August 29, 2012

Federer v. Nicklaus: Most tennis & golf Grand Slam championships

Enough election politics for now. Back to my August sports kick.

Roger Federer comes into the U.S. Open with a record 17 victories in tennis's four annual Grand Slam major championships (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open). The 31-year-old Swissman is trying to open up distance between himself and younger stars Rafael Nadal (11 majors) and Novak Djokovic (5). 

To my mind, however, the interesting angle is that he has a shot at tying Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 majors in the two big country club sports, tennis and golf. (Golf also has four Grand Slam events per year, the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA.) Tiger Woods has been chasing Nicklaus's mark his whole life, but Federer may beat him to it.

Combining the lists of top men's major champions of all time into an apples and oranges table gives a sense, that, yes, this isn't a completely apples and oranges compilation:

Jack Nicklaus Golf 18
Roger Federer Tennis 17
Pete Sampras Tennis 14
Tiger Woods Golf 14
Roy Emerson Tennis 12
Björn Borg Tennis 11
Rafael Nadal Tennis 11
Rod Laver Tennis 11
Walter Hagen Golf 11
Bill Tilden Tennis 10
Ben Hogan Golf 9
Gary Player Golf 9
Andre Agassi Tennis 8
Fred Perry Tennis 8
Ivan Lendl Tennis 8
Jimmy Connors Tennis 8
Ken Rosewall Tennis 8
Tom Watson Golf 8
Arnold Palmer Golf 7
Bobby Jones Golf 7
Gene Sarazen Golf 7
Harry Vardon Golf 7
Henri Cochet Tennis 7
John McEnroe Tennis 7
John Newcombe Tennis 7
Mats Wilander Tennis 7
René Lacoste Tennis 7
Richard Sears Tennis 7
Sam Snead Golf 7
William Larned Tennis 7
William Renshaw Tennis 7
Boris Becker Tennis 6
Don Budge Tennis 6
Jack Crawford Tennis 6
Laurence Doherty Tennis 6
Lee Trevino Golf 6
Nick Faldo Golf 6
Stefan Edberg Tennis 6
Tony Wilding Tennis 6
Byron Nelson Golf 5
Frank Sedgman Tennis 5
James Braid Golf 5
J.H. Taylor Golf 5
Novak Djokovic Tennis 5
Peter Thomson Golf 5
Seve Ballesteros Golf 5
Tony Trabert Tennis 5
Golf >= 5 18
Tennis >=5 29

I'd say that this list suggests that it's a little bit easier to pile up a lot of Grand Slam titles in tennis than in golf, primarily because most people would agree that Tiger Woods (14 majors) is a better golfer than Pete Sampras (14, too) is a tennis player. 

In general, the all time great tennis players can win more often at the peak of their careers than the all time great golfers, because tennis is a less random, larger sample size sport. In any given major, the world's best tennis player is usually more likely to win than the world's best golfer. Tennis is kind of like tug-of-war, where the better team ought to win.

On the other hand, golf careers last much longer. Nicklaus won his first major at 22, his 16th and 17th majors at 40 and his 18th at 46 (the famous 1986 Masters). And one of these years somebody really old will win a golf major. Tom Watson missed winning the British Open at 59 in 2009 by inches. In 1974, Sam Snead finished third in the PGA, behind only Trevino and Nicklaus. 

In contrast, Federer is considered a miracle of rejuvenation to have won Wimbledon at 30. 

The age of first victory in a major is usually lower in tennis, supporting the common sense notion that tennis is a much tougher game physically, while golf may be somewhat tougher mentally.

Put it all together, and it seems pretty reasonable to note that Federer is challenging Nicklaus.

By the way, why are apples and oranges the canonical examples of things that shouldn't be compared? Relative to every other possible pair of things, they seem pretty similar to me.

Sports History Minutia (for sports data methodology aficionados only): It's hard comparing the number of major championships won by golfers and tennis players before 1968, when tennis opened up its Grand Slam events to professionals. Thus, the great Mexican-American tennis player Pancho Gonzales is credited with only two Grand Slam titles because he turned pro and spent about 15 years on the small pro tour. (He won 15 Pro Slam titles). Rod Laver would have 20 major championships, adding together amateur, pro, and open titles. On the other hand, that segregation of talent may overstate this era's combined talent. Before 1968, Laver was never playing against all the top players in the world all at once. Then, again, in 1969, he won all four Grand Slam in open competition, the last time a man has done that. Laver was really good.

Golf has a lesser problem in that it's not clear what to do with the British and U.S. Amateur titles. The term Grand Slam was invented in 1930 when Atlanta amateur golfer Bobby Jones won the U.S. and British Opens and the U.S. and British Amateurs. Golf historians usually credit him with 13 major championships instead of just the 7 he won in the Opens, as on this list. However, when Jones retired upon achieving his Grand Slam, the prestige of Amateur championships as they slowly turned into merely the premiere events for college golfers. Nicklaus, who idolized Jones, likes to count his two U.S. Amateur titles, giving him 20 major championships (and Woods 17, including his three U.S. Amateurs), but most people just count victories in the four majors currently open to professionals, a foursome stabilized by 1934. 

Two golfers have won three professional majors in one calendar year: Ben Hogan in 1953 and Tiger Woods in 2000. Woods winning four straight majors in 2000-2001 is clearly the greatest 12-month feat in golf history, although it still lacks an agreed-upon catchy title like Bobby Jones' Grand Slam. In contrast, tennis players have won three of the four grand slam titles in one calendar year 13 times, seven times since open competition began in 1968.

Americans possess an advantage in golf in that three of golf's majors are played in the U.S., versus only one in tennis.

Golf courses can look radically different, especially the British Open courses, which are always played over gnarly-looking sand dunes next to the windy sea, versus The Masters' Augusta National, which is the prototype of the glossy inland course with trees and water hazards. Tennis courts are always identical in size, differing only in surface. Yet, at this point in history, golfers might be better at adapting to wildly different courses than tennis players are to different  surfaces.

Before the introduction of jetliners at the end of the 1950s, it wasn't all that common for golfers and tennis players to think of making it to all four events. Top golfers crossed the Atlantic on ocean liners in the 1920s, but the British Open withered in the 1930s through the 1950s due to Depression, war, and austerity. Arnold Palmer's decision to jet in for the British Open in 1960 revitalized that event.

46 comments:

  1. I like Federer. Hate Nadal and those stupid shorts (pants?) he wears.

    I watched the Wimbledon final live on TV back in 2008 between them that lasted almost 5 hours - was around 4 hours 48 minutes to be exact. Fantastic match. One of the best in history.

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  2. I hate grunters. I automatically root against whoever is grunting in a tennis match. Ruins the game.

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  3. Grunting and the Williams sisters have ruined women's tennis.

    Nadal is annoying but men's tennis is still in good hands with the likes of Roger Federer, a real class act, consummate professional, true champion, still around.

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  4. I basically agree with all this. With tennis especially though, some of these names should be removed from that list. William Renshaw for example only had to play one match to win six of his titles, and the competition in 1882 England. This might apply to some of the golfers too but my impression is less so.

    Also, the added pace and spin in tennis now has accentuated the difference between the surfaces (one reason they're trying to slow the Wimbledon grass down), so it was easier to win all 4 in a row in 1969 than now. An example of this is that women have had an easier time of contending for all 4 recently.

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  5. Measuring a player's performance by the number of Majors won has only made sense in tennis since the late 80s ( when the Australian Open decided to be big and all top players entered ) and in golf since the ( ? ) 70s ( when the top players from both the US Tour and the European Tour started playing all 4 " majors " )

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  6. @Stuart before Flushing Meadows was the US Open like the French on clay?

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  7. gary player always counts himself as winning all sorts of weird majors.

    Also Steve, I liked to see gca.com linked to in your Masters piece in takis. Why dont you post there anymore? I do.

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  8. Steve said:

    "most people would agree that Tiger Woods (14 majors) is a better golfer than Pete Sampras (14, too) is a tennis player. "

    Spoken like a golf fan. Sampras was widely considered the greatest of all time ("GOAT") before Federer came along. The former doesn't become a worse tennis player by dint of getting now outranked by the latter.

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  9. Being a young teenager and watching tennis sporadically it was like anyone good in men's tennis came from USA(Sampras, Agassi, Chang - what diversity! as in hair, no hair, no facial hair, what were you thinking?) while anything good in womens' tennis came from Russia(Miss Kournikova and then MaSha).
    Steroids were simply off the radar, Federer was the new and improved version of Sampras, and Nadal was simply someone who played differently, and moreso when it came to clay. Add being a southpaw and the penchant to win out 5-setters, and Federer's improvement on Sampras on clay didn't mean much.

    If you'd shown me that Chris Evert pic from the olden years, anorexia would've been my first thought, and that women were kept down by 'societal expectations' about not looking men and consequently not lifting heavy like them.
    Younger fans would even accuse you of sexism if you thought that it's worse(and not as bad) that female players take steroids a la men, and might even argue that men shouldn't have a monopoly on testosterone poisoning and women be allowed to look like whatever kind of monsters they want while only being described by the adjective 'beautiful'.

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  10. Keep in mind that Bjorn Borg could also have been part of the conversation if he hadn't retired at 26. Though I still think Federer is probably the superior player, comparing the wooden racquet era to today is problematic.

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  11. Steve Sailer, I am tired of you bringing up Federer's lack of muscularity as a proof that eveeryone else is using steroids. I am going to make this short and sweet:

    Tennis is not a sport that requires strength. It has been proen by physiologists that the strength of a muscle is proportional to the cross-sectional area of muscle of the muscle. The reason for this is that the individual contractile unit of the muscle, the sarcomere, does not become stronger. Hence, the only way for a muscle to increase it's strength is by it to grow in volume.

    Tennis does not make any significant demand for the muscles to hypetrophy to any significant degree. It requires some degree of muscular explosiveness, which does not require great adapatability towards size. Besides, tennis requires endurance and coordination, which have nothing to do with muscularity.

    In conclusion: the fact that Federer's muscles are not very impressive means nothing. Any drug-free guy who works with progressively heavier weights for 6 months will have bigger muscles than a tennis player. As for Serena Williams, she is black, and black people have less bodyfat than white people, especially on their limbs. So the fact that her arms LOOKS more muscular than Federer means nothing.

    You should stop posting on things you do not understand and make a fool of yourself.

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  12. semi-related
    Why do many US universities have foreign tennis players?
    If you carefully check their personal data, there are oddities. Missing birthdays. Missing years between graduating high school and starting college.
    I suspect many played full-time, semi-pro, etc. between HS and college.

    Google your favorite uni along with "tennis roster" to see countless examples.
    Liberty's men's team has 5 of 8 foreign.
    Tulane 6 of 10.
    UNC Chapel Hill 3 of 12.
    VA Tech 5 of 7.
    U of Georgia 4 of 10.
    U of Florida 3 of 7.
    U of S Cali 6 of 10.
    U Cal Berkeley 7 of 11.

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  13. The reason better players win out in tennis is because it is match play tournaments rather than golf, where everyone competes against everyone else at once, and only one random guy needs to have a great four days.

    If golf majors were match play, Tiger would have WAY more majors. He used to dominate match play.

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  14. Oh my God! Please give us a break about golf. If there is a more boring sport that involves actually moving I have no idea what it is.

    It's like hockey without the fights to keep it interesting. Visually, golf is worse than chess, at least you can see the chess pieces. Whereas until recently any golf balls on the tv screen were invisible from the moment the guy smacked them with his stick until some shlub either zoomed in on the green or some other schmuck chased the ball into the rough.

    Now sometimes you can see the ball between the hit and the landing on an HD tv. Which just makes it clear how really truly boring it is. Of course, the commentators are better than most other tv yakkers but that's a small consolation. I can always mute the talking heads on an NFL or NBA game.

    Nope, don't care that golf has sportsmanship mostly lost in other sports and that it does take some skill and discipline so does meditation or yoga. I don't want to watch someone doing it and I sure as hell don't want to compare the 'greats' of yoga with today's modern players.

    Racial make up of golfers and caddies? Couldn't care less. We screwed up allowing society to say that some honest work was dishonorable or too menial for some people fifty years ago. We're reaping the fruits of that and will continue to do so for decades maybe forever.

    Movies about golf? I honestly thought I was in hell when I watched 'Bagger Vance'. Several men in the room with me agreed. I actually did enjoy watching Bob Barker beat the hell out of Adam Sandler but that movie was about golf the same way 'Hook' was about pirates.

    Please, we know you like golf and if it illuminates something about HBD fine. But if it is just 'inside baseball' or telling me how the course at 'Old Stinky' is old fashioned, then please rethink the post.

    Okay, rant off. I must need to take my pamprin today.

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  15. Since when did this blog become Golf Digest?

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  16. To anonymous at 8/29/12 9:02 AM who said, "You should stop posting on things you do not understand and make a fool of yourself."

    Pro athletes use steroids and PEDs. No woman looks like Serena without steroids unless she has severe hormonal issues.

    If the 'roids didn't work tennis players wouldn't take them and they wouldn't need to test for it. By your argument most baseball players wouldn't benefit from PEDs or 'roids. I think you might want to rethink your position on that.

    If Serena wasn't using steroids she wouldn't run from testers except when she's prepared for a test before hand.

    Besides, who are you going to believe, your biased preconceptions or your lying eyes?

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  17. Steve:

    If you haven't seen it, the following link touches on some of your themes:

    http://nplusonemag.com/wimbledon-diary

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  18. As for Serena Williams, she is black, and black people have less bodyfat than white people, especially on their limbs.


    I see this idiotic claim made all the time in HBD-land but I've never seen a shred of evidence to back it up.

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  19. Anon 9:02 wrote:

    " As for Serena Williams, she is black, and black people have less bodyfat than white people, especially on their limbs. So the fact that her arms LOOKS more muscular than Federer means nothing."

    Er black women are not more muscular than white men!

    " You should stop posting on things you do not understand and make a fool of yourself."

    Quite.

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  20. sampras was definitely better at tennis than woods is at golf, unless you're an american getting brainwashed by ESPN for 10 years, otherwise i generally agree with steve's analysis.

    tennis is the bigger game with a better field of players and vastly superior athletes. lots of poor athletes play tennis and are in the mix as contenders for majors. each ATP major is held in a different country, and on 3 continents total.

    but because being athletic is far more important, the alpha males can win more reliably in one on one combat against their opponents. they will decline faster though. hey, it's one on one combat. once you get to 35, the young bucks will take you out. it's not a team sport where you can still contribute to a team effort while 10 other, younger players on your team are picking up the slack for you a dozen times a game.

    by contrast the PGA is almost like the NFL. it's not exactly that provincial but almost all of it happens in the US, and the poor people of the world cannot play enough golf to get into the mix of competitive golf. the talent pool is way smaller. as i've said before, while competitive golf is not bad, it's not nearly as good as it could be if a lot of guys around the world were playing. as it is today it's not much different than the NHL in 1980 or so.

    by the nature of the sport in isolation though, steve is correct, it's harder to win. golfing is like batting in baseball. it's a numbers game. most of the time you lose, sometimes you win. it's definitely not the case that the better you are, the more you win. it's more like the case that the better you are, the less you lose. as it is with hitting pitches with a baseball bat. a guy who loses 60% of the time would be considered the best hitter ever. he'd be batting .400, which never happens now.

    there's other things to consider, like, a PGA major is 4 rounds of 18 hole golf over 4 days, which is a lot, but not as grueling as 7 matches of ATP play over 14 days. the games last from 2 to 4 hours and they're draining and you only get 1 day to recover on average.

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  21. i also agree with steve about sports from 50 years ago or so not counting, or perhaps more accurately, a lot of that stuff should be devalued at minimum.

    for example woods is of course the best golfer ever technically speaking, he doesn't really have to win as many major as nicklaus. the competition was weaker and the courses were easier when nicklaus played. it was simply easier to win. we know for a fact that the courses have been made harder over time, objectively longer and subjectively tougher, and we know for a fact that there are more players now.

    this is a trend in all sports. it gets harder to win as time goes on and the participation rate increases. some of the old records will never be touched. no MLB pitcher will ever win 500 games again and no NBA player will ever score 100 points in one game again.

    for track & field and swimming, i use 1972 at the beginning of the modern era, but older results are still informative.

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  22. Is it possible you underrate Sampras because he's a hairy Greek guy? He was really good.

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  23. "Why do many US universities have foreign tennis players?"

    foreigners using NCAA programs to train. or is it the other way around. NCAA programs using foreigners to try to win.

    either way, it's a situation, and not just in tennis. track & field, swimming & diving, and to a lesser extent, wrestling and golf, are having the same, er, "problem", as NCAA tennis. i guess it depends on who you are as to whether you see it as a problem.

    this is where i think MLS really screwed up. it should have been a soccer league mainly for americans. this builds interest in the sport and develops your native players. instead it's a minor league mercenary league, filled with dozens of random players nobody cares about in their own countries, let alone the US.

    the NHL took a moderate popularity hit after the cold war ended and lots of players from eastern europe were allowed to become professionals. they filled half the NHL rosters in 5 years and nobody knew who the heck anybody was anymore. the league has recovered from this though and american and canadian viewers are now more familiar with the major eastern euorpean players who stick around for 10 year careers. they become identifiable. with MLS it's some third worlder who isn't very good and he's there for 2 years and then he's gone, replaced by another random third worlder for a season or two.

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  24. most people would agree that Tiger Woods (14 majors) is a better golfer than Pete Sampras (14, too) is a tennis player.
    I wouldn´t be so sure. Sampras ranks up there with the top all time greats. And so does Woods. I always found Sampras more impressive than Federer, for some reason.

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  25. another hilarious pic from that site:

    is it photoshopped?

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  26. "European sprint king thinner than Sweden's fastest woman

    BARCELONA. EM's sprint king Christophe Lemaitre is weaker than Swedish sprint girl Lena Berntsson.

    - I have heard from a French coach, I know that he takes 45 kg in snatch. It's almost ridiculous, "said Swedish sprint coach Hakan Andersson.

    Lena Berntsson taking 72 kg - Swedish record in 53-kg class for women.

    Lena Berntsson's individual EM-off ended with a last place in the first trial heat in the 100 meters with the time 11.84.

    Christophe Lemaitre won his second European Championship gold medal when he won the 200 meters yesterday. But he is still weaker than Lena Berntsson in moments of strength and pressure deep benböj. "

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  27. "but because being athletic is far more important, the alpha males can win more reliably in one on one combat against their opponents. they will decline faster though. hey, it's one on one combat. once you get to 35, the young bucks will take you out."

    Tennis isn't "one on one combat". It's live-action Pong, and it's actually less forgiving of age than a one-on-one combat sport such as boxing. The WBC heavy weight champion of the world is Vitaly Klitschko, who is 41.

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  28. Another reason it's been easier for the best tennis players to win Grand Slam events is they can control, to some degree, what their opponent is doing. If another golfer is having an incredibly hot putting week (a primary determinant of who wins majors in golf), you can't block his putts as they're rolling to prevent him making them. Heck, most of the time the two leaders aren't even playing in the same group. But if some tennis player is bludgeoning opponents with his forehand, the champion has a chance to thwart him with such tactics as picking mercilessly on his backhand, or mixing up the spins or just playing great defense. The head to head competition definitely helps the best player.
    Different courses also play a role. For instance, Tiger has never been all that good on the classic US Open type courses or the links courses in the UK (with the exception of St Andrews). Tiger has only won one US Open on the classic style course, that being at Bethpage in 2002 when the course was playing so long that he was the only guy who could shoot under par. The other two Opens were won on California courses that did not fit the mold of classic courses that the "Golden Age" produced.

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  29. Its much easier to win a tennis major than a golf major. The tennis surfaces are slightly different but otherwise every tennis court is like every other tennis court.

    OTOH, Augusta isn't anything like St. Andrews on a windy and rainy day. Plus a good A golfer can get "hot" and beat an A+ golfer by a couple stokes.

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  30. And Hogan's "Majors" understate his accomplishment. Because of WWII and the low prize money he only played in one British Open. He stopped playing in the PGA after 1949 because of injury. And he missed 10 US Opens/Masters Tournaments because of WWII and a car crash. Even with all that he almost won the US open in 1955 at age 43 and in 1960 at age 47.
    He was the best golfer in the world for about 10 years.

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  31. The Brits say "different as chalk and cheese," amusingly. And perhaps more aptly.

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  32. Comparing apples and oranges makes sense. They are objects that are deceptively similar but not the same. You'd never mistake an apple for an orange in a blindfold test, but they are roughly the same size.

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  33. I always found Sampras more impressive than Federer, for some reason.

    Sampras would not have been anywhere near as successful had he reached his peak in the Federer era as the courts are much slower now. In the 90s players with a big serve and little else could win major tournaments due to the speed of the courts. Some of today's hard courts are only slightly faster than the red clay of Paris. Sampras never won the French.

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  34. Hogan couldn't putt well, so his supremacy as a ball-striker must have been unworldly.

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  35. Another factor that makes tennis relatively easier to win is the winner only faces seven opponents in a grand-slam event. What happens in the other matches is irrelevant; as long as you beat the 7 you're up against, you win the title. In golf, you're competing against the entire field.

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  36. The US Open in golf doesn't really produce the best list of champions, at least not since Hogan's day. The US Open has been moving somewhat away from its traditional way of setting up courses.

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  37. This is a preposterous comparison. Even with all of Steve's qualifiers, it's laughably bad. Aside from the obvious fact that they are different sports, in Tennis, competitors directly affect the play of the other, whereas in Golf, every golfer plays against the entire field. A better example would be match-play, yet that would not capture the full difference either as a golfer's actions still have no physical effect on his competitor. This is why I absolutely cringe when people with low-level mathematical backgrounds (calc/stats) attempt to use math to make ridiculous inferences. I also refer to Steve's post on the correlation between gold medals and quality of life as a preposterous stretch. This kind of lazy nonsense is only step higher than Gladwell's mathematical effluvia. "Igon values", Steve, "Igon values".

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  38. the Golf US open is the most difficult of the Majors to win. The reason is there's little margin for error. If you're not at the top of your game, or make a few errors, you won't win.

    The penalization of mistakes often means a brilliant golfer like Tom Watson would often lose to someone like Hale Irwin. The Open an the Masters, OTOH, allow for a few wild drives and less than perfect approach shots.

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  39. Yes, but somebody has to win the U.S. Open. The fact that it is often won by lesser golfers while the Masters tends to be won by superstars seems like it speaks to the superiority of the Masters.

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  40. Getting back to Hogan. From 1946 to 1955, ten years, Hogan played in 22 Majors and won 7 of them. He came in 2nd (including a playoff loss to jack fleck at age 43) 4 times. In 21 of the 22 Majors he finished in the Top 10.

    Hogan was 34 in 1946 and 43 in 1955. By comparison Watson and Palmer didn't win a major after age 36.

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  41. Jack Nicklaus has stated he treasures his US Open wins the most because its the "hardest" major to win. He thought the Masters the "easiest" Major because (1) it has the weakest field (2) his game was suited to the course and (3) experience gave him an edge over the younger players.

    Snead could never win a US open. Watson only won one but came close several times. Trevino never won a Masters.

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  42. Correction: Hogan won *9* out of 22 Majors from 1946 to 1955.

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  43. The Scots were awe-struck the one time Hogan came over for the British Open. Scottish golf fans are definite contenders for being the best fans in the world, up there with La Scala opera fans and maybe some bullfighting fans.

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  44. who as of August 2012 is ranked World No.1 by the ATP. All the carrer is berst in tens history.Many famous player in all over the world but Roger is the best all vergion of game .He wins 17 time grand slam title.

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