This clearly has made a deep impression on you... be honest - was that kid you?

From what I understand there used to be a rule that a player must have completed 5 years on the PGA Tour to be eligible for the team. Nicklaus didn't qualify under that rule until 1969. The rule is no longer effective.

no im old man. but the reason it did was it was a monday.not a thurs-sunday. not even wedsday the day before the turny.

it was a monday.

oh yeah nxt i forgot about jacks 4th place finish in the us open as an am as well. so 2ams a 2nd and 4th in the open is pretty strong for an am right?

I am so tilted i can't help myself....but now I'm gone.

What EXACTLY do you proclaim to have witnessed? Setting what the kid did and what you REMEMBER Tiger saying.

So does the title of "am" really matter? Was Tiger older or younger when he WON his first major (by double digits) than these 2 Open finishes? And how about an age comparison of when Tiger won his 2nd major?

i was over at the short game range and kid asked tiger for an autograph tiger said get the hell away from me i was prob twenty feet away and excited to see tiger as i was a fanboi at the time.

best dumass moment of the day my friend asks butch to take a picture with me so we pose and my friend was out of film!!!! loooooool.

was tiger younger i dont know. im pretty sure jack graduted from osu as prize money was nothing then and lots of those guys worked jobs in off season. so he got a later pro start than tiger.

in 1960 jack was 20 when he finished 2nd in the open. he also finished 13th at the masters that year as well. he then finished 3 shots back at 21 in the us open the following year. at 18 jack also came in 41st at the open.


and just for grins a 12th at the buick.

As far as Tiger and Rory's Sunday play I'd use a qualitative approach. It's a small data set, and the different challenges they faced because the finish line was in sight were anomalies.

Tiger's goal was to go as low as possible to put pressure on the leader(s)-- shoot/post something so low that it actually influenced the tournament. He did. Awesome.

Rory's goal was to not go backwards thereby effectively make the tournament a three horse race with him having a two-length head start on the other two horses: Tom Gillis and Harris English. He did.

Strokes gained putting provides a basis for comparison of putting -- and inferentially all those things that aren't putts, by extending the idea that strokes gained +/- is linear, well-behaved, additive throughout a round of golf.

Whew. Taking a break as I just lost part of what I was saying-- disappeared into the ether. I'll pick it up later.

All that and 1 substance less sentence about strokes gained. LOL

Nobody is going to argue that Tiger and Rory had different game plans going into the day. Nobody will argue that Tiger and Rory had similar targets on approach shots, Tiger was more aggressive for obvious reasons.

The only argument is that Tiger's ball striking, be it playing more aggressively, hitting the ball better, or a mixture of the 2 accounted for almost the entire difference in Rory and Tiger's final round score. You think that is "laughable". Post something that makes it so.

No, no, man. A qualitative approach is the best way to analyze a round.

IMO, Tiger Woods is better at golf than anyone has ever been at anything.. That includes Einstein at physics, Jordan at basketball, Buffet at investing, Martin Luther King at civil rights and speeches, and Peter North at ............

That said.. He's not cool , and he's not the most likeable person to grace a TV. He hasn't handled the media well.. He's tried to be like Michael Jordan, and he's failed at that.. I think the media pounced on him because they could, and they already disliked him.

I actually think that's reasonable.. Similar to poker.. The statistics might tell you one thing, while reality is different..

What if you hit a flagstick and kick 30 yards left? What if you should have gone OB, but got a lucky bounce off of a tree? Sure the score card is all that matters, but it really doesn't tell the whole story.. Just like one poker session doesn't tell us much..

This only happens to Sergio

Strokes gained is destined to being circular unless you accept it abstracts away information (I know, blah, blah, blah)-- and that will take you seeing some cracks, and that will likely start with how strokes gained extends backwards off the green towards the tee. It's a seismic shift in what appears to be an ideology.

Apropos nothing. Two players A & B arrive on the green 35 ft from the hole (whatever the 2 putt distance is). They both putt off the green into a hazard. Player A chips to 35 ft and makes his putt. Player B chips in. Who putted better?

Maybe "laughable" is wrong. How about meaningless?

To analyze a single round of golf based entirely on the numbers in shot tracker is inferior to using both those numbers and what you actually observe.

This last part is almost certainly true, but that's about all.

I've actually implemented the strokes-gained algorithm for my own use and that of others who aren't PGA Tour Professionals. I've got over 2 thousand holes of my own in my database, each and every one of which I charted the 1st putt distance with 1 thing in mind: how does the algorithm perform for this specific putt? So I've got a pretty good idea about the "cracks", and whether or not they're "seismic".

Yes, it's possible that the specific putts each player had on Sunday were such that the true difficulty and expectations were far different than strokes-gained would have you believe, but you've done nothing to quantify the difference -- it's only 1 round after all, so shouldn't be too hard -- and I'm extremely skeptical that if you did it would be all that significant.

I didn't see most of Sunday because I was out playing (and shooting my lifetime best round), but from what I can gather, Rory made a lot of long 2-putts (due to a conservative tee-to-green strategy) that you're claiming were easier than strokes-gained would imply, as he hit to safe spots. In my experience, long putts are very rarely the ones where expectation is greatly different than distance would suggest. This shouldn't be surprising, as the longer the putt, the more distance control becomes the predominant factor in how close you are to the "ideal vector". The individual putts that really break the strokes-gained algorithm on a regular basis are things like downhill sliding 4-footers that are much more difficult than the 90% strokes-gained would suggest. However, it doesn't seem to me that there were many of these in the round in question.

So what's so hard about admitting that strokes-gained isn't perfect, but it's pretty damn good, and this instance is probably not one of the outliers where it's not, but there can still exist other, separate concerns about how players should make their way around the course in different tournament situations.

Another thing about hitting to "safe spots":

The main reason to play to safe spots with a lead isn't that a 50-footer from there is so much better than the average 50-footer; it's that an off-target shot aimed at a safe-spot is less likely to end up dead. Playing it safe has very little impact on putting EV. It is a play with approach EV.

Strokes gained putting is a well-defined statistic that is the single most useful stat that I know of when looking at putting performance. Maybe if I said that more often, and alternated it with, "Tiger Woods Rules!", I could make some headway on what it means to reify strokes gained putting.

Why don't you break down exactly what you don't like about strokes gained putting aside from hilariously freakish scenarios that happen 1 out of 1000 times? I'd be interested to hear it.

There is nothing to dislike about strokes gained putting. There isn't a better golf stat out there (that I know of, anyway). It may not have changed the way the game is played, but it is changing the way it is viewed and reviewed. And it is always there when I need it, and Tiger Woods is awesome.

I think scu_22 is asking you to explain where you think the strokes gained putting stat is flawed from Sunday's round. Something tangible that you can point to and say "oh see here is where Tiger made up more shots on the greens than the stats show compared to Rory and thus Tiger's ball striking wasn't the only thing bridging the gap between the .2 shot advantage he had over Rory in 'strokes gained putting' and the 7 shot difference on the scorecard."

And I think that is the disease talking. Trying (and let's say succeeding, just for grins) to convince either/both of you that .2 ought to be closer to 1 is besides the point I'm trying to make.

Do I think I could do that?, btw, yeah, maybe, not sure-- but that would be feeding the disease.

this
I was asking you to do this. So far you've just said "no thats laughable" and "im not going to explain it."

Im not even disagreeing with you or anything, Im basically just saying that if you have better evidence than strokes gained putting to support your 1 stroke theory, show your work. This has nothing to do with Tiger vs. Rory or anything, Im just curious about where you're coming from

Well now I'm officially confused. What is your point then? Do you even have one? Remember this post that set this whole discussion off?

Do you remember this exchange?

That's the disease.