Tiger Stalking at the Masters - Day 2

I only read the Slate article and not the whole study, but I think that the conclusion is bogus. Golf is a huge mental game, and Tiger’s excellence screws with his competitors ability to do what they want mentally.

I doubt that people work less hard at winning in golf when Tiger is around. In fact, they want to work harder, and do more, so that they can say they beat Tiger.

The reason their scores go up, in my mind, is because they are going head-to-head with the greatest and they try to do too much. This can be in the approach stage where they decide to take a risk they wouldn’t have, resulting in a higher likelihood of error, or they simply overswing trying to give 110%.

Combine this with simple intimidation forcing you into mistakes, and Tiger has a big advantage.

Those that are finishing 35th and 36th aren’t affected because they simply aren’t competing with the leaders. They aren’t overswinging and aren’t intimidated. The leaders are a non-factor to them.

Tiger had better quit stalking and start scoring today, or he’s going to be too far behind to contend. Plus, he’s never been much of a come-from-behind player on the weekends.

Immelman just finished his second straight 68 round, meaning Tiger begins today 8 strokes off the clubhouse lead. He may already be done.

I also want to know how they adjusted for the fact that Woods will frequently skip lesser tournaments. The tournaments that usually have much lower scoring totals than the ones Woods saves himself for.

Woods doesn’t really play, for example, the US Bank Championship. Joe freakin’ Ogilvie won that with a -14 total last year. He didn’t play Colonial where the top 10 all finished -10 or better. But he’ll obviously play every major where the scores will be higher on average.

Huck, I may have misunderstood the paper, but I think she took Tiger’s schedule into account for this study.

“4.3.2 Tiger-Played Tournaments:

Results in Table 4 suggest an adverse superstar effect, but one might ask: Is the estimated superstar effect simply capturing unobserved heterogeneity in the tournaments that Woods enters and those that he avoids?

Does Woods, who typically plays less than 20 of the 45 PGA events each year, select only courses that are more challenging for average professional golfers?

To compare golfers performances on the same course with and without the superstar, I narrow the sample to golf courses on which Woods has sometimes competed. Because this
smaller dataset is robust to bias caused by Woods’s selection criteria, I primarily use this subsample in the remainder of my analysis.

Smaller, lower-scoring tournaments in which non-exempt players excel and Woods never participates are excluded from the subsample.

When all tournaments are examined, non-exempt players average 0.85 strokes over par and 2.68 strokes under par when Woods does and does not participate, respectively. Regressions in Table 4 capture this statistically significant difference between non-exempt players scores with and without the superstar, while controlling for other factors.

When the lower-scoring events are excluded from the sample, the difference between non-exempt players’ average scores disappears on these “Tiger-played” courses, non-exempt
players average 1.68 and 1.72 strokes under par with and without Woods, respectively.

Small,low-scoring tournaments exaggerate the superstar effect for non-exempt players in Table 4. Thus, when I correct for this bias in Table 5, the superstar effect for non-exempt players becomes indistinguishable from zero. This change is not surprising in that lower-skilled players are likely not in real competition with top golfers, and the marginal value of improved play is small for players lower in the prize distribution."

Tiger probably needs to shoot 68 or better today to have a realistic shot at winning, given who is ahead of him and where they stand. And a 68 would likely only give him an outside shot at it, given that it wouldn’t get him into the final pairing on Sunday, which has produced the tournament winner in all but one year in this decade. He’d probably need to post 65 today to do that, and that’s if Immelman and some of the others do come back to the field, which is likely, though not certain. The last time Tiger broke 70 at Augusta was 2005. He’s played 11 straight rounds there without doing so since.

For whatever reason, and really, it’s pretty inexplicable to me, Tiger just doesn’t do comebacks on Sunday in the majors. If he can’t get himself into at least the top 5 today, history indicates his quest for a calendar year grand slam will have to wait another year.