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Tiger Woods Will Never Be the Greatest Player Ever

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It looks like Tiger Woods will not be playing in the Masters this year. Even if he does manage to find the fortitude to show up at Augusta, by all reports, his game is nowhere near tournament shape. If he doesn’t tee it up at Augusta, this marks the second consecutive Masters and the fifth straight major overall he will have missed.

After withdrawing from the Dubai Desert Classic earlier this year, which happened after he missed the cut at the Farmer’s Insurance Open, Woods has had to withdraw from three events, including the first playing of the Arnold Palmer Invitational since Palmer’s death, a tournament Woods has won five times.

 

Woods’ precipitous fall is all the more shocking for how quickly and thoroughly he came to dominate the world of golf.

From the end of 1999 until 2008, Woods won 13 of his 14 titles, and is 14-1 when he holds any part of the lead going into Sunday play at a major.

He is currently second all-time with 79 PGA Tour wins, second in major championships, and holds the records for most weeks spent as the best player on earth and most consecutive weeks with that title.

So, why can we not call him the best player ever? There are a number of reasons.

Longevity

No one can make a case that Woods wasn’t dominant. He absolutely was. It would be an interesting thought experiment to try to figure out who was better in their prime: Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus. When they were at the tops of their games, either one was capable of truly magical things on a golf course.

However, Tiger was great for a much shorter time than Jack Nicklaus. Tiger won all his majors in the very narrow window (at least, in golf terms) of 1997 to the first half of 2008, or a little over 11 years. If you exclude his monumental victory at the 1997 Masters, Tiger won all his majors between the ages of 23 and 32.

Compare that to Jack Nicklaus who won his first major in 1962 and his last in 1986. Jack won majors over the span of 24 years, as young as 22 and as old as 46.

 

Granted, Woods is only 41 right now and theoretically could win more majors, but that seems unlikely. And yes, he did win a major at a younger age (21), but his last major was when he was 32, or less than half the time Nicklaus spent winning majors.

Woods has lost most of the last nine years to a variety of injuries, but injuries are part of any sport. That’s why Cal Ripken is a household name to baseball fans.

Jack didn’t have any injuries that cost him the kind of time Woods has lost.

Advantage: Nicklaus

Equipment

There is no denying that Woods has benefitted from technology. There is simply no argument that better clubs, balls, training, and course maintenance have helped all modern players, but especially a guy who would have been better anyway, like Woods.

If you could have put the clubs and balls we have now into the hands of 30-year-old Jack Nicklaus can you imagine how dominant he would have been? He was already hitting the ball 300 yards with wooden clubs!

Can you make the same argument that Woods could have played the game at the same level on the shaggy greens and with the relatively low-tech equipment Jack had? There’s no way to know for sure, but you can clearly see what Jack did with the equipment he had at the time.

I have to think Jack would have benefitted with the equipment of today and Woods would have been less spectacular.

Advantage: Nicklaus

Competition

This is going to sound bad, and I mean no disrespect to the great players on Tour over the last 20 years, but can you honestly say the level of competition is the same over Woods’ career as it was over Jack’s?

Jack had to play against guys like Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Tom Watson, Lee Trevino. Seve Ballesteros, and Ray Floyd. Do you see what all those guys have in common? They have all won a lot of majors. None of the men I have just listed has won fewer than four major championships.

 

Contrast that to the players Woods has had to contend with: Phil Mickelson has five majors, Ernie Els has four, and Vijay Singh has three.

 

You could make an argument that there are more strong players on Tour now so anyone can win a major. While that may be true, my response is this: Would you rather play against a handful of guys who know what it takes to win majors because they have won a bunch of them, or a couple dozen who might be able to do once or twice and only if the conditions are right and they are at the very peaks of their games? Would you rather play against Watson, Floyd, and Trevino, or Els, Singh, and Mickelson?

Advantage: Nicklaus

Off the Course

When comparing athletes you hear the argument all the time that only their play should matter. In a perfect world, that is true. Only their play should matter, but we do not live in a perfect world. In this world, what you do off the field of play is shown on SportsCenter repeatedly and is broadcast over social media ad nauseam.

In a sport like golf, where the pros are independent contractors and therefore responsible for their own brand, poor behavior can only hurt them and the Tour. It will cost you money in terms of corporate sponsorships and outing fees. Yes, the commissioner of the Tour may have something to say if you are being a complete tool off the course, but for the most part, the PGA Tour is self-policing in that the pros know they have to accept the repercussions of any actions they may take off the course. They don’t have the benefit of a team to provide them shelter from the media, nor assistance or support.

As the saying goes, in golf, you don’t have to share the credit, but you can’t share the blame.

Unlike other sports, particular team sports, professional golf players make most of their money off the course through sponsorships. Case in point, Woods was, at one time, thought to be the first athlete to make a billion dollar in income. We all know what happened and why that is likely not going to happen.

 

I can think of no controversies concerning Jack Nicklaus. He has been a model example of a PGA Tour member both on and off the course. In more than 50 years in the public eye, he has not once been on the wrong side of anything even remotely controversial. He has had opinions on things like reducing the distance of modern golf balls, or the Casey Martin situation (in which Martin sued the PGA Tour for the right to ride a cart during tournaments due to a degenerative disease that made it painful and dangerous for him to walk), but that’s hardly strange. You would expect a high profile player like Nicklaus to have opinions on things concerning the game.

 

I won’t rehash the myriad of problems Woods has encountered since his ex-wife tried to brain him the day before Thanksgiving in 2009. Suffice it to say that Woods has had to make several apologies to family, friends, and fans of his and of the game.

Most Importantly…

You simply cannot be considered the best to ever play the game if you acknowledge you are chasing the guy who is generally considered to be that and you don’t break his most important record.

Woods was on his way to breaking Jack’s record of 18 professional major championships, but as so often happens, life intruded.

Woods currently sits at 14 pro majors. That is nothing to sneeze at. He is second behind Nicklaus, and has three more than that man in third, Walter Hagen. He doesn’t hold more of any one major than Jack, and has only tied Jack in the number of Open Championships they have won (three each.)

And then there is this: In the 69 majors he played and made the cut, Tiger Woods has finished second only six times, and in the top-5 32 times. He finished top-10 39 times in the 69 times he played in majors and made the cut. That’s an impressive 56.5% of the time he finished in the top-10 of majors in which he made the cut, but as you will see, that is just barely better than the man he was (is) chasing.

 

Jack Nicklaus, on the other hand, played and made the cut in 131 majors, and finished in the top-10 72 times (55.0%). This includes 19 2nd-place finishes and a stretch from the 1970 Open Championship through the 1978 Open when he finished out of the top-10 only twice. Nicklaus finished first or second 37 times, or nearly as many times as Woods finished in the top-10.

Nicklaus had a stretch in which he didn’t finish out of the top-10 at a major for more than three years! The longest such streak Woods can boast of is five tournaments in a row.

I will grant you that Woods did what no one, including Nicklaus, ever did when he won all four majors in a row beginning with the 2000 US Open, but that was during a three-year span when Woods was playing indescribably good golf. I won’t take that away from Woods, but I will say it is a microcosm of my first argument, that being Woods played exceptionally well, maybe better than anyone ever, but couldn’t sustain it. He was a sprinter to Nicklaus’s marathon runner.

What Does All this Mean?

Well, in order to be considered the best of all time, you have to have had a long enough career to have a comparable sample size to your peers and to the players throughout history. You have to have been dominant during a majority of that career. You have to have set records, and you have to have broken the records of the man you stated was the man to beat, especially the most important one. And you have to have done it all without drawing negative attention to yourself.

By those markers, Tiger Woods has to bow to Jack Nicklaus, who is still the best to ever play the game.


Cover Image via Flickr

I'm a reinstated amateur who took up the game at 19 while in the military, and attempted to play for a living for a year. I've play all over the world, and still play competitively. I currently teach Golf for Beginners at Anne Arundel Community College and have coached high school golf. I am a single father of two children, and I enjoy reading, writing, movies, and of course, sports.

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Tory Z
Tory Z
5 years ago

I really wish I could have watched Jack the way I’ve watched Tiger. Because of this, I can’t produce an honest argument on why Tiger is the better golfer. It’s simply impossible. But!…. Here’s what I can say. Tiger’s run from 97 to 08, throw in his good years after as well till ’13, he was more dominant than anyone to ever swing a golf club. To me subjectively, that makes him the greatest. Objectively tho, it’s not fair to prior generations of golf fans to say that. I’m 28 now and was a very talented golfer in my early… Read more »

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