Tiger Will Never Be the GOAT??? - Page 5

He hasn't won as many majors because it is ~2x (probably a bit less. but somewhere between 1.5x and 2x is good approximation)  as hard to win one now as it was in 1960 due to the better depth of fields. Winning 3 majors now is the same as winning 6 back then. Tiger also has had a short career as top golfer (hasn't won a major since ~33. I think Hogan had 0 majors at that age but I too lazy to double check). In the prime golf years of 34-40 (tiger is about half way through)  so far Tiger has been a nonplayer. If he doesn't win again you will have to debate if the much higher peak Tigers 15 prime years will compensate for having a 10 year career versus a 30 year one that Jack had. Happens in every sport. Who was a better pitcher: Sandy Koufax or Jamie Moyer? One has a 100 more wins than the other but is unlikely to be in the hall of fame. The other one shows up on greatest pitchers of time list on a regular basis.

 

The real fun will be if Tiger gets that 19th win for people to come up with reasons why Jack is still better.
 

 

You keep throwing this out there as some kind of fact.  The size of the field is irrelevant, what matters is the quality of players in the field. Do you really think Padraig Harrington's 3 majors is the equivalent of Lee Trevino's 6 majors? C'mon.

I am not sure if it exactly equivlant but it is real close. Padriaig though is a prime example of how random majors are. Is he a good golfer sure but I am not sure I would say he is tied for being the 27th best golfer ever in anyones mind given he has like 5 wins total on the PGA tour. Obviously having 5x as many tour wins puts Trevino in a different class of golfer

 

The quality of the players in the field is exactly what I have been saying. Jack had 6 tier one guys.  Tiger had about 12. And so on through the 100 odd players in the field. The 100th best player was much closer to the 10th best player in 2000 than in 1960. That is what depth is about. Again multiple wins by multiple people doesn't mean those people are awesome. It means there isn't that many people to divide the wins among. There is a reason there were a lot of really good seasons by athletes in the WWII years. And it wasn't because there just happend to be good athletes around in every sport at the same time.
 

 

Brocks,

 

I was wrong in detail, but not in the truth of my message: Jones and Hogan were celebrated for winning MAJORS and not for local or regular tour events. I know that congress did not get involved in ticker-tape parades and that it was convenient because that is where the boats came in. My point was very simply that the majors were important events well before Nicklaus came onto the scene. To deny this is quite bizarre.  (By the way, I hope that you are not belittling Richard Byrd's exploits flying over the poles in a 1930 plane! Would you have flown in one of those? LOL)

 

My comment about Tiger and the WGC's was simply to say that for some reason (a very good reason) the Majors are very important to him: because they are very important to "all" of the players out there (I place "all" in quotation marks because I know there are a few odd-balls like Lietzke and others that didn't care too much).  Ask tour players what they would prefer winning and I believe the answer would be clear. 

 

We all know that Jack never questioned his own importance (when he was younger especially), but to say that he plotted with Dan Jenkins to make everyone believe that the Majors are important is just a little far-reaching.  The majors were always important. Why would Hogan EVER go there with everything that it took (financially and physically). Don't forget that one aspect of the 4 majors was traditionally the challenge of playing golf in distinctly different playing conditions. It took different skill sets to win a US Open, different skill sets to win the Masters, different skill sets to win the British Open, and even much different skills when the PGA was in match play. Unfortunately we are losing that dimension of the Majors, as the Masters is playing more like the US Open and the PGA. 

 

There is surely an added importance of the majors since the 60's, but is that because of Jack's "decree" that it be that way or is it because of television? It would be just like if Tiger declared the WGC's as being the gold standard: that is quite hard to believe.

 

As far as winning a tournament against the "field," when someone wins, he beats everyone in the field, including those who don't make the cut. It means that you are the "Champion golfer" for that week. Better than everyone else who was there.  The person who does that the most in a career, not only in the regular events, but especially in the BIG ones, is the best ever.  Jack is not better than Snead ONLY because he won the most majors. You seem to talk like Jack sucked except for the majors!  

 

Do you not think that Snead falls out of the contention for best ever because he couldn't win a US Open? Why do you think he failed to finish it off in the US Open? Because it DIDN'T matter?! Don't you think that in a competitive sport, one of the credentials to greatness is to be able to pull it off under pressure? I always like to say that my mom could make a 2-1/2 foot putt, if it doesn't matter.  It's when it matters that it becomes difficult.  You can always argue that it didn't matter for Snead, Hogan, Hagen (who I too would put on my top contenders list), but that just doesn't cut the cheese. 

 

Going back to my comment (referring to rolopolo), do you really think that many of the youngsters can play championship golf like Jack? Especially by saying, geez, everyone gets better in all the sports, so they are better than him. Seems to me like there are a lot of shortcuts in that reasoning.  As I was saying in my original post, being a champion golfer is not a matter of becoming a better athlete! Yes, there is more to it than hitting it far, having a great swing, knowing about bio-mechanics, and whatever else was posited. Yes, there is a dimension to being GREAT that transcends physical skill/ability/athleticism or whatever you want to call it. In fact, the physical aspects may weigh very little in the end.  

 

Yes, most tour players are good athletes, better athletes, than in the 60's and 70's. But is there a player on tour today that we can clearly pretend to place above Jack as the BEST competitive golfer of all time? (let alone many, like rolopolo wants to imply!)

 

Of course, only one name could possibly come to mind: Tiger. If his career stands as it is at 14 majors, and another 7-10 regular tour victories (not sure if I am being generous or not), I will have to say NO. Jack would remain the BEST ever.  Please remember that I never once said that Tiger could NEVER be considered the best. He just hasn't done enough yet.  

 

As far as being "snide," I was just reacting to my "warm" reception after my initial post (which if you read again is not all that snide. And I am still sticking to my point that athletics is NOT what  gets the job done under pressure). 

 

 

 

Harrington is about the equivalent of beating Jack Nicklaus 4 times in major competitions? Seriously?  Well, I give up. I've tried as best I can to explain that the handful of players I mentioned during Nicklaus' era were indeed special.  You have dismissed them as just random players who couldn't even compete against today's players. Your reasoning is completely baffling. Once again, we'll just have to disagree. 

Best argument I've heard for Tiger:  winning that much more than your next closest competitor is the best measure for "greatest" against his competition.  Tiger has more than 3x as many major wins as his closest competitor, and more than 4x more than everyone else.

 

Best argument I've heard for Jack:  being the "greatest ever" has to be about more than just racking up wins.  Jack was a leader in his sport, a champion in an era of champions, and he did it all with grace and humility.  Tiger just rips it, putts it, and runs away to his eleventy-gazillion dollar mansion.

 

I think you have to start with an assumption about the overall quality of the fields in 1960s vs. 2000s.  And anyone who thinks the 60s fields were better is replacing a lot of really compelling evidence with nostalgia for a bygone era of great champions.  (My anecdotal fact:  I was recruited for a D1 golf program in 1994.  I wouldn't stand a chance of doing that today.)

GOAT arguments are like arguing if Batman would win a fight against Superman. 

 

We all have our favorites, and they usually are the athlete that we grew up watching.  I hear my uncle talk about Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, etc and calls all the current players PED bums.  Older golfers I know typically hate Tiger and think Jack is GOAT.  Right now it appears Majors victories is the measuring stick we're all using so Jack has the stats to support his claim.  If Tiger wins more Majors than Jack we'll hear the Tiger haters whine about how the guys Tiger played against weren't as good as the ones Jack played against. 

 

I personally like Hogan as GOAT, and he'd probably have the stats to back it up if not for the war or car accident, then Jack 2nd and Tiger 3rd.   

 

 

As if.

For those that claim that the field today is better, what criteria are you using?

 

Common sense.
 

 

and the field today is far more athletic, has better, higher tech equipment, and there's a lot more competition fighting to get into the Top 125 than there was in the early days. 

 

 

There may be more competition to get into the top 125 now, because the competition back then was to get into the top 60, just to keep your tour status.  Otherwise, you had to Monday qualify at each event each week. You can thank Gary McCord and others for convincing the tour to increase the number of also-rans on tour.

 

Also, you can't compare today's equipment, balls and course conditions versus back then and somehow say that means today's players are better.  That's like saying today's baseball players are better because they have bigger gloves.

 

 

Better equipment to get the same job done implies less talent.

The fields today aren't better, but the talent is much deeper. Calling today's talent better is a slap to Trevino, Casper, Lema, Bolt, Boros, etc. But I would think the 50th on today's money list would destroy the 50th on the money list in 1962.

 

Put another way - Jack had maybe a couple dozen top players to beat in a given Major. Tiger has the same skills level to beat, but there's a lot more of them now, just due to the growth of the game, growth of the population, greater proliferation of the game. Nothing to do with today's players being 'better' than players of previous eras. There's just more of them now.

 

There's no proof the top 10 were any better during Tiger's reign. Just like any sport. There are more guys that would have made the cut easily 20 plus years ago, but the cream of the crop? No proof.

I've always liked Tiger as a player and will continue to do so. The argument is irrelevant at this point because Tiger's career is not over. He still has a good 10-15 years left to play if he wants and his body hold up. He could win 20 more times with 5-7 majors in that time. Who knows where he will end up? You can't accurately compare careers until they are done.

I don't have a dog in this fight or an argument to make. I will say this. You can't make an argument about better/worse equipment without bringing up course changes. As equipment has changed, so have the courses. A 7000 yard course used to be a monster that no one wanted to play. Now it is considered short and would never hold even a low level tournament (outside of a few exceptions maybe). So to say the guys today have an advantage with technology and equipment, they also have to play longer courses with harder greens, and narrower fairways. Is is an even 1:1 swap between course changes and equipment changes? Maybe, maybe not, but it's probably not too far off in many instances.

I guess the point was that even less talented players perform better with the advances made in equipment.  Baseball players might not be "better" but fielding percentages have probably improved because of the larger gloves. 

 

 

Zipazoid,

 

I agree. But a "deeper" field does not make it any more difficult to win today than in the past.