That's not what I'm saying at all. Tiger is very close to being the greatest, but in golf, major championships hold the most weight when it comes to measuring a tour players career. Obviously total wins, streaks, tiger slams, etc. go into that makeup as well.

Making the comparison with basketball and free throws is ridiculous and idiotic. They don't compare at all. Free throws are not the most important factor in determing the GOAT basketball player. They would compare to something like driving accuracy in golf.

His FT comparison isnt near as off as you think. You have stated over and over you only go my majors and pretty much nothing else and everyone else is wrong. Now you see how ridiculous this side of the argument is if you think his free throw example is that ridiculous

If he plays a normal schedule then obviously he's not the GOAT.

But 19 wins is pretty strong anyway. That's like a DL3 career.

Robert Horry is better than Michael Jordan. Because Jordan would agree that it's all about the rangz.

grunching here but golf isn't a team sport

majos >>>>>>>>> bay hill etc.

u make a good point on variance

Of course Free Throws are not the most important factor in determining the GOAT basketball player. That's not what my example showed. Free throws however are the most important factor in determining GOAT Free Throw shooter, and just taking the person with the most career FT's(Karl Malone) is stupid. IMO the GOAT Free Throw shooter is the person with the highest career FT % over a minimum # of attempts(Steve Nash).

Quality>Quantity

yes, although i'd say 20.... and no extenuating circumstances. has to be non-ancient too

Wait, so a guy with 19 majors and 19 total wins is better than Jack with 18 majors and 72 total wins?

1) remove your brain
2) examine it
3) throw it away

Says who? I say they do, and that's all that counts. It's an irrefutable position.

Obviously not.

And the flip side: Guy wins 200 PGA Tour events, but 0 majors. GOAT?

19 majors is significantly better than DL3's career.

You might be right about the fields. I just think this idea that the case for tiger is based on cold hard stats and the case for jack is based on some combination of nostalgia and personal dislike of tiger isn't true. There are plenty of subjective assessments behind the arguments for tiger

The WGC's that include only the top 80 golfers in the world could easily be argued to be tougher to win than the Masters.

So now what makes a Masters win > WGC win. Just because?

You've used the word subjective twice now and I'm not sure it fits. I think most people, a large majority, would make a reasonable assumption that the fields are some combination of being noticeably better and/or deeper.

Subjective makes it sound like I went to one tourney once and followed Mike Weir and he played really well that week and he's ranked very low so obviously the fields are stronger. That's not close to my position.

Seriously man. Free throws in basketball and major championships in golf?!? Where's the comparison?

I agree. I just meant 19 wins (of any sort) is a very good career. You don't fluke your way to 19 wins, but I still wouldn't call that guy the GOAT if he played 15-20 events for 15-20 years.

Read closely. This is the exact position you are taking. You arent taking anything else into consideration. For argument he thinks FTs is what makes someone GOAT and as he said its irrefutable if anyone thinks otherwise since you think majors are the only thing that affects GOAT in golf. Both are absurd.

list of subjective assessments behind Tiger arguments?

Strength of field is quantifiable. For example lets compare 1980(first year of scoring average stats on PGATour.com) and 2012

In 1980 they had scoring average for 175 players
Difference between top and bottom was 5 shots
Difference between top and average was 2.53 shots

In 2012 they had scoring average for 191 players, but lets just look at 1-175
Difference between top and 175 was 3 shots.
Difference between top and average of top 175 was 1.9 shots

More compressed scoring averages makes it much harder to win. And considering the overall trend from 1980 to Now is that the compression gets tighter and tighter it's safe to assume that the gap between top and bottom during Jack's era is >5. And because the difference in scoring average was so great, it allowed the best players of that era to dominate more than the best players of our era.

Of course if you took the 10 best players of Tiger's generation and threw them on tour with a combination of PGA Tour and Web.com Tour players, their numbers would probably look similar to Jack's generation. Tiger may have 18-20 already, Phil and Ernie around 6-10, Padraig and Vijay in the 4-8 range, and Retief would probably have 1 or 2 more.

Still not convinced the reduction in variance is necessarily caused by change in skill level. There's also changes to courses and equipment that would matter a lot. Regardless my suggestion of using std deviation above or below field average would account for changes in variance

I don't know what effect changes to courses has if everyone is playing the same course. If you take the 1980 Tour and the 2012 Tour and put them on a course no matter the difficulty, the range of scores on average would be 5 shots wide with the 1980 guys and 3 shots wide with the 2012 guys.

Equipment has a negative impact on the better golfers, as most technological advances in golf are aimed at improving mistakes. The difference between Tiger Woods an the worst player on Tour is that Tiger "misses" show up less frequently and they are less severe. Tiger best shot from 180 yards and Mike Weir's best from 180 is very similar. Their worst shots and the frequency of those shots is significantly different and where the skill gap is. When equipment comes along that makes your misses much better it closes the skill gap as your best shots can't improve nearly at the rate of your worst ones.



This visual should help people see how the difference in field strength plays a huge roll. It is a statistical representation of Tiger's win % vs different fields of golfers.

Notice how important the strength of the field is in determining his winning %. Just the difference between the (1,3,5...287) field and the (1,4,7...430) increases his win % by almost 20%. And the difference between the top 144 and (1,4,7...430) is 70%. Those are significant changes.

How many more books*, PGA instructors, internet golf websites with dagolfdocs, youtube super-slowmo videos of professional swings, Trackmans, GPS devices, and laser range fingers are there in 2013 than there were in the 1940s and 1950s when Jack was learning?

I bet there are a lot more today. Speed and quality of information today is light years ahead of where it was back then. Even Hogan said if he had videotape capability back in the 30s he "could have been really good". Instead, he spend thousands of hours on the range digging it out of the dirt.

Nowadays some kid in Korea can watch slowmo videos of every pro on tour, figure out what they are doing rather easily, then go out and try to replicate. People learning the game no longer have blinders on.

In the next 10-20 years I feel like we'll see a monumental improvement in aggregate skill level. Though scoring may remain relatively unchanged because bunkers can be expanded, rough can be grown, and greens can become tougher. Which, ironically enough, has a cyclical effect on skill, since all players will have to master tougher courses (because courses cannot expand to 9,000 yards.)

*When I first started a couple years ago I drove 10 minutes to a library, checked out Hogan's 5 lessons, read it in fewer than 2 days, went to the range once or twice, then went out and shaved my scoring down from 120 to 110 simply by implementing what I read in his book.

John Daly claims to have learned golf by reading a "comic strip type thing" published one morning in the newspaper back in the 70s that Nicklaus came up with showing proper grip and swing. How many people saw this strip? Compare this type of learning to what is capable today.

This is the first good point I have read itt supporting Jack. In fact, if you add sports psychologist and medical advances those are huge benefits for Tiger not available to Jack.

Everything (except for designer PEDs) that is available to Tiger is available to his competitors. Likewise with Jack.

You are saying Jack is better because the game was tougher to learn by yourself back then.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information is light years ahead now so it helps bring everyone up and flattens out the skill at the very top. The skill curve at the very top back then was steeper, because of the inefficient transmission of information.

Having much more information negates the requirement of figuring out how to play from the ground up. That makes competition tougher now. Because someone like Keegan Bradley doesn't have to dig his swing out of the dirt. He can read and study film then use his superior athletic ability to polish off his game.

Nobody swings like Arnold Palmer or Lee Trevino anymore. I wonder why.

And I guess having Sean Foley helping Tiger with his swing, as well as many other players on tour gives Tiger an unfair advantage? LOL. No, it brings everyone up closer to him. At least in terms of knowledge and swing concept.

I don't see how that's really a point for Jack.

Jack played vs people with less golf resources available to them. Tiger has won at a better clip than Jack vs people with just about unlimited golf resources.

Tiger Woods: 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m)

Jack Nicklaus: 5' 10" (1.78 m)

There you have it, hater$.