Analyzing data from round-by-round scores from all PGA tournaments between 2002 and 2006 (over 20,000 player-rounds of golf), Brown finds that competitors fare less well—about an extra stroke per tournament—when Tiger is playing. How can we be sure this is because of Tiger? A few features of the findings lend them plausibility. The effect is stronger for the better, “exempt” players than for the nonexempt players, who have almost no chance of beating Tiger anyway. (Tiger’s presence doesn’t mean much to you if the best you can reasonably expect to finish is about 35th—there’s not much difference between the prize for 35th and 36th place.) The effect is also stronger during Tiger’s hot streaks, when his competitors’ prospects are more clearly dimmed. When Tiger is on, his competitors’ scores were elevated by nearly two strokes when he entered a tournament. And the converse is also true: During Tiger’s well-publicized slump of 2003 and 2004, when he went winless in major events, exempt competitors’ scores were unaffected by Tiger’s presence.
The argument is that the other players sense they are playing for second place and so their incentive is less. I don’t believe professional athletes play only for money, but the numbers are convincing.
Woods is 12 under, leading by four strokes after two days in his first tournament of 2008.
How, if at all, did they control for the fact that Tiger tends to play the more difficult tournaments.
Maybe the other players should take him in the back alley and… oops, can’t say that, now can I. Unless of course, I’m on the radio or TV.
Good question Ken. I’ve sent it along to the author of the study at Berkeley. Perhaps she’ll respond.
I don’t know that Tiger necessarily plays the more difficult tournaments. For example, he always plays in the Buick, the AT&T Classic, the Target Challenge, and the Masters. Winning totals in those tournaments can get pretty low. He definitely tends to play only the bigger tournaments, or the ones that matter to him, but I don’t know that they are necessarily the hardest ones.
Either way, the study should definitely have controlled for that, good point.
There is certainly tons of anectodal evidence that Tiger makes others play worse. Take today, for example. Tiger entered the second day of the Buick at -6, the same score as Rory Sabbatini. The two have a feud going on between them, to the point where they don’t even acknowledge each other when they pass in the locker room. (This was exacerbated recently when Sabbatini dropped out of Tiger’s charity tournament because he was playing poorly, and didn’t even tell anyone he was leaving. They literally found his courtesy car parked at the airport.)
Anyway, they were both at -6 after yesterday, and the golf commentators were all atwitter about how it would go if the two had to play together on Saturday or Sunday.
Tiger shot 10 (ten) shots better than Sabbatini today. Just a little knife in the ribs.
I would think it’s possible that players know they need to play better to be in position to beat Tiger so they take more risks and end up with slightly higher scores.