“Make no mistake: Tiger is different from the rest. I suspect that he sees colors the rest of us don’t know about, that he senses patterns of heat in the grass, electromagnetism in the earth at his feet. The guy bends the world to his will. This makes him feel alien and repellent to the rest of us.”
This entire gush over Tiger and his return poses an interesting question. How does Tiger actually affect the playing field? Does he bring out the best in his opponents by lowering all scores? I sorted through 4 years of playing data for the Deutsche Bank Championship and the Bridgestone Invitational – two respected tournaments that Tiger always plays in but missed in 2008. Unfortunately, the rotation of courses for the PGA, British, and US Open Tournaments coupled with Tiger’s courageous playing of the Masters limited the dataset.
Testing the hypotheses:
Null: Tiger does not affect players’ scores (Tiger – No Tiger = 0).
Alternative: Tiger does affect players’ scores (Tiger – No Tiger ≠ 0).
Performing a two-sided t-test on vectors of scores with and without Tiger, I received a p-value of 1.87196E-05, or essentially 0. This means that if the two sets of scores were from the same population, we would receive the actual differences observed almost 0% of the time. This rejects the null hypothesis and accepts the alternative that Tiger does affect players’ scores. I’m oversimplifying, but the results stand.
Most interesting however is how Tiger affects players’ scores. In fact, the presence of Tiger increased the average score by 4.03 strokes and 4.40 strokes for the Bridgestone Invitational and the Deutsche Bank Championship respectively. This goes against the grain that Tiger brings out the best in his opponents and makes competition more intense. The increased scores with Tiger could be that opponents essentially fear him; they believe that they can’t win and give up competing for first place.
Esquire was spot-on when it says,
“His will — his rage — to win is ice, shining even in his smile; other golfers avert their eyes in his presence and see their careful games laid waste.” Or as a stronger example, another writer continues, “There’s no joy in documenting the price of perfect. There’s no joy for me in anything Tiger Woods does. [When Tiger was out], I watched actual humans play golf, and I felt more human for it.”
Critics state that the claim that Tiger makes golf better is merely perception – and by the numbers, they may be right. However, the more likely answer is that there just isn’t enough skill out there to compete with perfection.
