While Na had a personal spin on his Sunday struggles at the Players, it fit right in with the story of 54-hole leaders in 2012. Of 23 third-round leaders or co-leaders this year, 11 of them have shot over par on Sunday and none have shot better than 69. Only eight of the 20 tournaments have been won by leaders or co-leaders.

Leaders have posted an average score of 71.90 in the final round, and that’s nearly three-tenths of a stroke worse than the average score of the field in those same rounds (71.62). Think about that—the players who have performed the best over the first three rounds haven’t even managed to play at a Tour average level when trying to close out a victory on Sunday.

A half-year is a small sample size, but for an article in last week’s Golf World (it didn’t appear online, so I’ve copied it further down on this post) I analyzed data from the PGA Tour and www.golfstats.com going back to 2003 and found this is not a phenomenon isolated to this year. In fact, leaders have not performed well over the 2007 to 2012 period. If you take Tiger Woods and his other-worldly record out of the equation, leaders have played worse than the field average in the final round over those five-and-a-half years (71.35 vs. an average of 71.19. Note: the 2012 numbers are higher because the schedule is tougher over the first half of the season.)

I also looked at this in an earlier post after Kyle Stanley and Spencer Levin blew five- and six-stroke leads on the West Coast Swing. In that post, I promised to look into the question of the “hot” player and whether we should expect a player to perform well in the fourth round because he has shown good form over the first 54 holes.

To do this, I compiled data from every tournament in 2011 and 2012 (excluding small-field events) on how players in the top 20 through three rounds did in the final round compared to those outside the top 20. The players with “momentum” through 54 holes shot an average score of 71.06; the rest of the field shot 71.33 (the average was 71.24).

That suggests there’s not really all that much carryover of good form from round to round—the difference between the top 20 and the rest may be mostly accounted for by the fact that the top-20 players are a better group of players and therefore should be expected to perform better than the Tour average. But leaders—also a better group than the average Tour player—are performing worse than average.

That suggests they are not handling the pressure very well. For Golf World, I explored with sports psychologists, players, and a TV analyst/swing instructor on why that might be the case. Here’s the story, correcting one unfortunate typo (it listed Vijay Singh’s record with the lead entering the final round as 19-3 when it is actually 19-13), with a follow-up thought and a Q&A with Kyle Stanley below.

* * *

Can’t anyone hold a lead around here anymore?

That question needs to be raised after watching the PGA Tour this year. We’ve already seen 54-hole leads of five and six strokes turn into ugly defeats, and a leader or co-leader entering the final day has held on to win only eight of the first 19 stroke-play tournaments. Nearly half (10 of 22) of the third-round leaders—the latest
Webb Simpson, who failed to convert a 54-hole lead at the Wells Fargo Championship into victory—have shot over par on Sunday.

A deeper look, through an examination of data from the PGA Tour and golfstats.com, shows that this is not an isolated half-year phenomenon. The conversion rate for 54-hole leaders has dipped below 45 percent from 2007 to 2012, and you really begin to see the depths of the leaders’ struggles when you look at average score.

Here’s a startling statistic: Players entering the final round tied for the lead since 2007, other than Tiger Woods, have posted a scoring average of 71.35 on closing day—that’s worse than the average score of the field (71.19) in those rounds. With the title on the line, presumably in the groove after three rounds of excellent play and needing a good round to post a victory, these players have been unable to score even at the tour average.

There are two explanations. The first is that there is less carryover from three rounds of good form than we tend to believe—in fact, very little carryover at all. An analysis of the last 18 months of data shows the top 20 through three rounds shoot not all that much better in the final round than those who started it outside the top 20 (71.06 to 71.33)—a difference mostly accounted for by the fact that the top-20 group are better players overall rather than by momentum from the first three rounds.

So, we shouldn’t expect the 54-hole leader to shoot a fourth round in the 60s simply because he’s “hot.” But leaders, collectively (other than Woods), are playing worse than the rest of the top 20, worse than the field and significantly worse than their own overall scoring average. Why? Since we are dealing with a sample size large enough to eliminate randomness as a major factor, it must be pressure.

It hasn’t always been this way. From 2003 to 2006 leaders won 65.4 percent of the tournaments (119 of 182) compared to 44.7 percent from 2007 to 2012 (109 of 244). In those last five-and-a-half years, prime performers Woods, Phil Mickelson and Vijay Singh have been leading less often, and the latter two haven’t been as effective at closing as they once were. More parity on tour has meant more players holding the 54-hole lead for the first time. And it’s first-time leaders who are most affected by the
pressures of Sunday.

“I am 24 years old, so a lot of the things that happen to me are things that I am experiencing for the first time,” says Kyle Stanley, who lost a five-stroke lead at Torrey Pines in January but rebounded to win the next week in Phoenix. “The more you put yourself in situations like we are talking about the more comfortable you get and the better you are able to handle them.”

Steve Stricker agrees that there is no substitute for experience. “I can remember the first few times how different your body feels, how different your mind is talking to you, how everything changes,” says the 45-year-old, who has six wins in his last seven times
entering the final round with the lead after winning two of his first eight.

The basic trick for the third-round leader is how to play like you did the first 54 holes for 18 more that feel completely different because the finish line is in sight and your position at the head of the pack has been established. There are a number of potential pitfalls along the way, not the least of which is getting ahead of yourself and thinking about what a victory would mean. That distracts you from the matter at hand.

“Golf is all about staying in the present tense,” says CBS Sports analyst Peter Kostis. “If you’re in the future tense, whether it’s thinking about what it would be like to be a winner, thinking ahead about what you’re going to do with the winner’s check or thinking about how bad it would be to blow the tournament, you’re not in the moment.”

Dr. Gio Valiante, a sport psychologist who has helped Justin Rose win two of his last three times with a 54-hole lead after starting his career 0-for-5, says that when his players find themselves thinking ahead, “We default to a question: What’s my target [on the next shot]? We don’t just talk about playing one shot at a time, we actually play
one shot at a time.”

Distraction is the enemy of the leader on Sunday. And the biggest distraction is getting caught up in what other players are doing. Dr. Bob Rotella tells the players he works with not to look at leader boards.

“Sometimes people ask me: ‘Are players too insecure to look at leader boards?’ No, they believe in themselves too much to care what anybody else is doing,” says Rotella, the author of eight books on the mental game. “To me the ultimate in being self-secure is to play your own game. Most players when they look at leader boards will start overthinking, overreacting, letting it affect the way they play.”

The way to go about winning on Sunday, says Rotella, is by not thinking about winning.

“You put together a game plan based on your skills and abilities,” he says. “The whole idea of that game plan is giving you your best chance to score your lowest. Why would you change it based on whether you are three ahead or one behind?”

Valiante concurs up to a point. “New guys are not allowed to look at leader boards until about the 13th hole. There is absolutely zero upside. Veterans can do it because they know how not to let it distract them,” he says. But he does want his players to know where they stand on the closing holes because it will help their decision-making in risk-reward situations.

The mindset of protecting the lead can be destructive, as it takes a player away from how he was playing in the first three rounds. Kostis says that he has observed too many leaders “trying not to lose it instead of trying to increase their lead. It’s a negative way to play golf. Kyle Stanley is proof of that. When he came out to try to vindicate himself in Phoenix, he was trying to do something as opposed to trying not to do
something.”

Rory McIlroy learned that lesson in 2011 when he followed blowing a four-stroke lead at the Masters by turning an eight-stroke lead into an eight-stroke victory at the U.S. Open. “There’s two ways you can approach it,” he says. “You can try and protect your lead, or you can say, ‘OK, I’m four shots ahead. I want to try and go five shots ahead,’ ” he says. “I found out last year [at the Masters] that approaching it the first way didn’t really work.”

Indeed, playing with a big lead isn’t as easy as it appears, because it often leaves a player uncertain what strategy to employ and indecisive in both his strategy and his swing. Entering the final round with a lead of four or more strokes is no assurance of victory: Of the 58 players who entered the final round with that margin since 2003, 13 didn’t win.

“You start to focus possibly on not messing up instead of playing well,” says Rose. “You start to think, ‘OK, let’s just not do anything stupid.’ Your focus changes from what got you into that position to being a little more cagey, and I think that’s when you can run into problems.”

Players in the heat of a close battle for the entire round have a different enemy—tension.
“The pressure of the situation amplifies all of our emotions,” says Valiante. “On Thursday we might feel a little sting from missing a putt but, on Sunday it feels like a crisis. The mind thinks, ‘I can’t afford to miss putts if I want to win,’ even though it’s not true.”

Eventually, the pressure can manifest itself in a player’s swing. “All swings get affected the same way,” says Kostis from his perspective as a swing teacher. “When the pressure starts to get to you, the big muscles tend to freeze and the small muscles get quicker. Your rhythm gets quicker.”

Valiante says too many players worry that their swing technique has broken down. But really it’s the tension and change in rhythm that have caused the breakdown. If you can get rid of the tension, the swing will be fine. How to do that?

“We have techniques we practice, such as muscle relaxation,” says Valiante. “The simplest way is grip pressure. Players often grip the club too tightly without realizing it.
My guys are always talking about soft hands.”

Mickelson, who has a good track record as a closer (23-10 record as overnight leader), says that on Sunday, “I don’t worry about mechanics, I don’t worry about ballstriking. I just want to get it in the hole and find a way to get the job done.”

It’s one thing to know the remedies in theory, but quite another to put them into practice the first time you play a final round with the lead—though Rotella says it can help to prepare the night before by thinking of every possible situation and deciding how to handle it.

The results show just how tough it is for first-timers. Since 2003 players making their debut as 54-hole leaders in a tournament won just 31.9 percent of the time. Experience does pay: Those same players won 34.4 percent their second time and 38.3 percent on subsequent occasions. Looking at it from an individual perspective results in a lower percentage of winners than from the perspective of how many tournaments have been won by leaders or co-leaders. The equivalent overall PGA Tour percentage is that 41.8 percent of leaders or co-leaders have won since 2003.

That’s still not a very good record for the younger generation of players. The systems of junior and college golf could be contributing to the problem. The best junior players mostly compete in large tournaments against the other top players in the country, and top-level college tournaments involve many schools. Such deep fields allow only limited opportunities even for very good players to experience holding the lead or coming down the stretch with a chance to win. Once they hit the PGA Tour, opportunities become even more scarce, and players are ill-prepared for what they face on Sunday.

It’s an open question whether anyone in this generation of golfers will approach the consistency of Mickelson, Singh (19-13 with the lead) or Ernie Els (13-4). Woods, of course, is the gold standard, his 92.5 percent conversion rate (49-4) out of reach—maybe even for the present version of himself.

Woods was left out of the average score calculation at the top of the story because his record with the lead is so out of this world. But his Sunday scoring numbers aren’t superhuman: From 2003 to 2009, his final-round average when holding the lead was 69.38 compared to the field average of 72.08 in those events.

That makes his scoring average as a lockdown closer about the same as his overall average of 69.11 in that period. So, Woods’ unreal winning percentage was built on two things—being the best player in the game combined with the rare ability to play his normal game in the abnormal circumstances of leading the tournament on Sunday.

The latter is something to which all players can aspire—but these days most are falling far short.

* * *

I didn’t have space in the magazine for my usual disclaimer, so here it is. These are overall stats showing that cumulatively leaders haven’t been handling the situation very well on Sundays. It doesn’t mean that every time a leader doesn’t win it’s because he couldn’t handle the pressure.

To listen to Johnny Miller, every single bogey—and even every single bad shot—hit by a leader in the final round was due to the pressure. I used to like Miller, and still do to some extent, but he’s become a one-note announcer, at least on Sundays. To him, there’s no story line except for choking or being clutch.

But golfers hit bad shots in every round they play, whether they are in contention or not. They make bad swings even on the range. As I’ve written before, sometimes a bad swing is just a bad swing. A bogey is more likely due to randomness than to choking.

And the data shows there isn’t all that much of a relationship between scoring in the first three rounds and the final round. This means that there will be a few stinkers by 54-hole leaders in the normal course of events anyway. It is of some significance that leaders are scoring at a below average level, cumulatively, but that doesn’t tell us much about any single round.

* * *
I did an e-mail Q&A with Kyle Stanley about his situation at Torrey Pines and subsequent victory at Phoenix. He gave a good look at the thought process of a first-time player trying to hold onto a lead, so here it is in its entirety:

Q: When you had a big lead in San Diego, particularly on the back nine, how hard was it to keep your focus on the matter at hand? Did thoughts of what a victory would mean keep popping into your head?

A: I think that I kept my focus just fine, but perhaps I started to play more to protect my lead versus sticking to my game plan and putting the tournament away. Keep in mind that was the first time I was in that position, so I had no real experience to fall back on. My mind may have wandered briefly thinking about what comes with a win, but honestly I was pretty focused. I hit good shots on 18 and didn’t miss a shot in the playoff. I feel like I had the proper composure and stood up well to the moment but it just wasn’t meant to be.

Q: Did you start playing safe with the lead or try to keep playing the same way you had for three rounds? If a little bit of both, was it tough to find the right balance?

Q: I think possibly I did start to play safe. When you have a lead that large it is easy to fall into a thought process of thinking what it is going to take to get this done and to not be too reckless. Rather than have the game plan that we used all week you might take some more conservative lines and perhaps make some swings that aren’t quite as aggressive. I hit it great for 63 holes. On the back nine I lost a little rhythm and my ballstriking wasn’t as good. On a course like Torrey South, you need to be hitting it well and I wasn’t quite as sharp.

Q: Did your swing feel the same on Sunday or did the adrenaline and all the other factors make it a different day altogether?

A: I hit the ball so well and played so well in all facets of my game that to keep up that kind of play up for 72 holes is pretty tough. Sleeping on a big lead and thinking about all of the things that might happened and that come with winning is tough. It is hard not to let your mind wander, especially when you are in that position for the very first time. So it was probably a combination of things and as I said it just wasn’t meant to be that day.

Q: On the 18th hole, did you consider going for the green in two since hitting into the water on that shot wouldn’t have hurt your chances all that much? Did you feel super-focused on that hole or were you out of your comfort level, or both?

A: I did consider going for it because it was certainly reachable. However, we made the decision to lay up to a good wedge yardage and we executed the shot pretty well in my opinion. I was very focused and was not out of my comfort zone at all on the third shot. We decided on 56-degree wedge versus the lob wedge to take spin off the shot and we planned to hit it at least nine paces behind the hole location which should have been fine. We actually landed the ball 12 paces behind the hole so I never expected the ball to spin back all the way as it did. Sometimes if the ball spins just right on poa [poa annua grass] you can get some different reactions. It may have been the perfect storm of a very crisp strike, the angle of the slope where it landed and the poa. I executed that shot real well but the result wasn’t what I wanted. In the end I still had a four-footer to win the tournament, which is all you can ask for.

Q: How did the experience of being in that situation before help you when you took the lead near the end of the final round in Phoenix?

Q: Well the main thing that helped was that I was playing very good golf. I left Torrey extremely disappointed about losing the tournament, but I also left very confident because I knew I was playing very well. Being eight shots behind also forces you to be aggressive which I was, so being on the other end of that experience the prior week did nothing but help me. I am 24 years old, so a lot of things that happen to me are things that I am experiencing for the first time. The more you put yourself in situations like we are talking about the more comfortable you get and the better you are able to handle them. I feel oddly fortunate to go through what I did in San Diego as it will make me a better player in the long run.

Q: Did the fact that what happened at Torrey Pines on the 18th was somewhat fluky help with your confidence in facing the situation again?

A: Yeah, again I came into Phoenix very confident knowing I was playing great. One bad hole the prior week was not going to change the fact that I was playing great golf. The course suited me well so there was no reason to think I wouldn’t have a good week. I did learn a lot about myself and my mental toughness because I am not going to lie, what I went through was incredibly tough. And yes, if I hit poor shots coming in at Torrey and melted down, I would have been in a different place mentally. But I thought well, executed good shots and stuck to my process which is all you can do.

Q: How were your thoughts and feelings on the final tee shot and the final putt at Phoenix compared to San Diego?

A: I was a lot less nervous and very excited with the opportunity to win the tournament. I felt like that tournament was mine to win and I needed to go out and be aggressive. I hit a very aggressive tee shot and in doing so took most of the trouble out of play. It was ironic that I was left with a four-foot putt to win (exact length I missed at Torrey) the tournament. The putt went in and it felt amazing.

Matt Kuchar hasn't won many tournaments, but his last two have been big ones. Photo copyright Icon SMI.

Things are looking up for American golf. Matt Kuchar’s victory in the Players Championship last weekend made him the first American to win the PGA Tour’s flagship event since 2007. Bubba Watson’s victory in the Masters was the second straight major for a U.S. player after a string of six in a row without one. If you limit the time frame to the last couple of weeks, Rickie Fowler is the hottest young player in the game (though I don’t think Rory McIlroy is going away). Heck, even Tiger Woods has won a tournament this year.

It’s all probably a coincidence, but it’s a happy coincidence for American fans and bodes well in a Ryder Cup year. Add Phil Mickelson and Hunter Mahan—the only double winner on the PGA Tour this year—and that’s a pretty strong core six.

It’s not like the big wins by Watson and Kuchar were random bolts from the blue. They’ve been in the upper echelon of the game over the last couple of years, so their victories were more like validations. In a way, the same is true of Fowler. While the Wells Fargo Championship marked his first PGA Tour victory, he’s been on the verge ever since he hit the Tour in the fall of 2009.

So we shouldn’t expect any of them to fade away. Of the three, Watson probably has the biggest upside (though a case could be made for Fowler) but the least predictable future. His game is mercurial and the same could be said of his personality.

Watson followed up his Masters win with a well received tour of the TV talk circuit that made him an even bigger figure. While embracing the spotlight in the aftermath of winning the green jacket, he suddenly seemed to withdraw from it when, after defending his title in New Orleans, he decided to take the month of May off.

Granted, as the new father of an adopted baby boy, family time is important. But skipping the Players, not all that far from his Orlando home, was an odd decision. He could still have taken off the week before the Players and two or three weeks after it. Now who knows where his game—or his head—will be when he returns.

Kuchar’s game is very different than Watson’s. Lacking Bubba’s length off the tee, not to mention his creativity (who doesn’t?), Kuchar traffics in the steady rather than the spectacular. Over the past two-and-a-half years he’s had 25 top-10 finishes, with just two victories. They’ve both been big ones, though, a FedExCup win at The Barclays and the Players, so he doesn’t shrink from the big occasion. It must be encouraging to Kuchar that Luke Donald took a similar path prior to his breakout year in 2011, so the game in the current era doesn’t belong exclusively to the long.

Through it all, expect Kuchar to keep smiling, no matter what the situation. Pair him with Woods in his comeback event from scandal in 2010? No problem. End up in the final twosome with slow-playing Kevin Na, admittedly in the throes of a can’t-pull-the-trigger problem, in the fourth round of the Players? That’s fine.

The “what, me worry?” attitude and ever-present grin serve Kuchar well in big situations. And if friends and family are to be believed, he is a feisty competitor underneath the friendly exterior. I’ve never been a believer in the “too nice to win” theory anyway. If Kuchar hasn’t won more, it’s probably more due to his style of play.

Fowler continued to impress when he followed up his Wells Fargo victory with a tie for second at the Players. It’s tempting to say the floodgates are now open, but perhaps it’s best to give it some time. Just as it was foolish to say Rickie was all style and no substance because he hadn’t yet won a tournament, it’s going too far the other way to say that he’s suddenly one of the best players in the game just because he’s won one. It is fair to say he could be one of the best players in the game. And a look at his gallery dotted with youngsters sporting similar caps and attire is an indication that a rise to preeminence by Rickie would be good for the growth and popularity of the game, especially among young people—a very important area for the future of the game.

In the long run, the ultra-talented McIlroy is still a better bet to be No. 1. But he won’t necessarily have a stranglehold on the position the way Woods did for so long. If the top spot is going to be up for grabs, Watson, Kuchar, and, in the longer run, Fowler, each have a chance to make a run at it.

Here are some highlights from my new book Making the Masters: Bobby Jones and the Birth of America’s Greatest Golf Tournament (Skyhorse Publishing), based on extensive research of the newspapers and periodicals of the day and the writings of those involved. Part 1 gives some background on the site that became Augusta National.

The land that ultimately became Augusta National was a tree and plant nursery called Fruitland from 1858 to 1925. The interesting thing is just how big and influential that nursery—owned and operated by the Berckmans family—was. It introduced to the U.S. many European plants, including a privet hedge that is considered the mother of all privet hedges in the South and most of the varieties of peaches now grown in Georgia (the Peach State). The Fruitland Nursery catalog was sent to customers all around the world, and Prosper Berckmans—son of a European baron who emigrated to the U.S.—was one of the great horticulturists of his day and the founder of the Georgia Horticultural Society.

The site was almost used for a large resort hotel before it became Augusta National. This is fairly well known, but my research uncovered that an oft-told tale about why the hotel wasn’t built isn’t true. The story goes that a hurricane hitting Miami in September of 1926 stopped the Augusta project because damage to his flagship Miami hotel bankrupted developer J. Perry Stoltz. This didn’t really add up, because ground was broken for the Augusta hotel in February of 1926, and then nothing else happened even though the planned 14-story hotel was supposed to be built quickly and completed by January of 1927—so it should have been well underway in September.

I found the smoking gun in a tiny legal notice in a June issue of the Augusta Chronicle, summoning Stoltz to court. He was being sued by the landowner, a development company, for failing to build a hotel as contracted. The Chronicle, incidentally, after splashing Stoltz’s plans all over the front page when they were announced, gave not a single word of editorial coverage to Stoltz backing out. But we can make a good guess as to why he didn’t fulfill his promises. He also had plans to build identical 14-story hotels in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Hendersonville, North Carolina, and must have been overextended. So, hubris, not a hurricane, brought the project down.

It’s a good thing for golf that the project didn’t go through. Stoltz was planning to let the engineer for construction of the hotel also design the accompanying golf course, so the result would have been nothing like the masterpiece that is Augusta National.

Going back earlier, a schism in the Berckmans family also may have contributed to the site eventually becoming available for Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts to found Augusta National. Prosper Berckmans, who died in 1910, divided the property in his will, the southern portion going to his three sons and the northern part to his younger second wife, who was not the mother of the other heirs. This gave his widow the manor house that now serves as Augusta National’s clubhouse.

The sons weren’t happy with this, and they started proceedings to contest the will. They later withdrew that action, but their displeasure led them to turn their attention away from Fruitland and Augusta. They bought a peach orchard about 60 miles away and concentrated their efforts there, selling the Augusta nursery business in 1919 to be operated by someone else but maintaining ownership of the property. Thus, they were open to selling the property to Washington Heights Development in 1925 when it was looking for a site for Stoltz to build his hotel, and Prosper’s widow was also willing to sell her part—thus the two halves of the property were reunited.

When the Depression hit, it looked like Washington Heights Development was going to be stuck with a property it would be unable to either develop or sell. The Chronicle had tried to boost a plan in the spring of 1929 to raise $500,000 through the sale of local stock and out-of-town bonds to fund a hotel on the site. That probably wasn’t realistic anyway, and when the bottom of the economy dropped out that fall it became pie-in-the-sky.

So, the company was lucky that Jones retired in 1930 with the dream of starting a golf club, a dream Roberts set out to help him fulfill. Roberts and Jones settled on Augusta as the preferred site because at the time it was a winter destination for well-to-do Northeasterners who could form the core of a national membership. Thomas Barrett, a prominent Augustan who would be mayor in a couple of years, showed Jones and Roberts the property in late 1930 and they instantly recognized that this was the place. Washington Heights wasn’t too lucky, though. They sold the property for perhaps a third of what they bought it for.

Some other real estate investors fared much worse. The announcement of Stoltz’s planned hotel had quickly led to a land boom along soon-to-be-paved Washington Road. Locals enticed by real estate ads in the Chronicle (“May Be Sold Today to SOMEBODY ELSE if YOU WAIT” trumpeted one) and out-of-state speculators ran up prices in anticipation of development of the then sparsely populated area four miles from downtown. In 1929, the Chronicle reported that $1.25 million had been invested in the area and that the total property value had plunged to 25 percent of that amount.

The birth of Augusta National didn’t help the value of those surrounding properties. The investors did OK only if they were able to hold out for three decades or so. By the 1950s Augusta had expanded along Washington Road, the main westward route out of town, to Augusta National and beyond, leading to commercial development on the main road and housing development around it.

The manor house that became the Augusta National clubhouse dated from 1854 and was built by the owner prior to the Berckmans, who added grandeur when they planted trees on both sides of the entryway in 1858 and 1859 to make Magnolia Lane. Roberts and Jones planned to tear down the house and construct a new clubhouse. “Roberts does not care anything about it and says he does not see what practical use could be made of it,” reported William Marquis to his colleagues at Olmsted Brothers, which was hired to landscape the property. “I agreed on that. It is not at all modern and would take a lot of money to make it so.”

The Chronicle reported on plans for a new clubhouse, but the club never came up with the money to build it and refurbished the old one instead—a wise decision forced by necessity.

In an indirect way, the Berckmans had a hand in designing the Augusta National course. When Jones first saw the property, he later wrote, not only did he think it looked like the land had been lying in wait for a golf course, “Indeed, it even looked as though it were already a golf course.” Jones and Alister MacKenzie put their fairways into corridors between trees that had already been cleared for plantings by Fruitland. Hardly any large trees needed to be removed. An aerial photo taken in 1930 before Jones, Roberts, and company purchased the land—possibly the one used by Alister MacKenzie when he made a tentative layout before visiting the property—could very well be mistaken for a photo of the course under construction.

A nice touch at the start of Augusta National was the return of two of the Berckmans brothers who had grown up living on the property and spent so many years running the nursery. They had maintained homes in Augusta all along, and returned to business there when they opened a landscape design firm in 1929. Louis Berckmans, who at the time was doing the landscaping for Rockefeller Center in New York City, joined Augusta National as a member when it was formed in 1932. It was he who decided which plants would represent each of the 18 holes. P.J.A. Jr. (known as Allie) became the first general manager, and when the course was opened became essentially its first superintendent. They were 74 and 65 years old when the club started, and lived out their final years involved in an exciting new venture on what had once been the family property.

Rory McIlroy has once again taken over the No. 1 spot in the world ranking from Luke Donald. Photo copyright Icon SMI.

Rory McIlroy and Luke Donald have been passing the No. 1 world ranking back and forth this spring like it’s a hot potato. McIlroy reclaimed the top spot with his tie for second at the Wells Fargo Championship last weekend just a week after Donald ousted him in New Orleans. The No. 1 ranking has now changed hands five times between the two of them in just the last 19 weeks.

One of those times, McIlroy took over on a week he didn’t play. That’s the kind of thing that causes critics to lampoon the system as mysterious and overly complicated. But there’s really nothing mysterious about that aspect of the ranking. It’s simply a built-in aspect of any system that is based on a fixed number of previous weeks, as the world ranking is (in this case, 104 weeks, but the same thing would happen in a 52-week system).

In such a system, players lose points for the week that falls out of the ranking (and in the world ranking, they lose points for events within the ranking period on a sliding scale). If two players are close in the ranking and neither earn points in a given week, they will change positions if the player who was in front loses more points. Nothing weird about it.

The only way to avoid this would be if you wiped the slate clean at the beginning of the year and compiled the ranking cumulatively, without reducing any points as the year went on (in other words, like the money list or FedExCup standings). But that’s not effective as a ranking system until late in the year. The world ranking is trying to determine who are the best players, not who has been playing the best for x number of weeks when x is a relatively small number.

What makes the most sense is a system that covers a long enough time period to give better players an edge over temporarily hot players, but gives more weight to recent events in order to give current form greater consideration. That’s just what the world ranking does.

So, in that sense, the world ranking has it just right. (Some have suggested cutting the ranking period from two years to one year, but two tends to provide a more reliable gauge of player quality. There are circumstances in which this is not ideal, such as a player dropping completely off a cliff after playing well for a year. But there are no systems that are ideal under all circumstances, and overall a weighted two-year period is the best.)

Of course, there’s more that goes into the world ranking recipe than the time period. Trickier problems are how much weight to give each tournament, particularly when different Tours around the world are involved, and how much weight to give to each player’s performance in the tournament (such as, giving x points for a victory, y points for 2nd place, etc.).

Recent research by a pair of college professors has tackled those issues. It’s been called an alternate ranking system, but that’s not exactly the way coauthors Mark Broadie of Columbia (one of the men behind the PGA Tour’s excellent strokes gained/putting stat) and Richard J. Rendleman of Dartmouth view it. In a presentation at the World Scientific Congress of Golf Conference, they stated, “We’re trying to add to the dialogue some evidence-based analysis. The powers that be may have their reasons for adding bias [to the world ranking], but it would be nice to know if it’s biased, how much is the bias. They may decide they want that.”

In other words, the goal is more to check the existing system for bias than it is to create a new system.

It might sound like the professors are trying to make the world ranking devised by the International Federation of World PGA Tours (based on an original system devised by IMG founder Mark McCormack) look silly by saying it isn’t mathematically based and that the governing bodies might want to have bias. But the statement is to be taken at face value. There may indeed be reasons for choosing a less mathematically rigorous system.

In fact, most people in the golf world—players, commentators, and officials alike—probably would opt for a system where points are given for places in the standings (with no points beyond a certain place for most tournaments) rather than figured by strokes as in the Broadie-Rendleman system. The world ranking gives 100 points for a victory in a major championship and 60 for second place (then 40 for third, 34 for fourth, etc.). That’s the kind of premium for victory that squares with the way most observers rate players. There’s also a victory premium, but less so, in regular tournaments. In the professors’ system, a stroke that makes the difference between a tie for 30th and a tie for 40th means the same as a stroke that makes the difference between winning and finishing second.

But the strength of Broadie-Rendleman is that it doesn’t rely on any outside assessment of the strength of field of various tournaments. Through a sophisticated mathematical model, it analyzes scores in various tournaments and spits out a single “skill” number or rating for each player. Golfers are all connected to each other—indirectly, if not directly—by scores in common tournaments. Even if Player A and Player B have not played in the same events, they might have each played with Player C. Put all of those myriad combinations together, and you are able to compare golfers from different Tours around the world.

That’s the Holy Grail for a ranking system that encompasses events on all the Tours. The world ranking system starts with a set of assumptions about the strength of various Tours and assigns points to each tournament based on the number and ranking of players in the world top 200 and the home Tour’s top 30 in the field. There are bound to be imperfections in this system, further magnified by awarding a minimum number of points to each Tour’s flagship events.

None of that is needed in the professors’ system—all you need is the players’ scores in each event and the math does the job of fairly comparing the scores. In a way, it’s simpler—although the math involved is above most people’s heads. And the results give the best true indication of the relative strength of players on various Tours. Broadie and Randelman analyzed the 2009-10 data that produced the final 2010 world ranking and found that there was a significant bias against PGA Tour players in the ranking.

The largest reason for the bias are the “home Tour” points added to each event’s field strength based on the entry of top 30 players from that Tour. That wasn’t a part of the original world ranking system, but was a later addition at the behest of the lesser Tours. Eliminate those and stop awarding a minimum number of points to select events, and most of the bias would be gone. (While they are at it, they could address the problem of giving too many points to events with very small fields of top players, especially unofficial events like Tiger Woods’ Chevron World Challenge.)

This is where “the powers that be may have reasons for adding bias” comes in. They may indeed want international players to have a better chance to qualify for World Golf Championship events. Japanese players may have a case that their performance in big events—and thus their much-worse rankings in the professors’ system—is hurt at least somewhat by the fact that all of them are “road games.” And is it really so bad to virtually ensure that the top Japanese player will be in the top 50 and thus qualify for the majors?

In any case, Broadie and Rendleman have done a service by showing just how great the bias is. At the very least, it gives the PGA Tour a case to take to the other Tours to argue for adjusting the world ranking to reduce the bias, even if they don’t want to eliminate it.

The professors’ system rewards consistency more and winners less than the way players are typically judged, and it might not value major championships quite as highly. It’s more like a season-long (or two-season-long) adjusted scoring average where the adjustment is highly sophisticated. When it comes to judging top players, most people want to see the “W’s,” especially in majors. Broadie-Rendleman also does not weigh recent events more heavily, so current form is not a factor the way it is in the world ranking.

Could the professors’ system be tweaked to include a victory bonus, more weight to major championships, or less weight to events that happened longer ago? Probably. That could be the best approach, as there’s a certain beauty—and definite utility—to a mathematical model that can evaluate scores from all around the world and essentially normalize them.

Will that be enough to overturn an entrenched system? Probably not. But the weight of the Broadie-Rendleman argument, and the authority of its creators, could be enough to lead to some improvements in the world ranking. PGA Tour players looking to crack the top 50 in the world certainly hope so.

Bubba Watson has a new set of demands and pressures, in addition to opportunities, as a new major champion. Photo copyright Icon SMI.

Bubba is back. But now Bubba Watson is more than just Bubba. He’s a major champion, the top-ranked American, the refreshing new face of golf, the next big thing. As he returns to action at the Zurich Classic for the first time since winning the Masters, Watson is the center of attention, and it will be that way for a while.

The combination of a heart-on-his-sleeve personality, a sense of humor, some quirkiness, a public-course background, a homemade swing untouched by any swing coach, a unique talent that makes him both the game’s longest hitter and most creative shotmaker, and ownership of a green jacket make Watson a bona fide phenomenon. The question is, where does he go from here?

Watson faces the usual hurdles for a first-time major champion—the distractions that come with extra attention, the flood of commercial and appearance-fee opportunities that can take time and focus away from the main job of playing well on the PGA Tour, and the challenge of increased expectations.

In Bubba’s case, you can take all of that and multiply it. He’ll get more attention and more opportunities than most. The expectations referred to aren’t so much those from media and fans, but from the player himself. Many first-time major winners who have struggled—Graeme McDowell being one recent example—have said the self-imposed pressure to live up to being a major champion has been a detriment. Watson has admitted to being too hard on himself in the past when things have gone wrong on the course. With his volatile personality, he’s vulnerable to the strains of trying to back up a major title.

He’s been vulnerable when things have gone wrong off the course, too. After the bad press he received for his not-so-respectful-of-his-hosts tweets from Paris last summer, his play dropped off considerably after a great first half of the year. Perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not.

His quirky personality and interests—the campaign last year to get on Ellen DeGeneres’ show, his purchase of the Dukes of Hazzard car, his friendship with Justin Bieber—and his unfiltered thoughts in combination with a Twitter account could lead to trouble, or at least distractions, in the future.

Then again, Bubba could use the Masters as a jumping off point and continue to rise. The crowds will be behind him as never before, and the shouts of “Bubba!” along with the confidence gained at the Masters could raise him to new heights.

There are good signs in his game. The second most impressive thing about his season—behind the Masters victory—has been his consistency. In eight tournaments, Watson’s worst finish is a tie for 18th and he’s been in the top five four times. That’s a good sign from a player who had only three top-10s in 2011 even with two victories.

Watson is a volatile player who makes a lot of birdies, especially on the par fives where his scoring average this year is 4.44, and also his share of bogeys. But he could be growing into the kind of player that Fred Couples was in his prime—volatile within the tournament (that’s Bubba golf) but so talented that he’s consistent from week to week.

Watson has gotten considerably straighter off the tee in the last couple of years without reining in his awe-inspiring distance. He’s first in driving distance in 2012 at 313.1 yards, but 128th in accuracy. That’s actually much better than most long drivers, and a very good combination. The only thing that can keep Watson from reaching a par five in two is a wild drive, so keeping it in the fairway pays dividends.

The areas where Watson needs to improve if he wants to be No. 1 are his short game and putting. He’s 112th in scrambling and 165th in strokes gained-putting this year after ranking 184th and 120th in those categories last year. Two-putt birdies do a lot for your score, but one-putt birdies and scrambling pars help, too.

Winning the Masters on Augusta National’s treacherous greens was a hopeful sign. It was impressive from a mental/strategic game standpoint, too. While Augusta is known for being kind to long hitters, it can be downright cruel to the impatient and impetuous, a graveyard for players who have been overly aggressive at the wrong times or who have become flummoxed by the pressures of trying to win a major.

Watson overcame those pressures. This week he begins the task of overcoming the different kinds of pressures that come with winning a major.

It used to be that the caddie would give the yardage, the player would pull the club he wanted to hit, and that, usually, would be that. There might have been a consultation if the player was between clubs, if there was some wind, or if there was a decision on whether to lay up or go for it. Even then, it would generally be brief.

Now a growing number of players seemingly will not hit a shot until they have fully discussed every possible variable with their caddie: yardage to the flag, yardage past the flag (and/or short of it), yardage from the flag to the closest side of the green, yardage to a certain shelf on the green, yardage over a certain bunker, yardage to where they want to land the ball, wind strength, wind direction, wind variability, shot shape, whether to swing hard or easy, level of risk, what kind of putt it is from various parts of the green, similar shots they have played on another hole—and that’s just on a routine approach shot. If they are playing out of trouble or deciding whether to go at a par five in two, there are whole new categories for discussion.

Perhaps the most well-known caddie on Tour is Phil Mickelson’s man Jim Mackay, not just because he’s been on the bag for 20 years but because we so often see and sometimes hear them talking about the shot Phil is about to play. It’s a great dynamic, because Mackay serves as a voice of reason to Mickelson’s gambling nature but has to pick and choose his spots because he knows that aggressive play is what Phil is about. But they don’t only talk about risk and reward. Mickelson is the analytical type, so he likes to have all the information; he’s a collaborative type (and he knows “Bones” is a good caddie), so he likes to talk about it; and he’s a creative enough shotmaker to have a number of options on what shot to play. Their discussions, picked up by course microphones, are downright esoteric at times.

A bit more down to earth, but every bit as detailed (if not more) were the conversations between Peter Hanson and his caddie during the Masters. They left no stone unturned and no option unconsidered before Hanson would pull a club and play a shot.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Ben Hogan would think. The ultimate self-made man, it’s hard to imagine Hogan being told what to do by his caddie, as often seemed the case with Hanson. Of course, it was a different era. There were no traveling caddies,* so Hogan had a different local caddie every week, often a kid.

*Aside No. 1 from research for one of my books, Making the Masters about the early days of the Masters: There actually were a few players who brought along their own traveling caddies in the early 1930s, but the PGA made a rule outlawing the practice. It was felt it gave those players an unfair advantage.

What’s more, there were no yardage books, and no 150-yard markers, so there could be no discussions with caddies about yardage. It’s hard for us to comprehend today, but players used to divine the yardage just by eyeballing it*—though it should not be overlooked that they also used experience from practice rounds or prior rounds in the tournament.

*Aside No. 2, this from Miracle at Merion, about the 1950 U.S. Open. I found an article about Sam Snead from 1950 saying that one reason he didn’t win as many tournaments as he should have was that he had a lousy sense of distance and often mis-clubbed. Hogan, on the other hand, had excellent eyesight (that’s not why he was called “The Hawk,” but it could have been). A Philadelphia newspaper reported that before the 1950 Open Hogan told the president of Merion Golf Club that his course was excellent, but the yardage on the scorecard was off. About a decade later, Merion re-measured the course and ended up with lower yardages on nearly every hole, so Hogan was right.

When Hogan debated whether to hit a four-wood or one-iron into the 18th green in the final round of the 1950 U.S. Open, the debate was wholly internal. The caddie wasn’t intimately familiar with Hogan’s game, he would have been guessing about the yardage, and Hogan wouldn’t have wanted to hear what he wanted to say anyway.

On another famous shot, Gene Sarazen did consult with his caddie before deciding on a four-wood to the 15th hole in the final round of the 1935 Masters, a shot he ended up holing for a double eagle. He and his Augusta National caddie nicknamed “Stovepipe” agreed that the ball was sitting down too much to hit a three-wood but the distance was a little too long for a regular four-wood, so Sarazen decided to “toe in” the four-wood for more distance. But the extra time that took caused fellow competitor Walter Hagen to yell across the fairway, “Hurry up, Gene, I’ve got a date tonight!”

Which is a reminder that the player/caddie huddles of today’s era only add to the pace-of-play problem on the pro Tours. It takes about an hour-and-a-half more to play a round now than it did in the old days because players take so much more time between shots—and some of that time is spent on lengthy consultations with caddies. Players are supposed to take no more than 45 seconds to hit a shot—but sometimes it takes longer than that just to pull a club.

Some scenes from this year’s golf telecasts spring to mind: Jonathan Byrd and his caddie having an interminable discussion on a par three tee at Kapalua, Mackay telling Mickelson to wait on the wind he wanted at the Masters, and Brian Davis taking forever to play a shot in Houston, changing his mind a couple of times along the way. The latter situation was so bad that the NBC commentators said his fellow competitor had to be annoyed.

Then there’s caddie Paul Tesori*, who used to parse every situation once and then twice for Sean O’Hair and now is doing the same for Webb Simpson.

*Aside No. 3, not from a book. It’s often noted that Tesori is a former PGA Tour player, but seldom noted that he’s one of the only players ever to make it through Q-School but never earn a penny on Tour. In his defense, there was an injury involved, but over the course of two seasons, 1997 and a medical exemption covering part of 1999, he was 0-for-21 in making cuts.

Taking it a step or two forward from Hogan, can we imagine Jack Nicklaus have these kinds of discussions with Angelo Argea? No. Nicklaus kept the same caddie probably because of comfort level—and later was even more comfortable with one of his sons on the bag—but made decisions mostly on his own.

Does all of this analysis really help the modern player? Well, it actually might. There may be cases where a first instinct might have been better than over-analysis, but more often it’s a good thing to carefully consider all information before making a decision. And, while Hogan might not agree, it helps to have an exact yardage to the hole and to other key points. The gains in equipment have led to Tour setups where the pins tucked closer to edges of greens and edges of shelves than they used to be, which leaves more to consider.

It helps to have a second opinion when you’re not really sure what shot to play or to confirm your own opinion—and to keep you from making a mistake when you’re about to make a bad choice. But it can lead to trouble when the player definitely wants to do one thing but the caddie, either subtly or not so subtly, lobbies for a different choice. In the end the decision is up to the player, and the caddie always ends up telling the player he’s got the right club in his hand and the right shot in mind—even if it’s not the club or shot the caddie was suggesting. That’s the caddie’s job, of course, to give the player a positive thought. But, really, don’t you think the player can see through that? You’ve got to figure they know the caddie is just saying what he has to say.

In any case, player-caddie discussions caught by microphones give us a nice window into what a player is thinking and what type of shot he is trying to play, at least when he is facing a truly confounding situation instead of taking all day to make a comparatively simple choice. And while they are guided by precise numbers, these discussions show that today’s players aren’t devoid of feel or shotmaking ability. The type of shot they are going to play—fade, draw, knockdown shot, low-spinning short iron, etc.—is generally one of the variables.

The rise in consulting does show that players are less self-reliant than they used to be, which goes along with their dependence on swing coaches and mental coaches (there are notable exceptions, of course, like Bubba Watson). And it shows that caddies have a bigger role than ever. We are seeing more and more caddies who are accomplished players or pros, and a big reason for that is they are better able to understand and appreciate the options their man faces on each shot. The old expression that the caddie’s job is to “show up, keep up, and shut up” is no longer true. Now the player wants to know—often in great detail—what they caddie thinks.

Bubba Watson wasn't the first with a miraculous escape from the trees on the 10th hole, but his shot netted a victory. Photo copyright John Korduner/Icon SMI.

Louis Oosthuizen’s double eagle at Augusta National on Sunday conjured memories of Gene Sarazen’s “Shot Heard Round the World” in the 1935 Masters. Bubba Watson’s playoff shot on the 10th hole also had similarities with a great shot from the past, but one that has been forgotten.

I only know about it from the research for my just-published book, Making the Masters: Bobby Jones and the Birth of America’s Greatest Golf Tournament. This shot, also an escape from the woods on the 10th hole, was struck in the first Masters of 1934 and was hit by Craig Wood.

Wood entered the final round two strokes behind leader Horton Smith. What is now the 10th hole played as the first in 1934 because the nines were reversed, and Wood started by pushing his tee shot into the trees on the right. His attempted recovery hit a tree and bounced deeper into the forest.

“Well, there he goes out of the tournament,” a spectator was heard to say. “And I’d just laid a bet on him.”

Bob Harlow in a tournament recap in PGA Magazine wrote that “it looked impossible to reach the green. It was like playing a ball through a jungle and hoping it would miss everything. There were tall pine trees with huge trunks; dogwood, magnolia, oaks and holly trees, and small bushes. There was not even an opening back to the fairway.”

If you remember Watson’s situation, this sounds like what he would have faced on a direct line to the hole. But while Bubba had an opening toward the proper fairway, Harlow speculated that Wood would have to play backward to the adjacent ninth (18th by the current numbers), which would still leave him with a blind shot over trees but sufficient room to loft it over them. But Wood took out an 8-iron and aimed at the green. His shot somehow made it through the trees, hit on the embankment above the green, rolled down, and ended up an inch from the hole.

“The crowd gasped in astonishment and then burst into a cheer,” Harlow wrote. “It was more than a million to one. You can go out there and play shots from that spot until you are too old to any longer swing the club and never get one as close to the hole as Wood’s ball.” Harlow, who later founded Golf World magazine, wasn’t prone to hyperbole, so we can take his account at face value.

Watson’s hooked gap wedge from the trees to within 15 feet of the hole naturally gets greater points for importance because it basically won the tournament for him. But Wood’s shot was big, too, because it kept him in contention. Ultimately, he finished second, one stroke back. If he had made the double bogey, triple bogey—or even worse—that it looked like he was headed for, he might have finished fifth or sixth.

It’s fair to say that Watson’s shot took more skill. His opening was toward the bunker in the fairway some 35 yards short of the green, so in order to reach the putting surface he had to make a wedge hook more than 40 yards while hitting it with control and avoiding some branches. It’s a shot that was not only beyond imagination for the average golfer, it was a shot that not even many pros could have pulled off.

Wood didn’t have to curve his shot. He might have seen an opening that nobody else saw. Pros have a way of doing that. So it might have been a matter of skill to send the ball through that opening. But it’s possible that he decided to just hit and hope, and got lucky. The amazing thing is that on a shot that observers thought impossible, he not only hit the green but finished an inch from the hole!

If Wood had won the tournament, his great escape would have been remembered as one of the greatest in Masters history. Instead, it fell into the dustbin of history. What’s more, Wood the very next year became the victim of the greatest shot in Masters history, perhaps the greatest shot in golf history. Gene Sarazen tied him by holing a 4-wood for a double eagle on the 15th hole of the final round, making up a three-stroke deficit with a single swing of the club. Sarazen went on to win in a playoff the next day, making Wood a runner-up in each of the first two Masters (he would win in 1941).

Oosthuizen’s double eagle with a 4-iron from 253 downhill yards moved him into the lead. But it came much earlier in the final round, on the second hole. He and Sarazen both faced the problem—a welcome one—of trying to keep their composure after the double eagle and take care of the business at hand.

Sarazen quickly was brought down to earth with the realization that he needed three pars to tie Wood, who had already finished. “I had to hole two tricky four-foot putts and I was afraid I would blow both and spill everything,” Sarazen said after the round. “I honestly think those last three holes were the heaviest pressure I’ve ever known in golf. I knew that if I missed one after that [double eagle] two I would be just a mug.”

Sarazen made those four-footers on the 17th and 18th holes and won a 36-hole playoff the next day by five strokes, so he was a hero instead of a mug.

Oosthuizen had nearly a whole round to play, but he almost gave the lead right back. He didn’t look like himself on the next hole, No. 3, where he hit three awful shots before thankfully holing a 12-foot downhill putt for a par.

“It was tough the next five holes to get my head around it and just play the course,” Oosthuizen said after the round. He didn’t make a birdie until the 13th hole, but managed to shoot a 69 and, like Sarazen, reach a playoff.

This playoff was 34 holes shorter than the one in 1935, and Oosthuizen came out on the wrong side of it partly because of Watson’s shot for the ages (his own bogey on the second extra hole didn’t help). But his double eagle was seen by millions on television, so it won’t be forgotten.

Phil Mickelson's stated strategy was odd, but his execution may have really been to blame for his costly triple bogey on Masters Sunday. Photo copyright Todd Kirkland/Icon SMI.

No player makes you shake your head more often than Phil Mickelson, whether it’s in wonderment at stellar play, like his 30 on the back nine on Saturday at the Masters, or in exasperation at some disaster that has cost him a major title, like his triple bogey at the fourth hole on Sunday. That triple bogey wasn’t just a head-shaker, it was a head-scratcher. Very little about it made sense, especially Mickelson’s post-round explanation.

Mickelson’s defining bad moments generally fall into two categories—excessive risk taking or over-thinking. Watching this one live, it seemed like the former. Ian Baker-Finch speculated on CBS that the mistake was shooting for the flag on the narrow left front tongue of the green. And then, of course, there was the curious decision to try a right-handed shot from the jungle instead of declaring the ball unplayable and going back to the tee.

Based on what Mickelson said after the round, it looked like over-thinking. The flag was on the left of the green, but he was trying to go left of the flag, he said, even if it meant missing the green. That was a curious strategy (more on that later) if that’s what he was really trying to do. But after going back and looking at a DVR of the broadcast, I think the main causes of the triple bogey were plain-old bad execution and bad luck—with some excessive risks and questionable strategy thrown in.

CBS cut to the tee shot in mid-discussion between Mickelson and caddie Jim Mackay. “I want to get it to the back shelf,” Mickelson said. That would be the back shelf of the green. Nothing about wanting to keep it left. It’s possible we missed that part, but the “back shelf” comment indicates he was trying to hit the green, not aiming at the fringe or left bunker as he said after the round. The rest of the conversation centered on club selection. Mackay told Phil to wait until the wind was hurting because that’s what was needed with the 4-iron he had in his hands.

I froze the action with Mickelson standing over the ball. It was a good view from directly behind the ball, and it looked to me like he was aiming at the flag or perhaps between the flag and the left edge of the green. Looking at the shot in slow-motion, it appeared that the ball left the clubface flying at the flag or a just few feet to the left of it (camera angles can be tricky but the angle was only slight). The ball ended up hitting the grandstand a good 25 or 30 yards left of that. The shot was a huge fade, perhaps pushed that way by a wind that was slightly quartering. Perhaps he was lining up at the flag and trying to fade it to the fringe or bunker, but the result of the swing was a fade more severe than anyone would plan unless they were bending it around trees; it was simply a poor shot.

“Tactically, I hit that shot where I had to hit it, which is at the bunker. Anything left of the pin is fine but the right side is almost a sure bogey,” Mickelson said later.

Actually, the shot didn’t go “at” the bunker. It hit the grandstand on a line a good 10 or 15 yards left of that bunker, not where he was aiming. Perhaps after the round Mickelson was in denial about making a bad swing, choosing instead to say he hit it where he wanted to.

If that was his strategy (and, again, from the videotape it didn’t appear to be), it didn’t make a lot of sense. Mickelson said after the round that anything to the right of the flag, even on the green, was almost a sure bogey. But, as other players showed, if you landed the ball a little bit to the right of the flag the slope would take it to the left directly behind the hole from which point it was a fairly easy two-putt (the tee shot was nearly impossible to get close, but that’s because there was almost no way to stop the ball on the front of the green). That was the best play.

Aiming left was “strategically where you have to play it to that pin on that hole,” Mickelson said. You didn’t have to play it that way. In fact, it’s safe to say that, if he did play it that way, Mickelson was the only one. Playing it toward the green, 42 of the 61 other players managed to make par or birdie (only one birdie but 41 pars).

The right bunker was indeed a no-no. And it’s true it’s a hard putt if you go too far right, but still you should be able to cozy it down to no more than six feet past and have a good chance to make the uphill putt.

While it wasn’t a hard bunker shot from the left bunker (as Mickelson showed with his fifth shot), let’s say a 70 percent chance of an up and down, are your chances of two-putting from the right side really worse than that? And if you miss the bunker, you could go careening down a side slope to near the grandstand—not as easy an up and down as Mickelson tried to make it sound.

If you miss wildly, as Mickelson did, and end up in the grandstand, you get to drop in that same place, where bogey is more likely than par. Or you could hit the railing of the grandstand and careen to the left into the bamboo (yes, there’s bamboo over there) and underlying vegetation. That was a bad break, which is where bad luck entered the equation.

Next came a questionable call. Since the two-club-length option under the unplayable ball rule wouldn’t get him a free backswing, it came down to two choices: Go back to the tee with a stroke-and-distance penalty or play it the ball as it lay. The latter option had several strikes against it. The ball was lying in some wiry growth, from which you might be sure of successfully hitting out of if you could take a hard swing. But Mickelson had almost no backswing because of some tall foliage, meaning he could generate little clubhead speed. And he was trying to make contact with a clubface that had nothing like the usual loft or hitting surface because he had to turn it upside down and play right-handed.

IF he could even pull that off and move the ball a few yards, he would be left with an uphill shot over a bunker to a narrow tongue of green from an area devoid of grass where the spectators had been walking. It’s an oxymoron, but the best way I can think of to describe the lie is soft hardpan. It’s hard to see how this third shot would really give him a better chance than hitting three from the tee.

Mickelson’s mindset about the tee shot—building it up to seem harder than it really is—worked against him here. More than two-thirds of the players made par on the hole, so going back to the tee meant a better chance at a five than a six. Yet Mickelson said after the round that going back to the tee “probably” meant making a six.

So, the BEST-case scenario was no better than going back to the tee. And if he couldn’t pull off the unlikely shot, he was in considerably worse shape than taking stroke-and-distance. As it was, it took him two strokes to extricate the ball, leaving him in a position from which he was going to make either a six or a seven.

Mickelson dumped that shot in the bunker. From there, he got up and down for his triple bogey, like Jean Van de Velde did on the 72nd hole of the 1999 British Open when he was victimized by a metal railing.

It was a sand save that was too little, too late. Perhaps the only good thing about it is that Mickelson ended up two strokes, not one, out of a playoff. So the Lefty-hits-righty decision didn’t cost him a spot in the playoff, though the poor tee shot and railing ricochet did.

Things are looking up for Tiger Woods coming into Augusta thanks to improved driving. Photo copyright Cliff Welch/Icon SMI.

Tiger Woods may no longer be bothered by “the big miss.” Oh, he’s no doubt still plenty bothered by his former teacher Hank Haney’s book The Big Miss. But he seems to be overcoming the wildness off the tee that the title refers to.

Through the first five tournaments he’s played in this year, Woods ranks 18th on the PGA Tour in hitting fairways. Granted, that’s a small sample size (it’s actually four tournaments, since full stats aren’t kept at the Match Play). He did have some four-tournament stretches like that under Haney from 2004-9, but not many.

There were four such stretches, to be precise, where he was better in driving accuracy than the 67.94 percent fairways hit so far in 2012. One of those included the 2006 British Open, where he was teeing off with irons, so that doesn’t really count. The others were the 2007 PGA Championship through Tour Championship (three wins and a second) and two stretches in 2009 (Players through AT&T and PGA Championship through BMW).

So, to be fair, Woods actually was making progress against the “big miss” in his last full year under Haney, 2009, when he ranked 86th in hitting fairways before everything fell apart for a while, starting with a wild drive into a fire hydrant. Overall, though, his average driving accuracy ranking under Haney from 2004-9 was 153rd. Under the tutelage of Butch Harmon from 1997-2003 he averaged 101st.

In a lost, injury-plagued 2011 under Sean Foley, Woods would have ranked 186th if he had played enough rounds to qualify. But a lack of practice time due to Achilles and knee injuries kept him from grooving the swing changes. It looks like he’s got things straightened out now. Not that we can expect Woods to keep up his current pace. It’s virtually impossible for a long hitter to rank near the top in hitting fairways (in 2011, the best driving accuracy ranking among the top 20 in distance was Keegan Bradley at 96th). But as long as he shows significant improvement over recent years in finding fairways, Woods will have a better chance of becoming a big winner again.

Putting is also a key, and there are good signs there, too. Again, it’s early, and there is so much variation from week to week in putting stats that it’s tough to make a big deal out of small sample sizes. But so far in 2011, Woods ranks sixth in strokes gained putting, gaining .727 strokes per round despite his poor showing on Sunday at Pebble Beach.

He has tightened up in scrambling, too. Long renowned as a wizard around the greens, Woods stunningly slipped to 166th and 141st in scrambling the last two years—an overlooked factor in his decline—but is back in the top five where he used to be (fourth, saving par 68.42 percent of the time when he misses the green compared to 54.97 last year).

The lone remaining area where Woods is still struggling so far in 2012 is in his full wedges. He ranks outside the top 100 in both greens in regulation and proximity to the hole in approaches from 75 to 100 and 100 to 125 yards.

That could hurt him at Augusta National’s third hole in the Masters this week, where the tiny plateau green is one of the most difficult targets for a wedge shot in golf. Or if he hits a bad drive and is forced to lay up on a par five. But that could happen less if his driving accuracy holds up, and he might make fewer visits to the trees on the par fours, too.

Woods’s efforts at Augusta since his last victory in 2005 could be titled “the near miss.” He’s had two seconds, a third, two fourths, and two sixths, finishing between two and five strokes behind every year. While Augusta’s tree planting campaign didn’t help him, Woods’s biggest problems have come on the greens, particularly in final rounds—even when, overall, he was still one of the best putters in the game in 2006-9.

As a result, he’s still chasing Jack Nicklaus’s total of six Masters titles, just like he’s chasing Jack’s total of 18 major championships. But if we compare the records of Woods and Nicklaus at the Masters through age 35, they are so similar it’s almost eerie.

Wins: Nicklaus 5, Woods 4
2nds: Nicklaus 2, Woods 2
3rds: Nicklaus 1, Woods 1
Top fives: Nicklaus 10, Woods 10
Top 10s: Nicklaus 12, Woods 12
Top 25s: Nicklaus 15, Woods 15
Cuts made: Nicklaus 15, Woods 16
Appearances: Nicklaus 17, Woods 17

That’s identical except one more made cut for Woods and, in the most important category, one more win for Nicklaus. But that difference only came about at age 35 thanks to Jack’s 1975 victory, and he won only one Masters the rest of the way, 11 years later. So there’s still room for Woods to catch Nicklaus.

Speaking of Nicklaus, it will be interesting to see if Woods can trace Jack’s evolution as a driver. Like Woods, Nicklaus overpowered courses—and the opposition—in his younger days. Stats weren’t kept for driving accuracy then, but it’s unlikely Nicklaus was near the top in his early years.

The PGA Tour began keeping stats in various categories of the game in 1980 when Nicklaus was 40 years old. By then he wasn’t the longest hitter, but he was long enough to rank 10th in driving distance (at 269.0 yards, by the way). Whatever power he had lost was more than made up for by a gain in accuracy—Nicklaus ranked 13th that year in hitting fairways. Nicklaus’ combination of rankings of 10th and 13th for a total of 23 in the total driving stat is still by far the best ever in the 32 years stats have been kept.

Woods is no longer in the elite bomber class of Bubba Watson, J.B. Holmes, Alvaro Quiros, Dustin Johnson, Robert Garrigus, et. al. If he’s as wild off the tee as those guys, he’ll be in trouble as he approaches 40. But if he can keep it in the short grass the way he’s done so far this year—and the way Nicklaus did later in his career—he’ll be OK.

TIger Woods claimed his 72nd career PGA Tour victory at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Photo copyright Cliff Welch/Icon SMI.

Tiger Woods’ win at the Arnold Palmer Invitational this past weekend showed that his game is back and that he will certainly get the one victory he needs to catch Jack Nicklaus.

That’s right, one victory. For all the talk that about whether Woods will be able to win the four majors he needs to match Nicklaus’s total of 18, the fact that Tiger now has 72 career PGA Tour wins—one less than Jack—has been virtually ignored.

Likewise, the fact that Woods is well within striking distance of Sam Snead’s PGA Tour record of 82 career victories is perhaps the most underplayed story of this era. Yes, major championships carry the most importance because that’s where all of the top players gather and that’s where history is made. More than anyone, it’s Nicklaus who planted the supremacy of majors in everyone’s minds—including Woods, who from an early age had 18 majors as his primary target.

That’s all well and good. But the PGA Tour’s all-time victory record is an important historic milestone, and the pursuit of it shouldn’t be relegated to the merest afterthought.

Woods actually has a much better chance to pass Snead than to pass Nicklaus. The five majors needed to break Jack’s record are a much tougher proposition than the 11 victories needed to pass Snead.

Jack’s milestone is the harder to break because the record shows that Nicklaus elevated his game for majors more than Woods has. They actually have a nearly identical winning percentage in majors through Woods’ current age, but Woods is winning non-majors at a higher rate.

Woods has entered 265 events as a pro, winning 72 for an extraordinary winning average of .272. Through the same age (36 and just under three months), Nicklaus had entered 293 events with 60 wins for a winning average of .205. But in major championships, they are nearly identical. Woods is 14-for-56 as a pro, Nicklaus through the same age was 14-for-57 (the difference being that at the time Nicklaus had just failed to win the 1976 Masters; he and Woods both won 14 times in their first 56 tries).

In non-majors, Woods has 58 victories in 209 events, a winning average of .278. That’s better than his major championship winning average of .250. When you take the strength of field into consideration, you can still make a good case that Woods has raised his game in the majors.

But Nicklaus really raised his game. Through Woods’ current age, Jack had won 46 of 236 non-majors, a winning average of .195 compared to his major winning average of .246.

The comparison through Woods’ current age is most appropriate since Nicklaus, like nearly every player, declined after age 35. Taking it through age 46, when he won his final major and final tournament, Nicklaus had 18 wins in 100 majors (.180) and 55 wins in 350 non-majors (.157).

The good news for Woods in his major pursuit is that he’s exactly on pace with Nicklaus through their current age. So he’s got a reasonable chance of catching or passing him even with the inevitable physical decline. Of course, physical condition is a bigger question mark for Woods at this stage, after his knee surgeries and Achilles problems, than it was for Nicklaus. And is winning one tournament after a two-and-a-half year drought enough to say that Woods is “back”? It depends what you mean by “back.” He’s certainly a threat again, but it will take multiple wins and a major to demonstrate that he’s all the way back.

In any case, Woods is on a much better pace to catch Snead as the PGA Tour’s all-time winner, though he (and most other people) will apparently consider that only a weak consolation prize if he falls short of the major mark.

Woods also has a chance to catch Snead for most victories in a PGA Tour event. Snead holds that with eight wins at Greensboro. Woods now has seven victories at the Bay Hill/Arnold Palmer Invitational and he already had seven at the WGC-Bridgestone (formerly NEC) at Firestone. For that matter, he also has six wins at the WGC-Cadillac (formerly Amex and CA) and the Buick Invitational and five at the Western Open/BMW Championship. He hasn’t won any major more than four times (Masters and PGA Championship), but he has done a good job spreading them out with at least three wins in all of them.

In fact, the group of events where Woods has shined the brightest are the WGCs. He has entered 36 of those (counting only the ones that count as official PGA Tour events) and won 16 for a winning average of .444. But he’s had the most trouble at the near-major Players Championship: He’s only 1-for-14 at TPC Sawgrass.