Antinomy

The commercials for the World Golf Championships have a hard rock background song. I wondered if it was a real song or just something composed for the commercials. It took me a while to figure out the magic words to get Google to cough up the information, but is is a real song: Blinded by The Bots And it rocks.

There is a cut anyway. Does it matter if they split on Thursday rather than Friday? Instead of making the players make an injury excuse, I think the Tour should have a mercy resignation option for those players who score so badly on Thursday that they have no chance of making the cut. This would be especially useful during those parts of the year that the tournaments are in danger of running out of daylight.

I find them sad more than either creepy or funny. These are people so alone that they imagine persons on the television are their friends.

I suspect good genes have a lot to do with it. Looking at the pga site, a lot of the profiles mention that the players were excellent high school athletes in multiple sports. The ten-thousand hour rule is largely nonsense. If you have the genetic potential, lots of practice can make you superior. If you don't have the genetic potential, lots of practice will only help you reach your peak. This appears to be true with everything in life that has a talent component.

It seems to me that people need to define their terms. In my mind, the greatest player of all time can't be determined in this world. In heaven, the angels inclined to bet on such things could take all of the players in question, give them perfect health, give them their choice of equipment of varying styles, time to practice, and then have them play against each other for a billion tournaments on a million different courses. The player who accumulated the most wins, assuming the difference was statistically significant, would be the greatest player of all time. Unless there is an afterlife, this will always be a thought experiment. We can use data to improve on it, but we can never know for sure.

Thanks, brocks, that is some interesting stuff. The shear size of the field increasing the difficulty in winning makes sense. The more players, the greater the chance of a weaker player either getting lucky or just having a good tournament, so the results are more random.

I don't play golf. I watch is casually (I find it restful), and I have a bit of a mathy streak. Has anyone figured out a way to evaluate how much more difficult it is to win a major vs. a typical weekly PGA Tour tournament? Obviously, the majors tend to have almost all of the best players in the world contending, whereas the week-in-week-out tournaments only have a fraction of them. I've looked at the way the Official Golf World Ranking awards points. It doesn't strike me as irrational, but it is ad hoc. Has anyone come up with a more rigorous method? For example, is there any way to determine mathematically that winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational twice is about as hard as, say, winning the U.S. Open once?