Tiger Woods will play in the 2015 Masters Tournament after missing last year’s event with back issues. His decision to play the first major of the year is enriched by the fact that Woods has not played in a PGA Tour event since February when he withdrew from the Farmers Insurance Open in San Diego.
The excitement generated by Wood’s addition to the 79th Masters comes after a series of miscues while trying to return to the form that made him the number one ranked player in the world. Injuries, personal problems and other issues have dropped Tiger out of the World’s top 100 for the first time since 1979 when he won his first Masters by a record score. Once a weekend machine, he holds the record for consecutive cuts made at 142, Tiger has struggled of late having played the weekend just once since last year.
The anticipation of how Tiger will fair after such a long layoff from competitive golf against the best players in the world on the fable fairways and greens of the Augusta National is a question everyone connected to the game of golf has been asking leading up to this week.
How that drama plays out remains to be seen. But my question this week is this: Has Tiger Woods done enough, in his career, to be called the best player who ever played?
Here is my take on that question.
Any investigation into greatest in the business of golf has to start with major championships. You can blame Bobby Jones for that. In Golf’s infancy, which was the early part of the twentieth century, it was no contest. Bobby Jones was the greatest who ever lived. 4 US Opens, 3 Open Championships, 5 US Amateurs and 1 British Amateur. Bobby Jones won thirteen major tournaments during this span including all four of the “major championships” in 1930. The “Grand Slam” it was called, setting a standard for golf posterity, earning him a ticker tape parade down Wall Street in New York City and golf immortality.
Mr. Jones promptly retired from competitive golf, retired to his law profession and set about building his own country club that would become the Augusta National home to the Masters. In time, the Masters and the PGA Championship would replace the US and British Amateurs as majors in golf jargon while professional golf supplemented amateur golf as the dominion of the best players in the world.
If major championships are the sole standard for rating players, and they are, then Jack Nicklaus with 18 professional majors is the clear winner. Tiger Woods is second with 14, Bobby Jones next with 13; Ben Hogan and Gary Player are tied for fourth with 9 each, Tom Watson is sixth with 8 and four players are tied with 7: Arnold Palmer, Gene Sarzen, Sam Snead and Harry Vardon, all legends in the game of golf.
But here is my take: If you just use the professional championship, i.e., The US Open, Open Championship, PGA Championship and the Masters, then Bobby Jones only won seven. You have to discount his US and British Amateurs, which, in my mind, in blatantly unfair seeing as he was the one who set the original standard in 1930 with the Grand Slam.
So here’s the deal, if you use just the professional majors as the standard of greatness then Jack is the best to have ever played with Tiger second. And until Tiger beats Jack’s record of eighteen then Jack’s the best. No question. But, and here’s the rub, if we count Bobby Jones’s six amateur championships towards his total as history does, then you have to count Jack’s 2 US Amateurs as well. That gives him twenty.
But if you count Jack’s 2 US Amateurs then you also have to count Tiger’s 6 Amateurs. People forget that Tiger won 3 US Junior Amateurs and 3 US Amateurs in a row. This gives him a total of 20 golfing majors, presenting a statistical tie with Jack Nicklaus as the best to have ever played and don’t think for a moment that Tiger doesn’t know this.
There is no doubt that Tiger must regain the brilliance that once made him the number one player in the world if golf fans are to renew the conversation about who is the best player in history. There is also no doubt that, for the present moment, it’s between him and Jack Nicklaus. They are head and shoulders above everyone else. What’s exciting is that conversation could start this week at Augusta.
At the Masters, I’m Jeff Waters