142 straight events without missing the cut comes to mind.

Winning the US Open by 15 and the Masters by 12.

Winning 7 starts in a row in 99-00 and 6 in a row in 06-07

328 professional starts and 96 wins for a winning percentage of 29.3%. Up until his personal life disaster those numbers were 295 starts and 95 wins to be just a shade under winning 1/3rd of all professional starts.

Comparatively, for Jack Nicklaus, up until the year of his last win(86) he had 506 starts and 94 professional wins for a win percentage of 18.7%. Someone page me when Tiger goes 0 for his next 186 tournaments and has a worse winning % than Jack.

nxt you say they have the same amount of wins at 14 thru 56. how many seconds did jack have at that point how many thirds.

look at the absolute nobodys tiger has lost to.

Not going to waste much time arguing with you over this, also please refrain from sending me any more pointless PM's attempting to show how right you are.

Here are some simple assumptions that I would like to throw at you. Athletes in EVERY sport today are better than they were 40 years ago for various reason. Infinitely more people play golf competitively and pursue it as a career today compared to 40 years ago. If people disagree with that, which you appear to, then wow. If you don't disagree then it would make sense that Tiger's domination over a larger and better golfing population is pretty powerful.

LOL.

Leo, did Tiger Woods run over your dog or something? Your hate is unfathomably strong.

^^ uh no. thinking he is walking excrement is one thing. analyzing where he stands in the history of golf is another. kinda like guys who confuse love with sex. love is love sex is sex.

tiger as a person is one thing i really dont put my dislike of him in my analysis.

@nxt man im sorry i sent you a pm as we didnt have a tiger only thread at the time and since he was out of the turny i just wanted to finish the point without taking up more space.

who said players dont get better? i never did. but i think you are way off when yu talk about the older players. you act like they couldnt hit the ball.
i contend if you took the all time greats and put them in the game today at the age of 20 they would have won just as much.

heres an analogy. you take alabamas football team next year and put them in the sunbelt
conference. alabama will crush. if you take any of those sunbelt teams and take them back to the 70s and put them in the sec they would crush (if they got to keep all the advances in football over the years and the 70's sec teams had only access to the knowledge of the period)

then you can look at the alabama team of the 70's playing other sec teams of the 70's everybody has equal access to knowledge.

who is playing tougher competition bama in 70's in sec or bama '12 playing sunbelt?

Transport Tiger back to 72, give him persimmon woods, blades, and balata balls and he won't be able to keep his card.

I've heard the opposite argued. That the fact that the equipment is so good actually decreased the gap between peak Tiger and the ROTW.

That may be true but it isn't relevant. Nobody can play those old clubs anymore, not even the people who mastered them. That skill set is gone.

im not trying to insult the members of this forum but i think a lot of them are so young that they really dont know how different it was.

did you know in the 60s and early 70s you had to go thru boxes of balls just to find 12 round ones? then even if they were round they might not be balanced. the changes in tech are huge. the changes in knowledge in physics, aerodynamics, physical therapy. its not just better equipment its even better varieties of grass.

i dont know nxts background im new here im going to assume he is on the hooters or nationwide tour. i assume he is a great player.

at the top levels its more mental than physical. thats for every sport. i dont think the players are as mentally tough as they were then. they just fold over and over again.

You're whole argument hinges on players not getting better. LOL. If you assume players do get better, than you can look at Tiger results vs his generation and Jacks results vs his generation and the only conclusion you can reach is that Tiger was more dominant, hands down, its not even close.

Your analogy is hilarious...

heres an analogy. you take Tiger Woods from the 2000's and put him on the Nationwide Tour. Tiger Woods will crush. if you take any of the Top Nationwide Tour guys and take them back to the 70s and put them on the PGA Tour they would crush (if they got to keep all the advances in golf over the years and the 70's PGA Tour players had only access to the knowledge of the period)

then you can look at Jack Nicklaus of the 70's playing other PGA Tour players of the 70's everybody has equal access to knowledge.

who is playing tougher competition Jack in 70's on the PGA Tour or Tiger in '12 playing on the Nationwide Tour?


Answer: Who the f knows how you can compare golfers from different generations. It's almost as dumb as looking at the absolute score was for a particular tournament was and deciding whether it was good enough to win, rather than compare the score to the rest of the field What you can do is compare a golfers relative performance to a generation. Here's an example. From the farthest back I can go and still get a PGA Tour scoring average.

1980-
Scoring leader- Lee Trevino 69.73
Tour average- 72.26
Standard Deviation of scores- .7849

So Lee Trevino was roughly 3.22 standard deviations better than the average Tour player.

Tiger at his best-
Scoring average- 67.79
Tour average- 71.24
Standard Deviation of scores- .8099

So Tiger was roughly 4.27 standard deviations better than the average Tour player.

Even if you assume that the "average" Tour player today is basically the same as the "average" Tour player from the 80s, then you can see how much more ridiculously dominant Tiger was. Unfortunately I don't think the average player from today is the same relatively to the average player of decades ago. The advances in teaching, technology, training, and the influx of many many many more players wanting to play golf on the professional level speaks to the average golfer today probably being better. If you agree with that, then again Tiger's performance vs his "better" generation is significant in the GOAT argument.

well maybe you and i dont agree on the main aspect of great players is more mental than physical over their competition.

i can only use my own personal history with this. but there really is such thing as a will to win. where you can play a sport better than your natural talent should allow.

there is such a thing as refusing to lose. i dont think these guys have any guts at all.

See my last post as to how it is impossible to just compare athletes from different generations in an absolute fashion.

Your mental argument is also flawed in that sports psychologists have just come around and become popular in the last 10-15 years. A ton of professional golfers use them, so how can you assume with this new science that our generation is mentally weaker? Even Greg Normal will admit that one of his biggest regrets is not getting help on the mental side of his game at an earlier age.

yes i do. the fact that they even had to go to a sports shrink in first place is damning. when you step up to the tee your thought should be im going to crush this sob i dont care who he is.

there are many cases of this across many sports today. my high level background is football. look at julius peppers, he is a pussy biggest waste of talent ive seen in years. i was so happy when the panthers got rid of him.

ok that shot by rory is a perfect example. watney showed it as well you r playing match play your opponent is in trouble and you shortside yourself thats just mentally weak.

all you have to do is put it 20 ft right

cwice please ban this troll. This **** wouldn't even be tolerated in SE, and that is saying something.

This. The good shots are relatively just as good today as they were years ago. The bad shots however, were more penalizing with the older technology.

You can see it in the stats too, average scoring has improved more than the scores of the best players on tour. Using last years data and the oldest data PGA Tour.com has you can see.

Top 10 guys from 1980 scoring average- 70.643
Top 10 guys from 2011 scoring average- 69.476

Top 10 guys from 2011 have only improved their scoring 1.65% compared to their 1980 counterparts.

Tour average from 1980- 72.26
Tour average from 2011- 70.97

The average tour player from 2011 has however improved their scoring 1.92% compared to their 1980 counterparts.

Now the absolute difference between those numbers doesn't seem like much, but when you are talking in %'s the average PGA Tour player has improved 16% more than their top 10 counterparts.

I love that NXT is churning out raw numbers. This is how arguments should be handled.

Also, one thing to note is that the courses are getting longer and harder to balance out the change in equipment, technology, and sheer fitness and athleticism of the players.

How many of Tiger's wins came in full field events? How many of Tiger's "made cuts" came in events with no cut? I'd like to see the percentage of Tiger to Jack in full field events only.

BO

reid again its not just about better equipment that leads to the better scores. and not just weight training speed training. but i dont think they had atheletic trainers on site to help with injuries. advances in medicine. tiger with his knee would have been done couldnt repair acls back then.

but really the grass itself is better now. holds up better less grain. better mowers and greens.

What's a full field official definition? Are you just going to brush to the side the fact that the Masters has more player in the field nowadays compared to 40 years ago? Or that the US Open is still a field of 156 but is the field from Jack's era where they got 2500 entries as strong as Tigers where they get 2x and 3x that?

But then again looking at this from an absolute stand point is dumb.

Here's another dumb absolute comparison....

Tiger best scores relative to par at all the majors is better than Jack's. Tiger must be better.

Rory's 2011 US Open was the greatest of all time because he shot 16 under and Tiger only managed 12 under in 2000.

Pretty dumb right?

But everyone on this forum can conclude that Tiger's performance was better, because when you look at each winner's performance relative to the field it's not even close. Why is this relative comparison lost when looking at other results and numbers? That is what I don't understand.

Cliff notes:
Tiger is really good and NXT is too smart for this thread.

/thread

Bringing over a couple of things for the other thread. I know NXT basically responded already, but meh.

Forward shaft lean doesn't necessarily mean bowed left wrist. And that's the kick Chamblee has been on, too much forward shaft lean. Anyway, as NXT pointed out, TW had more bow under Haney.

Which makes sense. He was fanning it open in the backswing, so needed to get the face back to square. A bowed left wrists leads to the highest rate of closure, so it's the compensation.

Again, mimicking NXT, but from watching every single shot he has hit this year that's been shown on tv it's apparent he is driving it straighter than anytime in the recent past. That's including the driver, and not just fairway woods which he still hits a ton of. This past week was the worst so far, but overall I think he should be pretty positive on the full swing.

Agree on the body language though.

I love Tiger, though not to the perverse extent of Nxt , but I commend him for actually using data to backup his arguments.

I can't believe some of you believe Tiger will never win another major. It's certainly possible, but the odds are in his favor to win atleast one more.

Historically, Tiger has shown that he needs about 12-18 months to really click with his new swing changes. Counting him out of everything and declaring his career to be over is ridiculous.

A better questions for this thread is -- how old do you think Tiger will be when he a.) wins his last title and b.) hangs it up?

I really do believe that Tiger could win with his current game if he had his old head. He will win this year but until he gets his focus he will not put up the numbers he did. I don't care how in sync his swing gets he won't dominate without his brain because that is why he dominated in the first place.