BY BILL FIELDS

ILLUSTRATION BY CARL WIENS

ThePredictionsIssue

ToughCall

Golf, the

40 JANUARY 14, 2013 ❮ GOLFWORLD.COM

G olf is hard to play and even harder, at the elite level, to predict.

It is a sport full of variables and intangibles, from venue and weather to the vagaries of the human mind

and body—“You just don’t feel the same way every day,” says Hall of Famer Lee Trevino—in which peak performance even for the best of the best is rare.

“I felt when I played some of my absolute best golf, if I went out and hit four or five shots—a handful—that I felt were really special, that was good,” says three-time U.S. Open champion and 45-time Champions Tour winner Hale Irwin. “The best rounds of golf are ones where the perfect golf shot was rarely played, but a lot of really good ones were. It’s a game where you manage your misses.”

We begin our Predictions Issue with this acknowledgment:

Figuring out who is likely to win a tournament is a real crapshoot.

Here’s why

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Notwithstanding a scattering of monster seasons by a small cadre of superstars (Bobby Jones, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods), the norm is not winning.

“The Kentucky, Duke or North Carolina basketball teams, or the three best teams in the NBA, three-quarters of the time they play teams they can play way below their ability level and still win the game,” says veteran sport psychologist Bob Rotella. “You get a lot of wins during the year, building up a lot of confidence. Where in golf, if you win 5 percent of the time, you’re incredible. You almost have to redefine winning as being able to walk off the course and say you played the way you’re capable of playing.”

The norm is accepting, as two-time Masters champion Bernhard Langer says, that “the margin of error is so small,” and that part of the competitive equation is always out of a golfer’s control regardless of a sound swing and good attitude.

“At the British Open,” says Tre-vino, “you tee off at 7 o’clock in the morning and it’s blowing like heck and raining, and a guy tees off at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and the wind’s down and the sun’s out. You can’t compete with a guy like that.”

Even under equitable condi-tions, golfers have to initiate the action, the game absent the reaction element of many sports. “You throw a ball, I catch it,” says Irwin, a star football player at Colorado before becoming a tour pro. “There is none of that in golf. We react to passive things—the direction of the wind, the lie of the ball, the grain in the green. That creates a lot of anxiety and vari-ables between the ears.”

Modern analysis such as the PGA Tour’s advanced strokes gained/putting statistic goes a long way toward explaining how the game is played—to a point. “The prob-lem is, it kind of has the assumption that all seven-foot putts are alike,” Rotella says. “A golfer will finish a round and talk about all the big, breaking sidehill putts he had while someone in his group had nice uphill looks all day. And if you’re in contention, versus somebody who is play-ing at 7 o’clock in the morning on Saturday and Sunday, I don’t think psychologically and emotionally that’s equal.”

As Michael J. Mauboussin, an investment strategist who has taught at the Columbia Graduate School of Business since 1993, writes in his 2012 book The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports and

Investing, the more chances a person has to display his skill, the less luck will play a factor. For instance, in com-paring team sports, basketball involves more skill than lacrosse because a team has more possessions in basket-ball. “That means luck plays a smaller role in basketball and skill exerts a greater influence,” Mauboussin writes.

The same theory translates to individual sports such as tennis and golf. In a five-set tennis match, Mauboussin notes, more than 500 points may be contested, providing a greater opportunity for skill to shine through. A round of golf consists of a much smaller sample through which

to measure skill.“For 18 holes of golf, scores are

roughly 71, plus or minus five,” says Mark Broadie, the Colum-bia Business School professor who helped develop the strokes gained/putting barometer. “There are many more points played in tennis. One way you can see whether a sport has a lot of luck involved is whether you can predict the winner. The more luck there is, the harder it is to forecast the future.”

During the last 10 years (2003-12) of men’s tennis Grand Slam events and golf major champion-ships, for example, 10 players won the 40 marquee tennis tourna-ments, while almost three times as many golfers, 28, captured the 40 elite golf competitions.

Beyond the inherent differences between golf and other endeavors that make it difficult to forecast (a 1 percent error rate over 72 holes could be three strokes, a huge figure on a leader board, says PGA Tour senior vice president of informations systems Steve Evans), its recent evolution in training and agronomy and a broadening global profile add to the challenge.

There are more players lurking with the talent to pull off a victory if things go their way at a given tournament. “Go back 60 years and look at the significance we gave to how hard Ben Hogan practiced,” says Rotella. “Today, thousands of guys practice that much. The 100th guy on the PGA Tour is unbelievably good. Players are not only talented but dedicated and committed.”

And, in Mauboussin’s analysis of the skill-luck con-tinuum, “as skill improves, performance becomes more consistent, and therefore luck becomes more important.”

In winning a tournament, says Rotella, “you hole shots from off the green, you hit the wrong club, mis-hit it and end up a foot from the hole, or you hit it into the woods and it kicks onto the green and you turn a double into a

42 JANUARY 14, 2013 ❮ GOLFWORLD.COM

ThePredictionsIssue

“Look at the significance

we gave to how hard Ben Hogan

practiced. Today,

thousands of guys practice

that much.” —Bob Rotella

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; DOM FURORE

birdie. You make a couple of 90-footers. On the weeks you win, you do a lot of really good things, have some good breaks and somebody else in contention gets a bad break or messes up.”

Broadie and Richard J. Rendleman, a Dartmouth and North Carolina professor, broke down ShotLink data from 2003-11 (nine million shots, excluding majors, which don’t utilize ShotLink) in a study to attempt to quantify “Winning and Luck on the PGA Tour.” The data doesn’t pinpoint whose ball hit a tree and bounced out of bounds or skipped through a water hazard and got on the green, but does note who made a hole-in-one,

sank more long putts than the norm or holed out or stiffed unlikely shots from the fairway—strokes that constitute “great” shots that excessively separate a golfer from the field.

The educators found that winners are “lucky,” or to use Rendleman’s descrip-

tion, they enjoy more “favorable variation” en route to vic-tory. Winners, the study concludes, “experience favorable scoring outcomes,” with 3.1 strokes gained per round over their normal performance.

“If you have a field of 150 or so players, very nearly equally skilled players, then the winner is whoever is lucky that week,” Broadie contends. During Rocco Mediate’s 2010 Frys.com victory—he holed out a shot of 110 yards or longer in each round—Mediate averaged 2.4 “excess great shot strokes gained” per round, ranked second only to Rory Sabbatini’s 2.6 daily average in winning the 2007 Colonial in the measured nine-year window.

It may be a hoary cliché for a golfer to talk about want-ing to get in position to have a chance in the final round, but that is all he can do. “You try to get guys playing great,” says Rotella. “Guys who get in contention the most, win the most. But you don’t have as much control over winning as people think.”

And even less, it is clear, about forecasting who those winners may be. n

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Trevino (above, at the 1972 British Open) and Rotella (left, with Ernie Els at the 2006 British Open) know all about golf’s vagaries.