.

Point being, I'm unconvinced that great courses produce great champions - and I'm CERTAIN that one should not use the list of the latter to validate or disprove the quality of the former. Matt (et al.) your rebuttal time starts now.  

Cheers,
Darren


Bob_Huntley

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Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #1 on: October 07, 2001, 05:59:00 PM »
Darren you have no idea how good my old pal Bobby Locke was in his prime. He took off several of his best years in flying B24's in the North African campaign during the war and having beaten Sam Snead twelve times out of sixteen in a South African exhibition tour, accepted Sam's advice and competed in the US in 1947. I do believe he was the leading money winner that year and won several tournaments. You can look up the record books and see that he was the winner of  a tournament (I think it was the Detroit Open) by the largest winning margin in PGA history, something like 14 shots. Ben Hogan was in the field.

He was so successful several, American pros had him banned from the tour.


Jeff_Brauer

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Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #2 on: October 07, 2001, 06:16:00 PM »
I once shared a table with Sam Snead for breakfast at the Western Open, by the chance of us both being single and the restaruant being crowded, and we both agreed to be seated now, if we sat together.

The point of this post is that he told how shook up he during that series of golf matches when Bobby Locke, who was facing a 100 foot putt, walked up to check the grain by the cup!  And he made the putt.

Jeff

Jeff Brauer, ASGCA Director of Outreach

Jeff_Brauer

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Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #3 on: October 07, 2001, 06:23:00 PM »
Another great Sam story from that breakfast. He said in a pro am at Turnberry, Don January marked his ball a putter out to avoid Sam's line, but failed to replace it to the correct spot before putting.  He realized his mistake before leaving the green and was assessed a one stroke penalty.  According to Sam, on the next hole, where he had a 100 foot putt, he marked one inch from the hole, tapped in for birdie, assessed himself a one stroke penalty and walked off the green with par. Liked is so well, did it for the rest of the back nine to combat balky putting.

Jack Tuthill, who used to run the tour, and who came by as the story was told, seemed familiar with it, and said that they added a rule, basically covering any violation that violated the spririt, if not the technicalities, of the other rules because of it. Can hardly believe its true, but I have told the story often.

Jeff

Jeff Brauer, ASGCA Director of Outreach

Mike_Cirba

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #4 on: October 07, 2001, 06:55:00 PM »
Frankly, I don't think Matt's contention is either true or false.

A championship is held over four days, often over a course setup that is totally inconsistent with the actual design intent.  When you factor in the vagaries of weather, luck, etc., I don't think general conclusions are possible.  

A good example is Carnoustie.  I think most would agree that it's a great course, yet the most recent setup and weather turned the tournament into a crapshoot.


TEPaul

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #5 on: October 07, 2001, 11:16:00 PM »
I think we might be able to detect a certain "courses for particular horses", if you know what I mean, when you analyze some of those Championship winners, certainly someone like Scott Simpson and to a lesser degree a golfer like Janzen and then Irwin. That group was certainly from the US Open type "management technician" style tournament player it seems.

What I would start to resist are people who really don't know much more about those players than their particular tournament or career records informing us or the golf world about whether they were champions or particularly that they were champions who were some kind of aberration. For that kind of characterization I would rather depend on what their contemporaries felt about them instead of someone today who knows little more about them than their names appeared on the championship list once or even twice!

A breakfast with a Sam Snead or some of the numeous interviews with the older players can tell much more about those lesser known "champions" and what they may have done in a particular week on a particular course than we can, in my opinion.


Mark_Huxford

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #6 on: October 08, 2001, 02:39:00 AM »

Well said Tom. Darren as I recall from reading The History Of American Golf, Herbert Warren Wind was full of praise for Bobby Locke's skills but he also noted a complacency in him that he said set in after a period of time on the American scene.

As for your original topic I think there is definitely something in what you are saying.

Luck with weather or tee times notwithstanding, it should be power, accuracy, finesse, tactics and temperament that decides who wins any particular week.

By definition truly great courses have the shot values I just mentioned in abundance so they should sort the wheat from the chaff more often than inferior courses.

I think the US Open throws up unusual winners from time to time because the set up of the course is so unbalanced towards accuracy at the expense of power and finesse. The USGA thinks they are identifying the best player this way but they are merely identifying the most accurate.

The ideal course is one which requires power, accuracy and finesse in equal proportion. This way the various strengths of your Dalys, Reids and Crenshaws are allowed to shine.

Mark,


kilfara

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #7 on: October 08, 2001, 04:24:00 AM »
Tom, I do know a thing or two about golf history! I'm sorry if you took offense at some of my snapshot characterizations, but my point was not to debate Bobby Locke's place in history, but rather to point out that the Old Course has produced a wide range of champions. (As good a player as Bobby Locke may have been, he would rank well below Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods in the pantheon of historical greatness, right?)

A breakfast with a Sam Snead or some of the numeous interviews with the older players can tell much more about those lesser known "champions" and what they may have done in a particular week on a particular course than we can, in my opinion.

I'd almost argue the opposite point, actually - we can conjure objective analysis of a player's career from our detached perspective, whereas old players are more likely to provide subjective analysis. You might get to know more about a player's personality and golf game from listening to someone like Sam Snead talk, but I'd reckon that I can do as least as well as Snead when it comes to quantifying that player's greatness relative to players of different eras. (To reiterate: the above post was not a serious attempt at evaluating different players' place in history.)

(I've been quite ornery of late, haven't I?)  

Now, I will grant that different golf courses will favor different types of players. John Daly, playing to the peak of his abilities, will have a much greater chance of winning at a relatively wide course like the Old Course than he will at Olympic. A tight US Open setup gives the "management technician" a much higher chance of winning than many others. But at the end of the day, golf is a strange game, where even Tiger Woods at the absolute peak of his abilities doesn't win more than 50% of the tournaments he enters. The player who wins ANY tournament is the one who combines accuracy, distance, recovery play and putting to the best effect over the course of 72 holes. What if Hogan, Palmer, Watson and Stewart had finished first in those four Opens at Olympic instead of second?

Which gets me back to my point about statistical probability: the more tournaments you analyze, the more trustworthy the results are going to be. Jack Nicklaus has played in over 150 majors in his career; by winning more than 10% of them he has identified himself as the best (pre-Tiger) player ever in many people's minds. Similarly, the guy who enters 100 majors in a career without winning one earns points for longevity, but little else - one can reasonably determine that his career wasn't as "great" (using major victories as the yardstick of choice at the moment) as the guy who won 5 or 10 of them. But when you get down to a single-digit sample size, accurate measurements go out the window. In 1979, would anyone have said that Fuzzy Zoeller must be the greatest player in Masters history, simply because he'd just won the only Masters he'd played in? Of course not.

I think we *want* to believe that there's some direct, one-winner-per-one-tournament correlation between a course's greatness and the champion it produces. We note Pebble Beach and Nicklaus/Watson/Woods just as gleefully as we noted Valhalla and Mark Brooks in 1996. Thing is, we just as conveniently ignore this thesis when Tiger wins at Valhalla in 2000, or when Richard Burton wins the Open at the Old Course - because the thesis is comforting to us at some times and isn't at others. Golf is a game of great anecdotes...but to try and use such subjective criteria within the scientific realm of golf course architecture analysis (such as we're doing here on this website) is a complete non-starter for me.

Cheers,
Darren


Jeff_Brauer

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Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #8 on: October 08, 2001, 05:18:00 AM »
TEPaul is right, based on my experience.  If you have ever hung around with pros before a tour event, they can pretty well predict the top five to ten players of the week, based on who's injured and/or tired, fighting with his wife, who has sick kids, a big portfolio loss, etc.  They also know who is suited to the course and who has been practising hard or is motivated (alimony due, house remodel, etc!

I know one player who has predicted every one of his victories. Not brashly, of course, just a quiet, "It'll be good this week" statement.

Tiger would probably have won the 2000 Open by a wide margin on any course it was played on. Would Andy North won on another course?  We'll never know, and of course, that is part of the magic of sports.

Jeff

Jeff Brauer, ASGCA Director of Outreach

TEPaul

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #9 on: October 08, 2001, 06:03:00 AM »
Darren:

I'm sorry you seem to be one of those (more lately) that thinks I take offense with you because I disagree with something you might have said. I don't take offense at all.

I just happen not to agree with the general line of your thinking that you (or let's say most people) can glean that much about a course due to a particular champion from yesteryear or many decades ago that they have never seen or seen play and consequently know little about.

I say that in a general sense though since I've never even met you and you just may be someone who has an unusual facility to somehow intuit those things. And I think I remember that you are a Harvard man, right, and many of the Harvard men I've known are very bright and the rest of the Harvard men I've known who aren't all that bright still think they are anyway.

So since I don't know you, no offense at all and I would be more than happy to give you the benefit of the doubt.

I agree with you about Sam Snead's take on other eras and golfers from other eras compared to his own era but what I was talking about is depending on golfers of the same era giving an accurate analysis of the competitors they played with and against. I might also tend to qualify Sam's response in that Sam can be an enormous bullshitter sometimes but what I mean is that we can all depend on the fact that Sam truly knows what he's talking about whether or not he feels like telling you, me or Jeff Brauer the truth at breakfast.

And furthermore if you're trying to tell me that you can somehow analyze lists, courses and statistics and tell more about the golfers that Snead spent a career playing against than he can, then I've got to tell you Darren that I really do think you're wrong about that and more than a little arrogant to even think it. But I still don't take offense--it's just your opinion and that's fine by me!


Matt_Ward

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #10 on: October 08, 2001, 06:14:00 AM »
Darren:

Thanks for this thread and I'd like to respond to clarify a few things.

First, my commment on great courses produce great champions is not always 100 percent accurate. That's a given. However, I do stand by the statement that when you take a top notch course and IT IS PREPARED CORRECTLY the likelihood of a great player winning the event at that site is enhanced simply by virtue of the course design and the demands it places on all around shotmaking and thinking skills that the great players possess.

It's very easy to dismiss this and say "well he (Nicklaus, Woods, et al) would have won anywhere that week." That is speculation -- what isn't speculation is that at PB great players won there. If you wnat to point out the name of Tom Kite so be it but I'll counter and say Kite had a long and distinguished record on the PGA Tour and while not in the same league as the other three is not really sort of fluke.

Nicklaus has always stated that majors are the separating point between all the players and I agree. And, when certain venues are used for the game's biggest championships, the opportunity for the great players to come forward is magnified, in my mind.

Let's not forget that just because the top player in the world at that particular time did not win they often placed very near the top in second, third and so forth.

Clearly, new venues are being added to the rota for the Opens on both sides of the pond and to the PGA. How they stack up in comparison to the PB's, Oakmont's and Winged Foot's is to be determined.

As you are aware, much of today's site selection for major championships and special events such as the Ryder Cup are based on deep pocket owners instead of venue quality.

I still believe personally that great players will be more clearly identified on venues of the highest quality. PB has done that in the past and I am quite confident will continue to do that in the years ahead.

Jeff states the obvious that off-course developments can possibly effect the minds of many players. Clearly, Nicklaus, Woods and the other big names in golf's history have been able to comparmentalize these issues and get on with the game when the bell rings at the appointed hour. Playing a superior venue only served to further differentiate their playing ability when compared to others.

A classic example would have been the Golden Bear's resounding triumph at Baltusrol Lower in 1980. Jack's record immediately prior to that event could not have been predicted. However, great players rise to the occasion and when played on venues that have little margin for error they shine. Do they always win? No, golf is not that predictable, but the possibility for their success is clearly enhanced. Just check the record book -- not for just victories but for the seconds, thirds, top five and top ten placements. What will you see is that great courses have these names clustered near the top.

Flip the subject the other way -- if you played the game's biggest events at the Hope Classic or some other birdie rich site does anyone not believe that the door is opened for just about any to tour player with one week of hot putting?

Regards,

P.S. Darren -- I am not a big fan of the Masters in the league with the other majors simply because the course overemphasizes the role of putting and because the fields have usually been rather limited until most recently.

One other note -- upsets do happen in all sports and from time to time you will get a Mize, North, Tway, Lawrie, etc. Exceptions do happen -- does that mean the main premise is completely in error. In my humble opinion it does not.


kilfara

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #11 on: October 08, 2001, 07:08:00 AM »
Tom,

I'm not offended by your disagreeing with me. If I'm getting hot under the collar, it's because I'm not expressing myself clearly...as perhaps expressed by the following response of yours:

I just happen not to agree with the general line of your thinking that you (or let's say most people) can glean that much about a course due to a particular champion from yesteryear or many decades ago that they have never seen or seen play and consequently know little about.

It's PRECISELY my contention that you can't glean much about a course from the people who have won golf tournaments at it. Matt's original contention is that great courses produce great champions. My rebuttal is that great courses can produce mediocre champions, just that mediocre courses can produce great champions...and that the laws of probability are such that any given course's list of champions is too short to tell us anything about the course's quality. To prove that thesis (quickly, for I don't wish to gain a doctorate from my contributions to this website, nice though the thought of such a degree sounds!)  , I've been trying to place certain champion golfers in their historical context of greatness.

I say that in a general sense though since I've never even met you and you just may be someone who has an unusual facility to somehow intuit those things. And I think I remember that you are a Harvard man, right, and many of the Harvard men I've known are very bright and the rest of the Harvard men I've known who aren't all that bright still think they are anyway.

And furthermore if you're trying to tell me that you can somehow analyze lists, courses and statistics and tell more about the golfers that Snead spent a career playing against than he can, then I've got to tell you Darren that I really do think you're wrong about that and more than a little arrogant to even think it. But I still don't take offense--it's just your opinion and that's fine by me!

All I offered to do better than Snead is place the champion golfers of history into their historical context from a statistical perspective. Maybe I can't, but my historical knowledge and analytical prowess will stand me in very good stead when attempting the task, and my very distance from many of the golfers involved is likely to make me a more dispassionate judge of historical virtue than Snead is. (Similarly, I trust the judgments of your average sabrematician far more than the Veteran's Committee in determining which major league ballplayers actually belong in Cooperstown, because they use reasoning techniques untainted by subjective biases. I grant that your mileage may vary....)

Matt,

Let's not forget that just because the top player in the world at that particular time did not win they often placed very near the top in second, third and so forth.

Shall I go back and tell you everyone who finished second at the Opens of St. Andrews? (Gotta love that 1995 Open, with a Top 4 of Daly, Rocca, Steven Bottomley and Mark Brooks.)   Or the Masters of Augusta? Or the US Opens of Pebble? The pattern will be quite similar to the list of winners: there will be lots of great golfers in the Top 3 and the Top 5, but you'll also get a number of eccentricities. I don't deny that upsets happen in sports - they're what make sports fun for me, in fact. My fundamental point is that with such small sample sizes, it's impossible to tell the difference between a great course upon which a couple of upsets took place and a mediocre course which produced mediocre winners. (Ditto the great course which produced great winners and the mediocre course at which great winners won.)

However, lest you think that I'm in full attack-dog mode, here....

Flip the subject the other way -- if you played the game's biggest events at the Hope Classic or some other birdie rich site does anyone not believe that the door is opened for just about any to tour player with one week of hot putting?

This is a very compelling point. Grant that the USGA would raise the roughs at Indian Wells to 5 inches, of course, and add the pressure of a "major championship" into the equation, and it would be tougher for the average tour pro to win with a hot putting week alone. But you're probably right that a great golf course tests the field in ways that lesser courses don't, and in theory this test should be more difficult for the lesser player to pass. Now, if only someone would write a computer program which allowed you to simulate a major championship at a given course 10,000 times in the blink of an eye, and maybe we could get somewhere!  

Cheers,
Darren


Adam_Messix

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Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #12 on: October 08, 2001, 07:23:00 AM »
Let's see here:

Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Tom Kite, and Tiger Woods all are or were the leading money winner of all time and they've won the US Open at Pebble Beach.  

I think with the exception of when the setup gets messed up (e.g. Carnoustie '99), a great course tends to provide a great champion.  The Masters and the Opens at St. Andrews should be excepted from this rule because they are used more than most courses.  However, it looks like 5 of the last 6 winners (Nicklaus, Nicklaus, Ballesteros, Faldo, and Woods) at St. Andrews were generally considered the best player in the world at the time of victory.


aclayman

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #13 on: October 08, 2001, 07:48:00 AM »
Am I the only one who trusts the usga and r&a to choose a course that is great, to hold their respective opens?
Calling a course that once held such a prestigious event mediocre is nitpicking and really comes off as snobbish, not ornery.  

Darren, I don't mean to attack your words but I would like to point out that your obvious knowledge and intelect may need to be tempered with the fact that most of us are just normal mono-syllabic, unsophisticated masses.


Paul Turner

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #14 on: October 08, 2001, 07:51:00 AM »
Darren

How about grouping the courses, rather than relying on a small sample from a single course?  Then you might find a trend?


David Wigler

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Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #15 on: October 08, 2001, 07:53:00 AM »
I am not sure if I'm arguing this to disagree that Great Courses produce great champions or to argue that Oakland Hills isn't a great course but the roster of winners is Cyril Walker, Glenna Vare, Ralph Guldahl, Hogan, Gene Littler, Player, David Graham, Andy North, and Steve Jones.  10 US Opens, PGA's or Women’s Opens and although all were good golfers IMHO Player and Hogan are the only two whom "Great” could be argued for.
And I took full blame then, and retain such now.  My utter ignorance in not trumpeting a course I have never seen remains inexcusable.
Tom Huckaby 2/24/04

TEPaul

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #16 on: October 08, 2001, 08:13:00 PM »
Well then Darren, I've only one more minor disagreement with you. You say you're getting hot under the collar because you feel you can't express yourself clearly or else you can't convey to people like me what you're driving at here.

That thought is unimaginable to me. The idea of a Harvard man not being able to express himself clearly is not part of anything I can conceive of--it's unthinkable really.

So it must be me! I am tired anyway and probably not thinking clearly myself. Give me a day or two and I'll go back over this and then we will probably be on the same page on all of it!


kilfara

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #17 on: October 08, 2001, 08:53:00 PM »
Tom - stop making me laugh!  

Paul, I'm not sure what you're driving at. Just taking educated guesses (I don't have any data in front of me), if you compared every winner of every major championship down the years, you'd wind up with between one-third to one-half of them being won by people with only one or two majors to their credit, and the rest split up among the players who begin to touch greatness and then those who ultimately define it. So the "median" major championship winner probably has around 2-3 majors on his resume. To save myself some time, I've tried to point out that the profile of champions at Augusta National (which has hosted approximately one out of every five or six majors ever held) matches the expected pattern: the Nicklauses and Palmers and Hogans have won their fair share, the second-level players (e.g. Watson, Ballesteros, Faldo) have as well, a number of players who were at their peak for a shorter period of time (Couples, Woosnam, Lyle), a number of players who were never incontestably #1 in the world but were solid players who deserved to win majors (Olazabal, Crenshaw, Langer), and a number of players whose one shining moment was an aberration in what was a good-to-middling career (Mize, Stadler). It is my belief that were any other course - from Pine Valley to Goat Hills - to host 65 major championships, its profile of champions would wind up looking quite similar to Augusta's.

While I don't think I've articulated myself terribly well in this thread, I'm not really sure I can - I'm trying to deal in statistical analysis at the moment, which requires me to use the language of a scientist. But I feel like my audience isn't interested in scientific analysis - it wants to believe that its intuition is correct, that there's justice in the world, that great golfers and great courses are made for one another. And as any man who's ever been in a relationship knows, you can't argue with intuition!  

Cheers,
Darren


Albert Einstein

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #18 on: October 08, 2001, 10:14:00 AM »
Mr. Kilfara

Some of us lurking out here are interested in "scientific analysis."  We just haven't seen any such thing yet on this thread (how do you do that smiley face, Liebchen?)


kilfara

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #19 on: October 08, 2001, 10:31:00 AM »
How can you argue with that?  

Some of the put-downs on this site are really too good....


Steve Wilson

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Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #20 on: October 08, 2001, 02:52:00 PM »
Somewhere in the bowels of the archives there is a question I asked in a long ago abandoned thread. "How much better as a course would Olympic be considered if it had produced Hogan, Palmer, Watson, and Stewart as champions rather than Fleck, Casper, Simpson, and Jantzen?  Would it be a better course or would it simply be more highly regarded?"  At that time the question went completely ignored.

Almost as soon as I had written and submitted it, I got to thinking that of the men who actually won at Olympic they held six U.S. Open title among them.  And the men they beat held eight, and Hogan accounted for four of those.

So, in terms of Open titles the gap in these players is not so great as might be expected their other accomplishments.  There's no question Hogan was a better player than Fleck, Palmer than Casper, Watson than Simpson, Stewart than Jantzen (although Jantzen does have some time left to pad his resume), but I think rather than the quality of the course these examples point out that on any given day...

Granted had the results been reversed then the numbers of Open titles held by the respective groups would gap decisively to 12 to 2, but with Casper and Jantzen you have as many  multiple Open winners as the other group which boasts Hogan and Stewart.

Just for giggles, add Snead to either group and nothing changes in numbers of Open titles.  And Snead was arguably the second best player in this octet.  

Two of these wins Fleck in 55 and Simpson in 87(?) featured a closing rush by the eventual winner--Fleck made two birdies in the final four holes and I think Simpson made three in the last five.  And two of them involved collapses by the leader Palmer who did a double crash and burn and Stewart who ran into some bad luck and indifferent play.   There's randomness here as there is in all of golf.  I don't care how good a putter you are, there is an element of fortune in making long putts.  True, the better putter will make more but he cannot dictate when the 15 footers and longer will drop.  

I think it the best conclusion here is that the great players will win more often (that's  what makes them great) and to try to establish a course's credentials by the winners it produces is a stretch.

In a similar vein, I have been struck by reading accounts of past golf championships when such phrases as "There was never any doubt that (insert name of great player here) would prevail." occur in the account.  That's twenty-twenty hindsight.  Last Friday I was playing with friends and one of them ran a forty-five foot putt in for birdie.  "I just knew I was going to make that." he said.  I didn't quibble but I've had the same thought over putts I made and didn't make.  It's selective recall if we only remember the putts made when we were sure we were going to make them.  I've also heard (and uttered) "Damn, I was just sure I was going to make that."

Points made about Daly chances of winning at St. Andrews over Olympic are certainly true, but Daly's prodigious potential outruns his accomplishments; and he will certainly be remembered as physically gifted player who was stymied by personal demons.  

I guess I'm with Darren on this one.  "Great courses produce great champions" sounds good, but I think "Great players win championships on all kinds of courses" is a truer statement.

Some days you play golf, some days you find things.

I'm not really registered, but I couldn't find a symbol for certifiable.

"Every good drive by a high handicapper will be punished..."  Garland Bailey at the BUDA in sharing with me what the better player should always remember.

Lynn_Shackelford

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Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #21 on: October 09, 2001, 07:53:00 AM »
I believe it was Mac O'Grady a few years ago did some research on which players were winning on the TPC courses, Memphis, D.C. and a few others.  Outside of Ponte Verdra, I think you would be surprised at how lesser known players prevail on these layouts.  Obviously, field, proximity to Majors and purses have to factor in, but it is something to think about.
And who would ever question Mac?
It must be kept in mind that the elusive charm of the game suffers as soon as any successful method of standardization is allowed to creep in.  A golf course should never pretend to be, nor is intended to be, an infallible tribunal.
               Tom Simpson

ForkaB

Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #22 on: October 09, 2001, 08:06:00 PM »
I think the next GCA interview should be a Mac O'Grady and Tom MacWood "MacDouble."  I'd pay to read that one.....

Dan Kelly

  • Karma: +0/-0
Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #23 on: October 09, 2001, 08:42:00 PM »
Darren Kilfara --

As one writer (smily face) to another (smily face), I hope you'll allow me to observe: That smily-face thing is the brand of failure, and your liberal use of it is getting on my nerves! (Smily face.) If you express yourself clearly and carefully enough, your tone will be clear; you won't be needing smily faces to show your lightheartedness.(Smily face.)

(The ironic, sarcastic smily face is still allowed, of course.) (Smily face.)

Oh, and by the way: I think you were right in saying that the sample of evidence is simply not large enough to answer the question you posed at the top of this thread. You should've left it there, and saved your (how did you put it? oh, yeah!) "historical knowledge and analytical prowess" (smily face) for another day. Just my humble (smily face) opinion.

"There's no money in doing less." -- Joe Hancock, 11/25/2010
"Rankings are silly and subjective..." -- Tom Doak, 3/12/2016

Paul Richards

  • Karma: +0/-0
Do great courses produce great champions?
« Reply #24 on: October 09, 2001, 09:31:00 AM »
As historian at the Beverly Country Club, I
have always maintained that a courses'list
of champions is truly a reflection of the
quality of that golf course.

Case in point - Beverly's Wall of Champions
includes:

Jack Nicklaus
Arnold Palmer
Francis Ouimet
Chick Evans

- amongst others.

Without a doubt, that is a pretty strong roster!

"Something has to change, otherwise the never-ending arms race that benefits only a few manufacturers will continue to lead to longer courses, narrower fairways, smaller greens, more rough, more expensive rounds, and other mechanisms that will leave golf's future in doubt." -  TFOG

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