Golf in the Rio Olympics

The Rio de Janeiro Olympics in August 2016 will feature golf for the first time since the early 20th Century. Professional golfers traditionally have not been enthusiastic about Olympic golf since the Olympics just gives you a shiny medal instead of what tour pros really like: one those four foot wide novelty checks with your name written in the "Pay to the Order of" space in Magic Marker 9 inches high.

A quarter of a century ago, there was big talk about holding an Olympic golf tournament at Augusta National during the 1996 Atlanta games, but the tour pros weren't interested and Augusta is closed in August, anyway, because -- although this seemed to come as a surprise to the International Olympic Committee -- it's hot and humid in Georgia in August.

But the golf industry wants to be in the Olympics now. And Brazil might conceivably be a good market someday for golf, since, unlike China, the country has a reasonable amount of land per person. But Brazil has almost zero golf tradition, so a new course is supposed to be built in Rio to host the men's and women's Olympic tournaments.

The Rio Olympic course is the the highest profile golf course commission of the decade. The surprise winner over Jack Nicklaus's and Greg Norman's firms was Gil Hanse, head of a tiny but excellent design firm, who promised to move to Rio for two years and drive the bulldozer himself.

The problem so far has been that exactly who owns the land where the golf course is supposed to go wasn't exactly nailed down. (Economist Hernando de Soto, who has frequently noted Latin America's less than clear-cut property rights, wouldn't be surprised.)

So far, Hanse has roughly shaped the golf course in the dirt, but he's visibly nervous in interviews about having the grass ready in 28 months.

Pete Dye's 1979 island green at TPC

Assuming it gets finished in time, the Olympic course will be a test of the mass appeal of trends in elite golf course design thought away from spectacular and expensive do-or-die holes and toward cheap, complex, and baffling, back to much like St. Andrews in Scotland, which more or less evolved over hundreds of years of play.

A couple of decades ago, Tom Doak pointed out that pros don't fear water hazards anymore, they only fear wind and gravity. In other words, they don't worry about being able to hit the ball far enough to cross a water hazard, they worry about being unable to stop the ball on the fairway or green. Hanse, along with Doak and the Ben Crenshaw-Bill Coore team are the leaders of this generation of architects who have thought hardest about reproducing the subtle challenges of St. Andrews in the 21st Century.

When asked which existing course his Rio course will most resemble, Hanse says, "I think Rustic Canyon (in Los Angeles) would be the closest. It’s set on a similarly sandy site, and, like Rustic, it feels very indigenous to the area."

Rustic Canyon: Now what?

I played Hanse's Rustic Canyon on Wednesday for $36. I don't play much golf these days, but when I do it's almost always at Rustic because the quality to price ratio is so much higher than anywhere else in the greater L.A. area. And now, after Rustic has been open for a dozen years, the grounds crew has the greens in close to US Open quality. (A British Open would be more than pleased with how Rustic's greens played yesterday.) I hit quite a few greens yesterday with my irons, but typically the ball would then slowly, slowly trickle off the green because I hadn't hit the perfect part of the green. And even if I could execute shots perfectly, are my 3-d cognitive skills strong enough to plan shots perfectly?

Yet, Rustic is not a punishing course. The fairways are immensely wide, there are no ponds, streams, or waterfalls. The chief penalty for hitting an indifferent shot is that your ball keeps rolling until it reaches a spot disadvantageous for your next shot. Your score keeps mounting without anything spectacularly bad happening to you.

In theory, Rustic Canyon style courses have a lot going for them: they can be built cheaply on unexciting terrain and they challenge good golfers while not beating up bad golfers. Thus, Rustic Canyon is held in the highest regard by golf course architecture aficionados. On the other hand, you can play Rustic Canyon for $36, so it's not as if it has overwhelmed the golfing public.

It will be interesting to see if Hanse's Olympic course televises well to an even less sophisticated audience.
   

Olde tymes at iSteve ...

Judging from today's Google searches, the whole world is suddenly interested in my 2001 UPI article on how the Nabisco ladies' golf tournament in Palm Springs functions as a national Lesbian Spring Break:

Lesbians Turn Out for Ladies Golf Championship
by Steve Sailer
March 26, 2001

 

The Spirit of the Age

Looking back over a long enough period of time, you can see how golf course architecture in America followed the same general stylistic evolutions as building architecture, enjoying a golden age in the 1920s and then enduring an eat-your-vegetables modernism in the 1950s and 1960s. It's not at all clear that Mies van der Rohe and Robert Trent Jones saw much connection between each other's work in 1950, but today it's obvious that the spirit of the age -- streamlining, simplicity, sleekness, and so forth -- pervaded the skyscrapers and golf courses of the Postwar Era.

But it's hard to tell what's going on in your own time. For example, prestige golf course architecture in the 21st Century is devoted to achieving a look of Old Money WASP Higher Scruffiness that's hard to equate with much else going on in the arts today, outside of the design of some recent college dormitories. (Golfers pay a lot of college tuition bills, so that may not be coincidental.) Above is the 16th hole designed by Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore at one of the first courses to debut in 2013, Streamsong-Red on an old phosphate strip mine in central Florida. 

Most golf course architects prefer to avoid discussing their style and instead talk about the functionality of their design (how it challenges the golfer, etc.). It could be that golf course architecture is evolving off in its own direction, divorced from the rest of the culture. Or, perhaps in a generation, we'll look at golf courses from the 2010s and be instantly reminded of, say, video games or hipster fashions or whatever from the 2010s because they all share common characteristics that will be glaringly obvious to people in 2043 even if they are baffling today.

A few months ago, I visited a half dozen of the newer golf courses in Palm Springs. It must be an uncomfortable time for golf course designers in Palm Springs because the current Mid-Atlantic steampunk (or whatever) look is so antithetical to the natural blank slate phoniness of Palm Springs. Southern California's low desert is a sprawling monument to post-War notions of design Modernism, now carefully tended to by a huge number of aging gay men formerly employed in Hollywood. It's about as far from the current aesthetic in golf design as is possible.

The most beautiful Palm Springs golf course was Desert Willow, a late 1990s design where Hurzdan and Fry went up into the mountains and brought down shrubs native to about 4,000 foot in elevation, then planted them alongside the fairways and watered the heck out of them to keep them alive in the low desert. (This is supposed to be "environmentalist.")

But, the most interesting development from an aesthetic standpoint was the newest, Escena, where Nicklaus, post-Crash, embraced the flatness and boringness of the desert in a tribute to Rat Pack-era modernism. (The steel and glass clubhouse appears to be a tribute to Frank Sinatra's house in Palm Springs.) I wouldn't be surprised that Nicklaus was originally intending to push around great piles of dirt, but then the developer suffered reverses in 2008, forcing a more modest, more old fashioned Modernist design philosophy.

Federer v. Nicklaus: Most tennis & golf Grand Slam championships

Enough election politics for now. Back to my August sports kick.

Roger Federer comes into the U.S. Open with a record 17 victories in tennis's four annual Grand Slam major championships (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open). The 31-year-old Swissman is trying to open up distance between himself and younger stars Rafael Nadal (11 majors) and Novak Djokovic (5). 

To my mind, however, the interesting angle is that he has a shot at tying Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 majors in the two big country club sports, tennis and golf. (Golf also has four Grand Slam events per year, the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA.) Tiger Woods has been chasing Nicklaus's mark his whole life, but Federer may beat him to it.

Combining the lists of top men's major champions of all time into an apples and oranges table gives a sense, that, yes, this isn't a completely apples and oranges compilation:

Jack Nicklaus	Golf	18
Roger Federer	Tennis	17
Pete Sampras	Tennis	14
Tiger Woods	Golf	14
Roy Emerson	Tennis	12
Björn Borg	Tennis	11
Rafael Nadal	Tennis	11
Rod Laver	Tennis	11
Walter Hagen	Golf	11
Bill Tilden	Tennis	10
Ben Hogan	Golf	9
Gary Player	Golf	9
Andre Agassi	Tennis	8
Fred Perry	Tennis	8
Ivan Lendl	Tennis	8
Jimmy Connors	Tennis	8
Ken Rosewall	Tennis	8
Tom Watson	Golf	8
Arnold Palmer	Golf	7
Bobby Jones	Golf	7
Gene Sarazen	Golf	7
Harry Vardon	Golf	7
Henri Cochet	Tennis	7
John McEnroe	Tennis	7
John Newcombe	Tennis	7
Mats Wilander	Tennis	7
René Lacoste	Tennis	7
Richard Sears	Tennis	7
Sam Snead	Golf	7
William Larned	Tennis	7
William Renshaw	Tennis	7
Boris Becker	Tennis	6
Don Budge	Tennis	6
Jack Crawford	Tennis	6
Laurence Doherty	Tennis	6
Lee Trevino	Golf	6
Nick Faldo	Golf	6
Stefan Edberg	Tennis	6
Tony Wilding	Tennis	6
Byron Nelson	Golf	5
Frank Sedgman	Tennis	5
James Braid	Golf	5
J.H. Taylor	Golf	5
Novak Djokovic	Tennis	5
Peter Thomson	Golf	5
Seve Ballesteros	Golf	5
Tony Trabert	Tennis	5
Golf >= 5	18
Tennis >=5	29

I'd say that this list suggests that it's a little bit easier to pile up a lot of Grand Slam titles in tennis than in golf, primarily because most people would agree that Tiger Woods (14 majors) is a better golfer than Pete Sampras (14, too) is a tennis player. 

In general, the all time great tennis players can win more often at the peak of their careers than the all time great golfers, because tennis is a less random, larger sample size sport. In any given major, the world's best tennis player is usually more likely to win than the world's best golfer. Tennis is kind of like tug-of-war, where the better team ought to win.

On the other hand, golf careers last much longer. Nicklaus won his first major at 22, his 16th and 17th majors at 40 and his 18th at 46 (the famous 1986 Masters). And one of these years somebody really old will win a golf major. Tom Watson missed winning the British Open at 59 in 2009 by inches. In 1974, Sam Snead finished third in the PGA, behind only Trevino and Nicklaus. 

In contrast, Federer is considered a miracle of rejuvenation to have won Wimbledon at 30. 

The age of first victory in a major is usually lower in tennis, supporting the common sense notion that tennis is a much tougher game physically, while golf may be somewhat tougher mentally.

Put it all together, and it seems pretty reasonable to note that Federer is challenging Nicklaus.

By the way, why are apples and oranges the canonical examples of things that shouldn't be compared? Relative to every other possible pair of things, they seem pretty similar to me.

Sports History Minutia (for sports data methodology aficionados only): It's hard comparing the number of major championships won by golfers and tennis players before 1968, when tennis opened up its Grand Slam events to professionals. Thus, the great Mexican-American tennis player Pancho Gonzales is credited with only two Grand Slam titles because he turned pro and spent about 15 years on the small pro tour. (He won 15 Pro Slam titles). Rod Laver would have 20 major championships, adding together amateur, pro, and open titles. On the other hand, that segregation of talent may overstate this era's combined talent. Before 1968, Laver was never playing against all the top players in the world all at once. Then, again, in 1969, he won all four Grand Slam in open competition, the last time a man has done that. Laver was really good.

Golf has a lesser problem in that it's not clear what to do with the British and U.S. Amateur titles. The term Grand Slam was invented in 1930 when Atlanta amateur golfer Bobby Jones won the U.S. and British Opens and the U.S. and British Amateurs. Golf historians usually credit him with 13 major championships instead of just the 7 he won in the Opens, as on this list. However, when Jones retired upon achieving his Grand Slam, the prestige of Amateur championships as they slowly turned into merely the premiere events for college golfers. Nicklaus, who idolized Jones, likes to count his two U.S. Amateur titles, giving him 20 major championships (and Woods 17, including his three U.S. Amateurs), but most people just count victories in the four majors currently open to professionals, a foursome stabilized by 1934. 

Two golfers have won three professional majors in one calendar year: Ben Hogan in 1953 and Tiger Woods in 2000. Woods winning four straight majors in 2000-2001 is clearly the greatest 12-month feat in golf history, although it still lacks an agreed-upon catchy title like Bobby Jones' Grand Slam. In contrast, tennis players have won three of the four grand slam titles in one calendar year 13 times, seven times since open competition began in 1968.

Americans possess an advantage in golf in that three of golf's majors are played in the U.S., versus only one in tennis.

Golf courses can look radically different, especially the British Open courses, which are always played over gnarly-looking sand dunes next to the windy sea, versus The Masters' Augusta National, which is the prototype of the glossy inland course with trees and water hazards. Tennis courts are always identical in size, differing only in surface. Yet, at this point in history, golfers might be better at adapting to wildly different courses than tennis players are to different  surfaces.

Before the introduction of jetliners at the end of the 1950s, it wasn't all that common for golfers and tennis players to think of making it to all four events. Top golfers crossed the Atlantic on ocean liners in the 1920s, but the British Open withered in the 1930s through the 1950s due to Depression, war, and austerity. Arnold Palmer's decision to jet in for the British Open in 1960 revitalized that event.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Augusta National membership list

Back in 2004, USA Today published a list of the approximately 300 members of the Augusta National Golf Club. The list was probably from about 2002, since some of the members on the list have obituaries from 2003. 

I'm not particularly good at recognizing names, but the only Business Titans on the list whose names strikes me off the top of my head as more likely Jewish than not are Sandy Weill of Citi and John L. Weinberg of Goldman Sachs.

Here's Canadian real estate mogul Leo Kolber in his autobiography Leo describing the 1980s:

And among the very stupid things I've done personally was to turn down an offer to join Augusta National Golf Club, where I believe I might have been the first Jewish member. ... "I'll never use it, I said, declining with thanks. Of the many things I've regretted in my life, that is near the top of the list. Later, Johnny Weinberg of Goldman Sachs and Sandy Weill of Citibank became the first Jews admitted to membership at Augusta National.

Two of out of 300 is not terribly representative of the balance of money and power and media influence in a modern America where the Forbes 400 is reportedly 36 percent Jewish.

For whatever it's worth, in the behind-the-scenes Talk section of Wikipedia, I found:

Does anybody know if Augusta National has any Jewish members? 12.36.128.73 (talk) 19:32, 3 April 2009 (UTC)Otis P. Nixon 

In answer to your question, Otis...yes, the Augusta National has several Jewish members. I grew up close to Augusta and lived there for many years, and was occasionally able to borrow tickets from one of the Jewish members because I went to school with one of his daughters. The membership at Augusta National consists of people in two main categories: Long-time businessmen (especially from the east Georgia and west South Carolina areas), whose parents/grandparents joined the club during the first few years of its existence. (Up until the late 1940's it was not as exclusive, nor as prestigious...though the association with Bobby Jones was a big attraction.) Most of the Jewish members are this type, who own and run area businesses started by their fathers and grandfathers, who helped build the club into what it is today. And the other main group of members are the wealthy and important people who first started joining when President Eisenhower became a regular at the club. After that, the membership became rather exclusive and prestigious, and soon there was a large group of members who were invited to join because they were Board Chairmen or CEO's of some of the largest companies in the country. A few more of the Jewish members are in that category, CEO's of large international corporations.

That sounds pretty plausible to me, although it technically contradicts Kolber's surmise that Weill and Weinberg were the first Jews at Augusta National. Anyway, the topic suggests an answer to the question that must be puzzling Augusta National insiders: How to get more sympathetic press coverage?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Decline of Jewish country clubs

The subjects of country clubs, Jews, and Jewish country clubs are interesting and somewhat important because old resentments and guilts related to ancestral exclusion and social status striving seem to be one among the little-discussed reasons behind much of today's conventional wisdom. 

So, for background, I'll start with part of a 2009 Golfweek article by Bradley S. Klein called "Demise of the Jewish club." It was written immediately after the Madoff Affair had punched a big hole in the net worths of members of some Jewish country clubs, so the term "Demise" -- instead of the more accurate "Decline" -- is understandable hyperbole.

Peter Davidson, a member of Inwood Country Club since 1956, vividly remembers realizing just how unusual his Long Island club really was. The moment of clarity took place nearly two decades ago, and it explained much about how his historically Jewish club operated. 

“I was invited to play at a member-guest at Oakmont Country Club outside Pittsburgh,” Davidson says. “Along with our host were members from the Olympic Club in San Francisco and Medinah in Chicago.

Oakmont, Olympic, and Medina all have hosted major championships in recent years, so they are very famous in the golf world.

The conversation turned to annual fees. I forget the exact numbers, but it was something like $5,000 for Olympic and about $5,500 for Medinah. Our host from Oakmont said that his dues were right in the middle.” 

Inquiring minds naturally turned to Davidson. 

“I said, ‘We’re about where all of you are – combined.” Back then, Inwood charged a princely sum of $18,000. [Around 1990] 

Later on, Klein explains the reasons for this price differential.

In its heyday, Inwood didn’t have to worry about holding down costs or attracting new members. Having an acclaimed golf course – good enough to host the 1921 PGA Championship and the 1923 U.S. Open, where Bobby Jones won his first national championship – served as a magnet for the affluent who lived in the distinct Five Towns community on Long Island’s south shore. ....

Another unexpected blow comes from the investment scandal involving Bernie Madoff. An avid golfer based on Long Island and in Palm Beach County, Fla., Madoff apparently drew heavily upon the close social circles of the Jewish community. His ill-doing led to financial hardship and membership resignation among hundreds of people, resulting in some Jewish clubs losing dozens of members over the past winter. 

Long before Madoff, however, the demise of Jewish clubs was evident. 

As the hush-hush exclusivity of American country clubs gave way to a wide-open market in which anyone is welcome, Jews gained the freedom to assimilate. The shrinking pool of candidates for all-Jewish clubs, in turn, forced such facilities to seek a secular, more diverse membership. ...

Jewish clubs surfaced in the early 1900s when overt discrimination was the norm. If your ethnicity or religious identity didn’t conform to the prevailing blue-blood ethos of the ruling “Social Register” crowd, you were out of luck. Or you formed your own golf club. 

That’s exactly how Inwood emerged in the southwest corner of Nassau County, just beyond the limits of New York City, where the runways of JFK Airport now abut the tidal salt marshes of Long Island’s Jamaica Bay. ...

Inwood is now directly under the final descent flight path of JFK, making it a relaxing experience for deaf members. They had Tom Doak revamp their seafront holes to look more Early 20th Century.

For Jewish clubs, golf served as just one of many reasons for seeking membership. The club became a center for Jewish life, providing privacy so an extended family of sorts could celebrate holidays and dining, and pursue community service or charity work. 

That kindred behavior often has led to distinct differences between Jewish clubs and other private facilities. Jewish clubs keep outside corporate outings to a minimum. They offer full-service meals all the time, not just on weekends. They usually keep a bigger staff, which typically translates into better service but higher costs for labor and benefits. 

One interesting cultural aside, according to McMahon: Jewish clubs consume less alcohol, lowering revenues from one of the most profitable components of any private-club operation.

The profit on gin-and-tonics alone has probably paid for a lot of lawn-mowing at classic WASP courses.

Later on, I'll get to some of the more puzzling aspects.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Condi Rice & diversity via sameness

From my Taki's Magazine column:

Augusta National is to aspirational Gentile corporate executives what Harvard is to ambitious high-school students. …. So why did Augusta National immediately add a black member in 1990 after Shoal Creek, site of that year's PGA Championship, was widely criticized when its founder let it slip that it was all-white? In contrast, why did Augusta National wait 22 more years to let in any women, even shrugging off a frenzied 2002 campaign against it by The New York Times? ... 

The contrast is striking because race discrimination was pervasive in American country clubs up through the 1990 Shoal Creek imbroglio... 

On the other hand, contrary to all the press accounts presenting Augusta National as a last relic of the Bad Old Days, all-male golf clubs have never been common in the US, and they may even now be increasing in number.  

What's the story behind all this?  

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Casey Martin, Slippery Slopes, and Boiling Frogs

Three years ago, I blogged about how the culture of the bond rating companies, such as Warren Buffett's Moody's, had been very slowly corrupted by the logic of the conflict of interest that went back to the 1970s by which they stopped being paid by buyers of securities and started being paid by issuers. This logical problem didn't become a terrible real world problem until the 2000s with the mortgage-backed securities disaster. I drew an example from golf:

Casey Martin, who was born with a terrible birth defect that crippled one of his legs, leaving him in recurrent pain, starred on Stanford's famous mid-1990s college golf team along with the full-blooded Navajo Notah Begay, who went on to win four times on the PGA tour before alcohol brought him down, and with Eldrick Woods Jr., who, last time I heard, remains employed in a golfing capacity. 

Despite his disability, Martin enjoyed enough success on the minor league Nike tour to qualify for the PGA tour in 2000. His lawsuit under the Americans with Disability Act to be allowed to use a golf cart on the PGA tour went all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won in 2001. 

Martin's was not a popular victory with players, with both Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer protesting that it would open the door to other players getting a note from their doctor to be chauffeured about the course. 

It was easy to imagine a player with a bad back like Fred Couples trying to get permission for a cart, and then the whole thing descending into carts everywhere.
And yet, eight years later, the PGA Tour hasn't slid down the slippery slope. So far, as far as I can tell, a cart has only been used once by somebody other than the severely unlucky Martin: Erik Compton rode in one tournament last fall because he had gotten his second heart transplant only a few months before. 

Essentially, golf has a fairly healthy culture of sportsmanship where top players don't want to be seen as abusing loopholes. So, it hasn't been hard so far to restrict cart-riding to rare human-interest stories like Martin and Compton.

As dearieme commented at the time:

This accords with my observation that conservatives are very shrewd at seeing the direction of social change but prone to overestimating its speed. That's because they overlook how conservative people can be, which is pleasingly paradoxical.

Golf has a highly conservative culture, basically one of "What would Old Tom Morris do?" 

It was fortunate that its origin culture was Scottish rather than English because it avoided most of the hypocrisy and cheating over amateurism that plagued tennis up to 1968 (when Wimbledon finally admitted professionals) and the Olympics even later. The Scots had a somewhat less classbound society than the English, so if a man wanted to make his living from golf, as Morris did at St. Andrews in the mid-19th Century, that was honorable. It was more honorable to be an amateur, like Bobby Jones in the 1920s, and they had their own Amateur tournaments, but the amateurs did not see themselves as tainted by striving against the professionals in the Open tournaments. 

By the way, the partially crippled Casey Martin, unsurprisingly, couldn't play well enough to stay on the PGA tour. Six years ago, he retired and became the golf coach at the U. of Oregon. A week ago, at age 40, he qualified for next week's U.S. Open at Olympic in San Francisco.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How good is the best woman at golf?

A decade ago, Annika Sorenstam was doing a lot of weightlifting*, and pulled away from other women golfers, becoming probably the best woman golfer ever for a few years. So, she entered the men's PGA tournament at Colonial in 2003 to a din of publicity. In the weeks leading up to that event, I collected a ton of data on the difficulty ratings of the courses that the PGA and LPGA play to provide an objective metric, and I announced:

So, I predict that if Sorenstam plays this week the way she's played in the rest of 2003, she'll miss the cut by four strokes.

And that's exactly what happened: she missed the cut to play on the weekend by four strokes. Out of 113 entrants, she outperformed 13 men, tied four, and finished behind 93. A highly respectable performance, but not up to Phil Mickelson's prediction (that she'd finish 20th -- although I'm guessing that was gamesmanship on the part of Phil, who is a sly devil) or Thomas Boswell's assertion that if she played the PGA regularly, she'd make the cut half the time and win a couple of events during her career. But, she beat the Vegas over-under line by eight strokes over two rounds. 

Of course, I was very lucky that she played in those two rounds about as well as she had been playing all year. Still, it was a pretty level-headed prediction. Sorenstam seems to have felt she'd given it a good shot, and didn't try it again.

I wanted to bring this up because prediction is widely recognized as crucial to science. On the other hand, one of my two or three most important contributions to the philosophy science is the idea that people tend to be more interested in those future events that are hardest to predict: e.g., will this stock outperform the market?  When thinking about the kind of things that people get most fascinated by, such as which NFL teams will beat the point spread on Sunday, the phrase "dart-throwing monkey" comes to mind. In contrast, most of the things that are pretty predictable, like test scores for large groups, bring to mind the phrase "boring and depressing."

In contrast, Sorenstam's entrance in that PGA tournament was the kind of novel event that is interesting to predict as a test of one's model of the world and struck the public, briefly, as not boring and depressing.

-------------
* By the way, I was attacked by the SPLC for noticing that Sorenstam, at her peak, had bulked up from weightlifting:

Sailer's website is rife with primitive stereotypes. On it, Sailer mocks professional golfer Annika Sorenstam for having well-developed muscles ...

What I actually said in my prediction article was, in the course of comparing her scoring proficiency to that of Corey Pavin:

Pavin is listed at 5'-9" and 155 pounds. The 32-year-old Sorenstam is 5'-6". She used to be listed at 130 pounds, but has clearly added a lot of muscle mass over the last two years. Now, she has that distinctive characteristic of a bodybuilder: her forearms no longer hang down along her sides because her upper arms are so muscular. Think of how Saturday Night Live's Dana Carvey and Kevin Nelon held their arms away from their sides while playing Hans and Franz, their Schwarzenegger-type "Ve vill pump you up!" muscle heads. (No doubt some male pros think she's been augmenting her weightlifting with steroids or human growth hormone, but there's no specific evidence for that at all.)

Noticing things is evil.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Decline of the Black Caddie

To get ready for the 2012 Masters, the New York Times has an article on why there are so few black caddies anymore: "Treasure of Golf’s Sad Past, Black Caddies Vanish in Era of Riches."

I wrote basically the same article nine years ago to get ready for the 2003 Masters: "Decline of the Black Caddie." (And here's my 2003 companion piece: "Decline of the Black Golf Pro.")

If you are interested in the topic, I'd invite you to compare and contrast the two articles on black caddies to see which one is more coherent and draws out more implications from the topic. Think of it as a test of worldviews: the conventional one of the New York Times versus mine. Whose perspective makes for more interesting thinking?

I'd probably sum up my approach as "empathy without sentimentality." By nature, I'm highly sentimental, so I've had to train myself to avoid thinking that way. What I'm good at is putting myself in other people's shoes, seeing the incentive structures they face, and thus how they feel. 

I don't reason well from the abstract to the particular. But I have a good memory, so I can usually think of examples to get started in noticing larger patterns. And because I like to notice patterns, and don't believe noticing patterns is evil, I'm better at remembering examples because they either support a thesis or contradict it. If an example contradicts my thesis, then it either is what I like to call an "exception that supports the tendency" (e.g., that 6'8" Brittney Griner is famous for being a woman basketball player who dunks suggests that women basketball players seldom dunk), it's just an anomaly, or, most profitably, it suggests that the thesis needs work and that there might well be a better thesis out there somewhere that accounts both for the bulk of the examples and the exceptions.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Municipal coup

I've long been interested in the topic of municipal coups, in which somebody overthrows a corrupt and incompetent local government and then afterwards, everybody acts as if nothing out-of-the-ordinary happened. For example, the feds setting up Mayor Marion Barry of Washington D.C. in 1990. After WWII, returning veterans organized to rid more than a few hometowns of corrupt mayors and police, much like Frodo and friends do in the Scouring of the Shire conclusion to Lord of the Rings. San Francisco and New Orleans had major coups in the 19th Century.  

The NYT Magazine has an article on an expensive new golf course, hotel, and housing development, Harbor Shores, that has opened in the micro-Detroit of Benton Harbor, a black slum city on Lake Michigan a couple of hours from the South Side of Chicago. As Rachel Maddow often complains, the state of Michigan suspended democracy in Benton Harbor and turned all responsibility over to an appointed city autocrat. The Whirlpool Company, which maintains its headquarters in Benton Harbor, has promoted the Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course (greens fee for non-residents on summer weekends: $150), which will host the 2012 Senior PGA Championship, and the gentrifying Arts District. The writer interviews a quasi-homeless former city councilman who thinks, with some reason, that what's going on is a municipal coup.

This development is another high-low team-up:

Given Benton Harbor’s unfavorable history and demographics, no private developer would likely be willing to take on such an ambitious project there. But there was another way: Robinson’s group, along with other nonprofits supported by Whirlpool, could secure enough federal and state grant money to help remediate the land, build the golf course and at least get Harbor Shores off the ground. The project’s complicated financing deal closed in May 2008, right around the time that the national real-estate market crashed. 

On the Thursday morning that we played Harbor Shores, the course looked virtually empty. 

The West Coast of Michigan is a great place for golf because the steady winds blow cool air across Lake Michigan, making it vastly more pleasant in summer than Chicago's suburbs, and that has piled up big sand dunes along the shore. There's nothing golfers love more than playing through sand dunes with a view of big water. 

Until the last couple of decades, this coastline has been underserved with quality golf courses. Alister Mackensie designed the fantastic Crystal Downs course in Frankfort, MI in the 1920s, but almost nothing else was built on the forested dunes until the last 15 years. Back in 1990, I bought a a couple of dozen topographic maps of the southwest Michigan coastline and drove up and down looking for a piece of undeveloped shoreline that I could put a team of investors together to buy and turn into a great course. But, just about every bit of cliff along Lake Michigan had cabins on it, so I left it to more enterprising people to do the heavy lifting of buying out existing homeowners. About a half dozen spectacular courses such as Arcadia Bluffs have gone up along this coastline since then at vast expense.  

My question about this new development in Benton Harbor would be, however: are all the responsible grown-ups crazy? Has anybody made a nickel off of a new golf course development in the last ten years (outside of China?). Back in 2005 a California real estate developer I know told he he'd never invest in a golf course-centric housing development again, and I can't see much that would have made him change his mind since then. 

The sad secret of golf is that it's a youngish man's game, not the game for retirees that everybody thinks. It peaked economically in the 1980s and 1990s when Baby Boomers were between, say, 25 and 50. There was a huge overbuilding of outstanding new golf courses that came online about a decade ago, and times have been tough for golf course owners ever since. 

Moreover, how does a resort provide work for the black underclass? The article says:

This is the competing narrative of what’s going on in Benton Harbor: It’s being converted into a resort town for wealthy weekenders and Whirlpool employees — that, when all is said and done, its struggling black population will either be driven out by the development or reduced to low-wage jobs cleaning hotel rooms, carrying golf bags or cutting grass.

As I pointed out in 2003, practically no black guys have taken up caddying since the Civil Rights era. Only Hal Sutton of all tour golfers still had a black caddie. The usual caddie on tour might be a former college golf teammate of the pro who dropped out of law school. Similarly,

Poor urban African-Americans hate servile work, so is the resort, assuming it ever gets any guests, going to have to bring in immigrants to be maids?

And who are the target customers? Judging by the models in the ads, they're aiming for a half black clientele. I think that would be interesting -- is there a large enough black middle class in Chicago to support a heavily black resort? The number of black men who play golf in Chicago is by no means small, and they tend to be big spenders when they play, but I've never heard of them flocking to one single upscale course. Usually, huge cities have one municipal course that is, by common agreement, the black course where blacks are socially dominant: Chester Washington in LA., Joe Louis in Chicago, etc. In the Northeast, there are a number of summer home communities, such as The Oaks on Martha's Vineyard, that have been upper middle class black for generations, but I'm not familiar with new golf or beach destinations for upscale blacks forming in recent decades.  

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Mayor Bloomberg's latest

A distinguished reader points to this from CNN:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is worried that high U.S. unemployment could lead to the same kind of riots here that have swept through Europe and North Africa.

Fortunately, Bloomberg has long used his massive political, media, and financial influence to increase the supply of marginally employed workers / potential rioters in the U.S.

From UPI in 2006:

Bloomberg: Illegal immigrants help golfers 

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says golf fairways would suffer if illegal immigrants were returned to their native country. 

"You and I are beneficiaries of these jobs," Bloomberg told his WABC-AM radio co-host, John Gambling. "You and I both play golf; who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?" 

However, Robert Heaney, general manager of Deepdale Golf Club -- a Long Island course where Bloomberg often plays -- told The New York Daily News that no illegal immigrants work at the club.

Deepdale is "maybe the most reclusive club in America," and it "hosts maybe ten rounds per day," according to golf course architect Tom Doak in his indispensable Confidential Guide to Golf Courses. Thank God that billionaires like Bloomberg don't have to choose between paying groundskeepers a little more or putting up with fluffy lies in the fairway that might make it harder to draw a 3-iron shot into Deepdale's notoriously unreceptive 15th green. If it weren't for illegal immigrants holding costs down, Deepdale might have to let an extra two or three golfers per day play the course to pay the wages of those greedy American citizens. And then, Mayor Bloomberg might one day see another foursome playing on a different hole, which could ruin for him, perhaps permanently, the entire Deepdale Experience of having what appears to be his own personal golf course. C'mon, people, we have to get our priorities straight. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How golf fans at St. Andrews heckle Tiger Woods

Scottish golf fans are among the most discerning fans in all of sports. Watching the British Open on TV can be disconcerting because what the crowd cheers and doesn't cheer depends upon subtle slopes in course that you can't see on 2-D television. The player on the right side of the fairway hits a shot that stops 40' from the flag and the crowd goes wild (because he managed to hold his shot on a green tilted sharply away from him). Then, the player on the left side of the fairway hits his shot to 20' and is greeted with tepid applause (because he should have gotten it closer).

The Swinger is a new roman a clef novel about golf superstar Hubert X. "Tree" Tremont by two Sports Illustrated writers who clearly enjoy being liberated from the shackles of Access Journalism. In it, a fan at St. Andrew's heckles the struggling, post-disgrace Tree:

“Ya canna pleh without the magic drugs, ken ya?”

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

In case of alien invasion ...

I've noticed that when I read the obituaries of prominent people in New York Times, I always check the last paragraph to see how many grandchildren they have. The replacement rate would be four, and lots of high-achieving people die without getting to that number. 

On the other hand, I just noticed that golfer Jack Nicklaus (who is not dead, by the way -- his name just comes up whenever there's a major championship), whose career record of 18 major championships is looking more secure each month (Tiger has been stuck on 14 for just under three years), has 21 grandchildren. 

Nicklaus, who was born in 1940, had six children, and his children have averaged 3.5 kids each, which is a lot for a celebrity's kids these days. (I suspect that bequests from Grandpa Jack have helped his offspring go forth and multiply.)

Nicklaus is an example of high all-around competence. For one thing, he was a fat white 5'10" kid who could dunk a basketball. He's also one of very few celebrities to lose a large amount of weight for cosmetic purposes in mid-career without hurting performance. 

I'm not sure that I'd want to have Jack Nicklaus as my next door neighbor. (I suspect he would roll his eyes in a marked manner at my lawn care efforts.) But, in case of, say, alien invasion, I would be glad that there were more rather than fewer copies of his genes floating around in the human race. 

It might be interesting for somebody to go through obituaries of high achievers and build a database of numbers of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Golf Summit

From the Washington Post:

After months of public anticipation [really?], President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) have settled on a date to play golf together: Saturday, June 18.... 

Boehner is widely considered the much better player, having started playing when he was in his 20s. Later in life, as a successful businessman, he joined Wetherington Golf and Country Club outside Cincinnati. Obama didn’t really become a regular player until he became president, when he started using golf outings to maintain a level of normalcy to escape the intense life inside the presidential bubble. Of late, however, Obama has been improving his game as Boehner’s has deteriorated. 

According to Golf Digest, Obama is now a 17-handicap. That means that he usually shoots about a 90 on a course with an overall par of 72.

Not really. Handicaps are calculated, or at least they were 17 years ago when I wrote an article for Golf magazine on them, using only the better half of your last 20 rounds. And the handicap makes up only a majority of the gap (85%?) -- the idea is that the lower handicap golfer should win the majority of bets (because he's better), but at least it should be interesting. 

If somebody lists their handicap without a decimal point, they probably don't maintain an actual handicap. 

Boehner’s handicap has drifted up from about 5 or 6, before he became the GOP leader in 2007, to an 8.5, according to an official handicap site. Boehner has not broken 80 at his home course, Wetherington, since last May — at which point his campaign for Republicans to win the majority in the November midterms shifted into high gear.

On the other hand, the Christian Science Monitor reported in January that Boehner "hit the links some 120 times last year."

That's a lot. Considering that the guy lives in Washington and Ohio, that means about four months of the year are too cold for golf, and it rains a lot the rest of the year, so he must have been playing golf over half the days when the weather is reasonable. I'm glad he's got a job that's not too demanding.

Guys always tell you that you should play golf to become rich and powerful, but my sneaking suspicion is that a lot of guys become rich and powerful in order to play more golf.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Unified Field Theory of This Week

Update: Mickey Kaus points to a 2004 Los Angeles article by Ann Louise Bardach suggesting the mother of ex-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's love child is not the family maid, as a naive reading of today's news accounts would suggest.

If you are Arnold Schwarzenegger, you employ lots of people besides a cleaning lady. This 2004 article points to a stewardess on Arnold's Gulfstream jet. (Assuming there's only one such family retainer Arnold got in a family way.) 

Okay, now the story makes more sense. Arnold has his foibles, but he isn't Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Mounting the maid while she's vacuuming might be standard operating procedure in International Monetary Fund circles, but Hollywood action heroes are expected to show more discretion and stick to the Gulfstream.

UPDATE: According the Brit Daily Mail, there are two love children and the second mother is indeed the maid.

By the way, speaking of antitrust, that 2004 article raises some interesting points about the broad political effect of the fairly recent monopolization of supermarket tabloids by AMI.

The tabs will pay for stories and hire private investigators, so they get juicier stories about important people than does the prestige press (e.g., Gennifer Flowers). However, in the 1990s, they were all consolidated under the ownership of AMI (the first victims of the anthrax mad scientist, by the way), because nobody much cares about enforcing antitrust laws anymore.

Then, in the early 2000s, AMI bought the Weider magazines for muscleheads, like Men's Fitness.

This provided a lot of synergy. For example, when AMI's National Enquirer obtained a photo a number of years ago of Tiger Woods in a parking lot with a local waitress, they spiked publication in return for Tiger flexing his new performance-enhanced bicep on the cover of AMI's Men's Fitness magazine and allowing an interview with his musclehead trainer. This 2007 story may have offered us our first clue into the ongoing physical collapse of America's most famous athlete. (Notice the lattice of coincidence?)

On the other hand, Arnold had a long relationship with the Weider interests, which apparently got transferred over to AMI. With the tabloids now financially in bed with Arnold, he was free to run for governor of California in 2003 without the tabs doing much snooping about his ever-interesting life story.

By the way, what are the chances that M. Strauss-Kahn, a 62-year-old with more energy than a frat boy on spring break, might have a prescription for some kind of chemical enhancement, like Arnold, Tiger, and Joe Weider?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Is Tiger juiced out?

Yesterday, Tiger Woods withdrew in pain after playing the first nine holes of the The Players' Championship in 42 strokes. (Hey, I've shot 42 for nine holes!) TPC is the fifth most important golf tournament of the year, so quitting isn't something Woods takes lightly. His body appears to be falling apart at an oddly early age. Why?

Back in a May 2009 column in Taki's Magazine, Tiger Juice, I was among the first to publicly raise the possibility that Tiger Woods had been using performance-enhancing drugs. (This was a half-year before the bimbo eruptions, back when his mastery of the media was nearly complete, other than one bizarre article starring him in Men's Fitness.) By 2008, his last major championship victory, he was massively more muscular than when he was a wiry 24-year-old in 2000, when winning three majors.

Tiger's future is mildly interesting, but coming to a more accurate understanding of his past is more important. There's a fundamental intellectual issue that persuades me to work at trying to make sense of the career of the most famous American athlete since Michael Jordan. It's always been obvious that much of the appeal of sports is as a test of masculinity, in the basic sense of muscularity. On the other hand, we also like to believe that sports are something more than just that: a test not just of masculinity / muscularity, but of manliness, a broader, nobler concept. The emerging evidence over the last generation that so many famous athletes were triumphing by buying more masculinity / muscularity in a bottle is a little too reductionist even for my tastes. Fortunately, I could always point to golf as a sport where the guy with the biggest muscles didn't have a huge advantage. Sure, it's not a terribly masculine sport, but that allows manliness to play a larger role.

Or, at least that's what I thought, Well ...

What's wrong with Tiger besides the wounds to his psyche? (Golf fans really do take respectability seriously, unlike NBA fans. For example, in 2001, Bill Clinton's feelers for membership at prestigious Westchester County golf clubs like Winged Foot were repeatedly rejected, in part because of Monica Lewinsky -- he ended up at the Century , a Jewish club with a fine but not very famous course. For whatever reason, Jewish country clubs tend not to host big tournaments. Are they discriminated against by the very WASPy USGA, or do they not like to share? For the last 20 years, the USGA has required a quota system for membership of private clubs hosting USGA tournaments -- all memberships must be integrated, e.g., have at least one black member -- and perhaps Jewish clubs don't want to deal with quotas. I don't know. It's an interesting topic, but not one that is discussed much other than off-the-record out on the course.)

Tiger's body appears to be falling apart at an age, 35, when most golfers are in their primes. In early 2008, I had calculated that Woods was on track to smash Jack Nicklaus's career record of 18 pro major championships with a total of 26. Today, he's still stuck on 14. His last major championship victory was at age 32 in the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, where he played in pain.

In contrast, the primes of other golfers appear to be getting longer on average. Vijay Singh, for example, won 12 tournaments before turning 40 in early 2003 and 22 in his forties, more than Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer did combined. Walking six miles per day on soft grass is not normally a physically debilitating lifestyle. It's like an ideal hunter-gatherer lifestyle -- walk 200 yards and throw a spear at a rabbit -- without the part where the woolly mammoth tries to toss you with his tusks.

In the Wall Street Journal, John Paul Newport comments:

Physically, after years of bodybuilding and exceedingly high-torque swinging, Woods is an old 35. Mentally, after decades of on-course domination and little in the way of comeuppance (golfwise, at least), he’s an immature 35. He doesn’t know how to adapt to decline. 

If Woods wants to win again, given his increasingly apparent physical limitations, he doesn’t need to reengineer his swing, as he has been trying to do with coach Sean Foley. He needs to reengineer himself, as a crafty veteran. With 71 PGA Tour victories and 14 majors under his belt, he’s got more wile, experience and golf smarts at his disposal than anyone playing the game – way more than enough to win tournaments with imagination alone. 

In contrast, Phil Mickelson appears to be as big an idiot on the course as he is rumored to be off the course (colossal sports gambling debt, illegitimate child, etc etc -- just rumors, of course).

Bubba Watson was right last week when he said, “I think Tiger is going the wrong way. I think he’s so mental right now with his swing. Just go out there and play golf.” If and when Tiger’s body heals enough to start playing regularly again, he needs to let go of the search for a perfect swing and learn to play “old man” golf: put the ball out there somewhere in or near the fairway, and then let the wizard within take over.

Ben Hogan won six major championships in his forties after a horrific car crash that left him permanently shuffling about. Lee Trevino was a 5'7" Mexican who got fried by lightning at age 35, permanently messing with his back, yet battled back to lead the Tour in stroke average in 1980 at age 40, win a last major at age 44, and then dominate over-50 Senior golf for a few years. 

Golf isn't that hard, physically. Or at least it didn't used to be. On the other hand, perhaps improvements in clubs and balls have reduced the element of guile in the game, making it more of a test of whose body can hit the ball longest and straightest. 

For example, Trevino in his prime was famous for playing a fade that curved left to right with some backspin. This sacrificed length but kept the ball from rolling into trouble. In his Senior Tour days, he switched to a draw that curves from right to length with some topspin to get more length after the ball hit the ground. But these days, most players have their driver and ball choice optimized by video and computer analysis to hit it long and straight. All that shaping the shot stuff sounds very 20th Century.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Whistling Straits

With the PGA Championship returning this week to Whistling Straits, a spectacular pseuo-Irish Pete Dye golf course on Lake Michigan north of Milwaukee, I thought I'd link to this review I wrote of the course when it was new in 1999.

(For my 2005 magnum opus on the art of golf course architecture, see here.)

Also, Michael Agger is writing a long series this week in Slate on innovations in the study of golf statistics, which looks pretty good.

For example, one finding is that tour players are more risk averse in their tactics than is optimal. They try harder to avoid a bogey than to make a birdie, but they get paid by the total strokes for the week, so that doesn't make much sense.

In terms of the applicability of moneyball techniques, one issue that distinguishes team sports, such as baseball, from individual sports, such as golf, is that baseball teams can have both statistics-driven training and selection techniques available to them, while individual golfers have only training. Touring pros can't deselect themselves, without taking up an exciting new career in giving golf lessons at the country club.

For example, the Bill James revolution in baseball encouraged teams to start asking their players to try to walk more and hit more home runs, even at the cost of additional strikeouts. Sometimes hitters could change their style, sometimes they couldn't. If they couldn't, teams became more likely to get rid of them. (See the career of Raul Mondesi, who was worshiped as a god of the diamond until more sophisticated baseball stats came into fashion.)

Golf moneyball could, theoretically, be very useful for that fraction of players whose personalities are amenable to changing approaches. In baseball, we've seen some players adapt to the new statistics by getting more walks, but we've seen a lot of other players fail to do that. I suspect that the current aversion of pro golfers to statistical analysis is not wholly obscurantist. When advanced statistics do become fashionable in golf, we will likely see some pretty good golfers fall apart as they attempt to incorporate the insights of the new golf statistics and, in the process, ruin the delicate balance of their games and psyches.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Charles Murray predicts Tiger won't break Nicklaus's record

Charles Murray jumps into the golf stat discussion by pointing out how individual skills tend to be distributed along bell curves, but extreme accomplishments follow L shaped power curves with only a tiny number at the far right edge. Just counting the four professional majors, Nicklaus is first with 18 wins, Woods second with 14, and two 1920s golfers, Bobby Jones (13, including Amateur titles, which aren't counted anymore) and Walter Hagen (11) are next, followed by Ben Hogan with 9. In contrast, 124 players have won one.

Murray says:

But to predict that Woods can win five majors between now and the end of his career—something that only 17 other golfers have done in their entire careers—assumes that nothing in the last year has significantly degraded the freakish combination required for extreme accomplishment. I find that assumption untenable.

The door can shut on great golfers in the Majors before anybody expects it to. Tom Watson won eight majors between age 25 and 34, but none after his 35th birthday.  Arnold Palmer won seven between 28 and 34, but none after his 35th birthday. Woods will turn 35 at the end of the year. 

Five more is a lot these days. Phil Mickelson, aged 40, has won four in his entire career, even though he got off to an early start as a star, winning a regular tour event as an amateur in 1991.

On the other hand, Ben Hogan won one before his 35th birthday and eight afterwards. Nicklaus himself won twelve before his 35th birthday and six afterwards, so, assuming Nicklaus is the best comparable for Woods, that would project Woods out to about 21 major championships in his career. But after the 2008 U.S. Open when he won his 14th, he was projecting out to around 26. So time is passing.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

For Golf Stat Geeks

Your Lying Eyes quantifies an issue that a lot of sports fans have felt about golf since the emergence of Tiger Woods in 1997: that golf would be more fun if he had more superstar rivals besides Phil Mickelson, the way Jack Nicklaus had lots of worthy foes such as Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Lee Trevino, Johnnie Miller, Tom Weiskopf and Tom Watson. Here's his graph showing the number of career major championship victories by each year's major champions (excluding Nicklaus' 18 over 1962-1986 Woods's 14 over 1997-)

For example, in 1974 (the second highest point on the graph), the major championship winners were Gary Player (9 career majors), Hale Irwin (3), Gary Player (9) and Lee Trevino (6) for a total of 27. That year, Nicklaus finished T4, T10, 3, 2, so he had strong competition.

Your Lying Eyes argues that Woods's best competitors haven't been as formidable. He is aware of the alternative explanation, however, that maybe there are just more formidable competitors in golf today than in Nicklaus's day and they just cancel each other out.

My heretical view, as detailed in the Your Lying Eyes comments, is that Nicklaus tended to outsmart himself by trying to play smart (i.e., conservative, as he viewed it, like Ben Hogan). He could have won more major championships if he'd been a little dumber. On the other hand, Nicklaus's super-cerebral approach tended to intimidate his rivals such as Arnold Palmer (although not Lee Trevino). So, even though Nicklaus's tactics weren't as effective at winning as he thought they would be, his rivals, with the exception of Trevino (a former driving range hustler who wasn't impressed by anything), tended to agree with Nicklaus that he would beat them because of his brainpower.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer