![\"Thrash](\"\/b\/imgs\/thrash_talk\/tt_title.gif\")
One of the most talked about aspects of the last two Masters tournaments has been the effect of the recent, dramatic architectural changes on the nature of the competition. Golf fans, like those of any sport with perhaps the exception of boxing, aren’t generally thrilled to see their champion determined in a war of attrition, stumbling over the corpses of their competition and limping across the finish line.<\/p>\n
So it is no surprise that with the last two Masters Sundays (and perhaps the last several years’ worth of “toonaments”) featuring very few birdies and heroic charges among the eventual winners, many have concluded that the Augusta National Golf Club course has been changed for the worse. I’m not sure if there’s any merit to that argument, but I do know I’m pretty sick of hearing the whining. So for this week’s Thrash Talk<\/em>, I decided to take a few vital signs on the tournament and today’s golf fan. All of the majors contrast sharply with the Masters in some way. The U.S. Open suffers from penal course set-up bordering on insane, the (British) Open Championship, often played on a browned-out links can turn out just about any way depending on the caprice of nature, and the PGA Championship resembles the U.S. Open, perhaps lacking quite the same bite and reputation.<\/p>\n For just about any seasoned golf fan, the Masters – with the beautiful springtime setting, a classic course inviting aggressive, heroic play, and often exciting, low scoring – is the ultimate major championship.<\/p>\n That is the essence of the tournament as most of us know it, as it was played from the 1960s through the 1990s. But things began to change when Tiger came on the scene.<\/p>\n When Woods demolished the course in 1997, the members of Augusta embarked on a multi-year plan to update the course to keep it “current” with the skill level and playing styles of modern golfers. The changes have been relatively severe (see below), and the net affect has been a more difficult course. As for how this has affected the Masters, John Hawkins sums up the prevailing opinion best when he writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n The world’s greatest golf tournament IS no longer the world’s greatest golf tournament, not in the context of how we once knew it, anyway. Gone are the Sunday afternoon fireworks, the four-hole birdie runs, the leader boards that changed faster than the arrival\/departure screens at Grand Central Station. Power is now passé control rules the day. Love it or lament it, the azalea patch has grown fangs and chest hair, altering the competitive disposition of the Masters to a degree many would find easier to abhor than ignore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Sounds serious, doesn’t it? But before I delve into why I abhor this kind of commentary, let’s put some numbers on the board and see exactly how much things have changed through the years. (All scoring data obtained from masters.org.)<\/p>\n Below are some Masters scoring statistics I mined. I decided to look at six different eras in Masters history (special thanks to Ron Whitten for important insights on the architectural history of Augusta National Golf Club):<\/p>\n The boundaries of these time periods were chosen arbitrarily, and I did not intentionally leave out any specific years. I wanted a few distinct subsets of tournaments that had some historical meaning. Remember, this is a semi-thorough look-see at some data, not a doctoral dissertation.<\/p>\n I chose to focus on scoring statistics of the winners and those in the top twenty, since these are the players we see on TV and the ones determining the overall drama of the tournament. With one obvious exception, all numbers are averages of the given statistic over the period of time indicated. All eras are eight years in length, with the exception of 2005-08.<\/p>\n Looking at the data very simply, it tells us a few things, quite obviously, I think.<\/p>\n Overall Scoring Trends<\/strong> These data show a steady improvement in scoring overall between 1949 and 2004, with a little blip in the winners’ total in the first post-bentgrass era. Scores remained at historic lows during many of the early years of the post-Tiger course transformation, but have definitely increased in the last four years. So, between 1949 and 2004, players found Augusta progressively easier, probably due to overall improvement of player skill, perhaps better overall conditioning of the course over that period, and, in latter years almost certainly, improvements in equipment. Since then, architectural changes have turned the clock back on scoring, making it more difficult. But note that overall scoring is still better than in the Hogan\/Snead era.<\/p>\n Scoring and “Excitement Value”<\/strong> The most interesting stat may be the number of final round scores below 70. Note that the number was actually fairly low in the 1950s and 60s, then rose dramatically afterward. So, the exciting final-round charges aren’t really a historical constant of the Masters, but something slightly more recent.<\/p>\n As with total scoring, there is a slight reversal of the trend of rounds below 70 since 2004, but the number is nowhere near the level of the 1950s and 1960s.<\/em> Note that in four years from 2005-08, the era of the most drastic changes in the course, the number of rounds in the 60s is already equal to or greater than the two oldest eight-year periods studied.<\/p>\n One interpretation of this data would be that recent architectural changes have managed to make the course more difficult and challenging overall, while maintaining the potential for sub-70 rounds at a level better than what was normal in the Hogan\/Snead and Palmer eras.<\/em><\/p>\n In case you don’t like my sub-70 round as a reasonable definition of an exciting final round, I also counted the number of rounds below 67, among top-20 finishers, for each of the eras listed, and the trend is essentially identical to that of the sub-70 round analysis. Rounds of 66 or lower were vanishingly rare in the 50s and 60s, increased dramatically in the next three eras, and dropped off sharply in 2005-08. However, the rate of rounds below 67 is on pace to beat the 50s and 60s totals, as was seen with sub-70 rounds.<\/p>\n The data on low final-round scores, as might be expected, are similar to that of the number of sub-70 rounds. Winners’ final round scores are perhaps the toughest to interpret, perhaps because they contain fewer data points and are therefore more prone to random variation. Still, scores in the most recent period are not out of historical boundaries, although clearly they are higher than in most of Masters history.<\/p>\n So concerning Hawkins’ lament, the affects of recent course changes on the character of the Masters, my interpretation of these scoring statistics could be summarized as follows:<\/p>\n So the Hawkins commentary is correct, to a degree, but distorts the picture in an important way. I wonder if his opinion is overly influenced by the results of the last two tournaments, and perhaps myopically skewed toward more recent Masters history.<\/p>\n Maybe in the last two years we just haven’t had the winner get hot in the final round. Maybe it’s the weather, and maybe it’s just how it goes. Not every Masters had finishes like ’75, ’78, and ’86. Plus, this year Tiger Woods made<\/em> the sort of heroic, final-round shots on the par-five holes, and other holes, that we like to see. He just didn’t close the deal by making the putts. Can we blame that on Hootie’s and Fazio’s rough and trees?<\/p>\n Is the ultra-low, “tradition-unlike-any-other,” blistering final-round charge, back-nine 30 a thing of the past? Well, it’s certainly harder to shoot 65 there today than it was even five or six years ago, but don’t we have to be careful not to go too far with the fireworks, lest they become ordinary? The purpose of strengthening the course was to protect the validity and historical importance of those past great rounds, to adjust for modern advances in the game. Maybe they overshot the mark a little, but it’s off-base I think to suggest they ruined the tournament. And although I didn’t collect specific data on the number of Masters won with final round scores in the mid- to low 60s, I’m pretty sure you could count them on one hand. Doesn’t matter how easy they make the course, you’re not going to see that sort of thing every year, or even every five years.<\/p>\n What disturbs me even most, though, is not the specifics of the golf debate per se. It’s the tone of the debate, the premises underlying everyone’s angst. It’s as if we’ve forgotten that sporting events are contests between human beings, and not scripted playacts with outcomes engineered on request.<\/p>\n To me, modern information technology fuels this problem. Like 30-second, chopped-up porn videos on the web, we can see just about any exciting sports moment we want on YouTube. The TV networks, whether covering the World Series, NCAA Basketball Championship, or the Masters, serve up visually stunning, rapid-fire vignettes of every exciting moment in our sport’s history, giving us the illusion that great moments are the norm. People come to expect excitement, gratification, perfection, on a big scale, every time, on demand.<\/p>\n But that’s not the way things really are. Totally mediocre golfers (by professional standards, anyway) like Charles Coody, Gay Brewer, George Archer, and Tommy Aaron have won the Masters. Many, many players have won with final-round scores in the 70s, and without anything resembling a charge across the finish line. Despite what we may remember, it hasn’t been a 75-year thrill fest.<\/p>\n There are many people I like and respect a great deal who have been quite critical of recent Masters. I’m not saying they are wrong. But I can’t shake the notion that an important subset of golf fandom has gotten the wrong idea about sports. Please go ahead and complain; there wouldn’t be a PGA Tour or Masters (not a lucrative one, anyway) if it weren’t for fans, but can we manage to think a little before we complain?<\/p>\n You get the idea that some golf fans cannot be satisfied. Read the blogs…when a non-“glamorous” player like Immelman or Zach Johnson wins the Masters, with an ordinary final-round score, they complain the tournament is dead. When players tear up a tour event, they complain that modern equipment makes the game too easy.<\/p>\n A friend of mine pointed out to me a while back that sports contests are, in and of themselves, boring and almost meaningless to most of us. After all, what difference does it make who wins the Masters or what score they shot? Sports competitions are only important to us in that they are metaphors for our lives…the struggles, the ups and downs, the wins and the losses. Sometimes, life is just ordinary. Thankfully, I’ll add. If life were a 24\/7 orgasm, I think the thrill would fade pretty fast, don’t you? OK, maybe you’d want to try your luck there, but you get my point.<\/p>\n At the very least, I urge golf fans everywhere to be patient. So far anyway, the data don’t tell a story of Judgement Day coming to the Masters, just a slight change, and not into uncharted waters, either. Let’s let ’em play for a while, and try to just sit and watch. When the spectacular moment comes along – and I believe it will – maybe we’ll appreciate it even more.<\/p>\n Photo Credits: © brittanica.com, courtesy of Arnold Palmer Enterprises<\/a>, © brittanica.com<\/a>, © Augusta.com<\/a>, © NYTimes.com<\/a>, © golfdigest.com<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Think the Masters is dead? No argument here that the tournament has changed recently. But is the change really for the worse? I don’t think so…or maybe I do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[98,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hot_topics","category-thrash_talk"],"yoast_head":"\n
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\nThe Masters is of course the major championship we most identify with Sunday fireworks. Heroic final-round charges to victory by Palmer, Player, Nicklaus, and others have been well cataloged, and the tournament has long had the reputation of being the most beautiful and exciting of all the major championships.<\/p>\n![](\"\/b\/imgs\/pga\/arnold_palmer_at_augusta.jpg\")
Arnie was the face of the Masters for a decade, but there were few scoring fireworks in his day.<\/p>\n\n
![](\"\/b\/imgs\/pga\/tiger_woods_donning_first_green_jacket.jpg\")
Tiger’s win in 1997 was the catalyst for major changes to Augusta National.<\/p>\n\n
\nThe first two graphs below show scoring average and the winner’s total score average, which I chose as surrogates for overall scoring trends at the Masters.<\/p>\n![\"Top](\"\/b\/imgs\/thrash_talk\/masters08_top_20_scoring_average.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Winners](\"\/b\/imgs\/thrash_talk\/masters08_total_winning_score.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"\/b\/imgs\/pga\/sam_snead_ben_hogan_at_augusta.jpg\")
Modern course changes have players shooting much the same scores as the great Hogan and Snead.<\/p>\n
\nTo try to gauge the excitement value of the course, its potential to yield thrilling, final round charges, I looked at three additional statistics: the winner’s final-round score, the number of final-round scores below 70, and the low final-round score. If we’re talking excitement, if we’re interested in the course challenging players yet yielding to daring, aggressive play, it should show up in these stats. Here are the numbers:6<\/p>\n![\"Winner](\"\/b\/imgs\/thrash_talk\/masters08_winner_final_round_score.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Top](\"\/b\/imgs\/thrash_talk\/masters08_low_score_final_round.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Final](\"\/b\/imgs\/thrash_talk\/masters08_final_rounds_in_60s_of_top_20.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n
![](\"\/b\/imgs\/pga\/2007_2008_masters_champs.jpg\")
Is the Masters really dead, or are we simply unhappy with the lack of star appeal of recent champions?<\/p>\n