[Michael Felton]

Jon,

Does the mathematics part of that statement ring true? If there are multiples of the number of players actually pursuing the career via different wordwide tours, as well as the creation and growth of the developmental game via college and high school...doesn't it stand to reason that the top players emerging out of those levels would be better?

As a society, in North America (but even globally) we are wealthier than ever -- and many more young people can 'afford' to chase a dream, especially a dream that pays-off exponentially more handsomely than it once did. But that doesn't necessarily mean they *should* be pursuing that dream (Maybe they should, maybe they are *all* in fact that good -- I simply don't know.) But maybe back in the 50s and 60s (and certainly the 30s and 40s), would-be pros understood/realized this better, understood the odds against real success and realized the true quality of their games better than they do today -- because they *had* to.
Who is to say that a (relatively) large number of very good players back then didn't decide not to even try to make a go for it, and instead went straight into teaching and club pro jobs (like Harvey Penick said he did right after the first time he heard the sound that a Sam Snead iron shot made). Even JN himself was set to continue making a better living selling insurance until he realized he could indeed make more playing golf (but only if he was the best of the best). All of which is to say: 'math' is useful, but I wouldn't want it swinging my golf club for me with money on the line.

Peter - I think the issue is that the relative levels of money have changed. In the 50s and 60s, you could make a comfortable living working in the business world. In the 2000s and 2010s that remains true. In the 50s and 60s, you would struggle to get by as even a decent level PGA Tour player. As you note, Jack figured he had to be the very best to make more money playing golf. In the 2000s and 2010s if you're a decent level PGA Tour player, you're making a heck of a lot more money than most insurance salesmen make.


Granted it's a whole lot harder to be a decent level tour player in 2000s and 2010s than it was in the 50s and 60s...


Incidentally, the players on those developmental tours do not make much money. Most of them rely on sponsors to even be able to survive while they play.

[JESII]

Kalen,


I think we are agreeing that the more players trying today indicates the best would be better...




Peter,


Ask someone on the #2 US Tour if he can eat at night and he'll tell you yes...ask him if he's saving any money and I bet it's a different answer. He's desperately fighting to reach the next level where he can actually make some money and he'll emphatically tell you yes.


The #200 guy in 1960 didn't stick around for the second year...now there are thousands of guys working their asses off to get there so that when they do.


There may be 200 - 250 spots to secure a good living through playing professional golf...and if you have one of them it's a tremendous living. A blind guess is that there are 10 times the number of people actively looking for those spots as there were 50 years ago...maybe 20 times.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

Dr. Bob Rotella is indeed a sports psychologist who has worked with top pro and am's. He also happens to be a PhD. I'll stick with his advice even though he didn't go to Stanford.

Head in the sand, man. I tried.

Ultimately, of course, I'm glad you enjoy playing golf, and you're of course free to do as you wish. So I'll just wish you well in whatever that is.

How much of that 67% long game potential improvement do you allocate to strategy and shot selection?

Can't really answer a broad topic like that. Even on the PGA Tour you have guys who play a little riskier game versus, say, a Charles Howell III type who tends to play toward the fatter sides of greens, etc.

The point in that 67% is that they simply hit the shots better - they hit them farther without giving up much accuracy off the tee, and they hit more greens and when they do, they hit them slightly closer to the hole, too. Across all levels of golf.

Kalen, yeah, every sport is getting better. If a sport is growing, the best players are getting better. Good luck proving the opposite.

The best football team from a town of 500 will almost always lose to the best football team from a town of 50,000.

It seems to me that 'survival of the fittest' applies in the context of scarcity. And we have today via the many pro & developmental tours the very opposite of scarcity.

You have that backward, in my opinion. Those 125 spots are more scarce because there are far, far more people competing for them. A farm might be large enough to feed 200 people, but if there are 20,000, food becomes "scarce" even though the farm is the same size.

[JMEvensky]

Peter - I think the issue is that the relative levels of money have changed. In the 50s and 60s, you could make a comfortable living working in the business world. In the 2000s and 2010s that remains true. In the 50s and 60s, you would struggle to get by as even a decent level PGA Tour player. As you note, Jack figured he had to be the very best to make more money playing golf. In the 2000s and 2010s if you're a decent level PGA Tour player, you're making a heck of a lot more money than most insurance salesmen make.


Granted it's a whole lot harder to be a decent level tour player in 2000s and 2010s than it was in the 50s and 60s...


Incidentally, the players on those developmental tours do not make much money. Most of them rely on sponsors to even be able to survive while they play.

I believe this is the point John Kavanaugh was trying to make several pages ago. The money they now play for has changed the career choice for a lot of amateurs.


Granted this is just an anecdotal data point, but a now deceased friend made it to the quarterfinals of the Amateur 3 straight times in the late 50's/early 60's. He never even considered turning pro--he had a good job in the food industry and said it wasn't worth the risk to try.


Nowadays, every kid who enters an AJGA event thinks the PGAT is going to be his golden ticket.

[JESII]

Erik,


I don't think it's a broad question.


If you want to help a 90 shooter improve by 10 shots, how much of that improvement do expect to come from shot selection and strategy advice versus actual technique?

[Peter Pallotta]

I don't know guys, Erik Jim, Kalen, Michael
you have the math but something doesn't sit right, intuitively
The # of people playing golf doesn't seem to really tell me anything -- necessarily -- about how good they are as a class or how great the best of the best are.
Rory and Brooks and Tiger etc can swing remarkably fast, drive the ball miles and miles, hit magnificent approaches with every iron, and have short games to die for
Say there were even 5 billion people playing golf today, competing for 125 spots -- would all of them, some of them, a few of them, or very few of them *necessarily* swing faster, drive it longer, be even more magnificent with the irons, and have short games to die & kill for?
I don't know, and I simply don't see how any of the math/stats proves it one way or another.
P

[Kalen Braley]

Jim,

We are certainly agreeing on this point. 

And to go along further with Eriks point of competing school sizes, its why every state sports program in the US has different brackets isions based mostly on school size. Sure every now and then you get a Hoosiers type deal, but 99% of the time the big schools are gonna beat down on the small schools at the championship levels...

[Rob Marshall]

"Head in the sand, man. I tried.Ultimately, of course, I'm glad you enjoy playing golf, and you're of course free to do as you wish. So I'll just wish you well in whatever that is."


Thank you for the kind offer but I don't need your help. I can play a little and I'm very fortunate to have known some great PGA members who have been a tremendous help to me over the last 30 years.

[JESII]

I don't know guys, Erik Jim, Kalen, Michael
you have the math but something doesn't sit right, intuitively
The # of people playing golf doesn't seem to really tell me anything -- necessarily -- about how good they are as a class or how great the best of the best are.
Rory and Brooks and Tiger etc can swing remarkably fast, drive the ball miles and miles, hit magnificent approaches with every iron, and have short games to die for
Say there were even 5 billion people playing golf today, competing for 125 spots -- would all of them, some of them, a few of them, or very few of them *necessarily* swing faster, drive it longer, be even more magnificent with the irons, and have short games to die & kill for?
I don't know, and I simply don't see how any of the math/stats proves it one way or another.
P

Peter,


How about the Korean women golf phenomenon in just our lifetimes? Hell, in just our adulthood...


Is that not a result of pure numbers and incentive and organization?

[Peter Pallotta]

Jim, I don't have the language, or maybe even the ideas, necessary to raise my doubts, but again: that there are more Korean women golfers (for the reasons you mention) there is no doubt, and that they are excellent players is true too. But I don't know how that tells me anything about the 'relative quality' of their games. Would Annika S have fared worse/better/far worse against these newer golfers than she did against her main rivals then? How about the owner of the best golf swing of all time, Mickey Wright, or the leading winner of all time, Kathy Whitworth: as golfers were they less talented than today's Korean greats? I just don't understand -- and I mean just that, I can't see how -- any of the 'numbers' help us to answer that question. And if the numbers can't answer *that* question, what are they actually telling us? That there are a lot (and a lot more) really good golfers around today? Okay: sure, yes, there are. But are the very best better than the very best of the past? I just don't see it, ie how one proves the other.
But I'll grant that my mind isn't very good with numbers/statistical analysis, so the problem is likely mine.
P

[JESII]

Scarcity


There are only so many tournaments to win.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

If you want to help a 90 shooter improve by 10 shots, how much of that improvement do expect to come from shot selection and strategy advice versus actual technique?

Tough to say, because it's not quantifiable, nor do we have good data on "how good" of a strategy people have currently.

Say there were even 5 billion people playing golf today, competing for 125 spots -- would all of them, some of them, a few of them, or very few of them *necessarily* swing faster, drive it longer, be even more magnificent with the irons, and have short games to die & kill for

If 500 people play golf, the top 100 represent the top 20% of golfers. If 5,000,000 people play golf, the top 100 represent the top 0.002%.

Assuming the same roughly bell curve distribution of players… is it easier to win a city championship in a city with 5,000 or a city of 5,000,000?

Thank you for the kind offer but I don't need your help. I can play a little and I'm very fortunate to have known some great PGA members who have been a tremendous help to me over the last 30 years.

Rob, I gave up. Your head is firmly buried in the sand.

[Rob Marshall]

https://www.golfmagic.com/interviews/dave-pelz-interview-putting-not-most-important-part-golf

[Michael Felton]

I don't know guys, Erik Jim, Kalen, Michael
you have the math but something doesn't sit right, intuitively
The # of people playing golf doesn't seem to really tell me anything -- necessarily -- about how good they are as a class or how great the best of the best are.
Rory and Brooks and Tiger etc can swing remarkably fast, drive the ball miles and miles, hit magnificent approaches with every iron, and have short games to die for
Say there were even 5 billion people playing golf today, competing for 125 spots -- would all of them, some of them, a few of them, or very few of them *necessarily* swing faster, drive it longer, be even more magnificent with the irons, and have short games to die & kill for?
I don't know, and I simply don't see how any of the math/stats proves it one way or another.
P

Peter,


It's not possible to prove this one way or the other purely with the statistics. What you can do is show the likelihood that it lies one way over the other is substantially weighted one way.


Let's take a for instance. Suppose you have two pools of golfers. One has 1,000 in it and the other has 10,000 in it. Beyond that we know nothing about it. The chances that the best player falls in the first group is 1/11. The chances the best player falls in the second group is 10/11. So, the chances that the best player in the first group is better than the best player in the second group is also 1/11 or 9.1%.


Now let's look at the 2nd best player in each pool. The probability that the 2nd best player in pool 1 is better than the 2nd best player in pool 2 is quite a bit smaller than 1/11. It requires that the best 2 players in pool 1 also lie in the best 3 players in the entire population. I'm getting hazy on my probability, but I think that probability is 1000C2x10000C1/11000C3+1000C3/11000C3 which is about 2.3%.


The chances that the 10th best player in pool 1 is better than the 10th best player in pool 2 is correspondingly smaller again. I think it's about 0.00016%. Take that down to the 50th best player in pool 1 being better than the 50th best player in pool 2 and you're getting into the vanishingly small likelihood. I think there are 23 zeroes after the decimal point before you hit a digit in percentages.


I think that can be extrapolated to imply that the field is markedly stronger in a larger pool than in the smaller pool. If the best player in pool 2 can differentiate himself by a similar margin to the best player in pool 1 amongst his peers then we can say with quite a lot of confidence that the best player in pool 2 is better than the best player in pool 1. It also stands to reason that the top guys in pool 1 will win more events than the top guys in pool 2 because the fields are that much shallower. It's quite plausible that the top 10 in pool 1 will share a good number of tournament wins. Also the best player would have to have a dreadful week to fall outside the top 10. Compare that with pool 2 and the wins will be more spread out and shallower totals. Much like what we see in reality.


None of this counts as proof of anything, but the likelihood that Tiger is better than Jack ever was is pretty high.

[Michael Felton]

https://www.golfmagic.com/interviews/dave-pelz-interview-putting-not-most-important-part-golf

In quite shocking news, short game and putting coach names short game and putting as the most important parts of the game...

[Rob Marshall]

And I thought no one would notice that..........

[Peter Pallotta]

Well, thanks very much for that Michael -- that at least makes the concept a lot clearer. 
See, the problem wasn't me after all, it was all those other guys using crappy stats and/or explaining them badly
They probably live in smaller cities with only, like, 100 statisticians...
Also, good quip on the Pelz thing. Yes.
 

[Erik J. Barzeski]

https://www.golfmagic.com/interviews/dave-pelz-interview-putting-not-most-important-part-golf

The fact that you can be about as good as a PGA Tour player at putting and the short game makes my case: those areas are not the areas where there's much Separation Value®.

[V. Kmetz]

Nowadays, every kid who enters an AJGA event thinks the PGAT is going to be his golden ticket.

And at probably a 25:1 ratio, these kids are country club...no caddies, clothes-folders or cashiers at Stop n Shop among them...if they go for it and fail, there will be no consequences.

[JESII]

Ha...what kind of consequences would make you feel good about it VK?

[Mike Wagner]

https://www.golfmagic.com/interviews/dave-pelz-interview-putting-not-most-important-part-golf

The fact that you can be about as good as a PGA Tour player at putting and the short game makes my case: those areas are not the areas where there's much Separation Value®.

Um, no .. sorry.  If you're going to tell people their heads are buried in the sand, the you're going to have to look in the mirror on this one.  You will never be able to get stats on this .. period.  Whatever rounds you're using from amateurs will never stack up.  It's all about what happens "when the lights come on."  I get what you're selling, but I ain't buyin.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

Um, no .. sorry.  If you're going to tell people their heads are buried in the sand, the you're going to have to look in the mirror on this one.  You will never be able to get stats on this .. period.  Whatever rounds you're using from amateurs will never stack up.  It's all about what happens "when the lights come on."  I get what you're selling, but I ain't buyin.

You're likely over-rating how good PGA Tour players are at putting, and over-rating the whole "when the lights come on" bit, too. Plenty of people can deal with pressure, can meet the moment, etc.

PGA Tour players are good, but… again, if a Tour player is 20 shots better than someone, just under three strokes over 18 holes come from their putting. Hence, "about as good as a PGA Tour player at putting."

And hey, there are many non-PGA Tour players who are actually better at putting than the average PGA Tour player.

Mark Broadie once again:

[Alex Miller]

Um, no .. sorry.  If you're going to tell people their heads are buried in the sand, the you're going to have to look in the mirror on this one.  You will never be able to get stats on this .. period.  Whatever rounds you're using from amateurs will never stack up.  It's all about what happens "when the lights come on."  I get what you're selling, but I ain't buyin.

You're likely over-rating how good PGA Tour players are at putting, and over-rating the whole "when the lights come on" bit, too. Plenty of people can deal with pressure, can meet the moment, etc.

PGA Tour players are good, but… again, if a Tour player is 20 shots better than someone, just under three strokes over 18 holes come from their putting. Hence, "about as good as a PGA Tour player at putting."

And hey, there are many non-PGA Tour players who are actually better at putting than the average PGA Tour player.

Mark Broadie once again:

+1 Erik you've proven your point. It's up to them if they want to accept it for themselves.

[JESII]

I’d say he’s repeated his point...

[Erik J. Barzeski]

I’d say he’s repeated his point...

The point remains the same. I'd say I've backed up the point with several different ways. I'm not repeating the same information.

But, the topic IS still "82" which is Tiger (and Jack), and I'm happy to get back to that topic, too. This feels pretty far off topic.

[Tags:]

Tags:

[Tags:]

Tags:

Call to undefined function theme_linktree()