Scorecasting (11 page)

(AND NOT FOR THE REASON YOU THINK)
 

It started with his father. In one of the great money quotes in the annals of sports,
Earl Woods confided to
Sports Illustrated
that his son, Tiger, not merely would transcend golf, or sports, or even race but would transcend civilization. “Tiger will do more than any man in history to change the course of humanity,” Earl said without a trace of irony. “He’s qualified … to accomplish miracles. He’s the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don’t know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He’ll have the power to impact nations. Not people.
Nations
. The world is just getting a taste of his power.” The year was 1996, and Tiger, age 20 at the time, had yet to win his first Major title.

Instead of dismissing these claims as the messianic ranting of another crazily ambitious sports parent—if Tiger was Jesus, what did that make Earl?—many actually stopped to consider the prophecy. Could it be that Old Man Woods had it right? In the years that followed, Tiger did little to discredit his father’s prediction.
By his mid-twenties, Tiger had single-handedly hijacked professional golf and, with the retirement of Michael Jordan, was on his way to becoming the brightest star in the entire sports cosmos.

When Tiger played, he usually won. When he didn’t play, events had the thrill of Christmas without Santa. At this writing, he’s won 14 Major titles for his gilded career and, despite a recent slide, still is a good bet to eclipse
Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18. Through 2009, Tiger had won roughly 30 percent of the events he’d entered. For the sake of comparison, Nicklaus won 73 titles in 594 events, or 12.3 percent.

It’s not just the relentless winning that has perpetuated the Tiger-as-Chosen-One mythology. It’s
how
he has won. His game was unparalleled. His physical gifts were matched by his neurological gifts. He was the best at driving and the best at putting. He blew the field away; he trailed and then rallied on Sunday. He won with wise and conservative play; he won with brazen, you-must-be-kidding-me shot-making. He prevailed at the 2008 U.S. Open playing on what we later learned was a shredded knee. He performed miracles such as the famous chip shot on the sixteenth hole at the 2005 Masters, an absurd piece of handiwork that defied all prevailing laws of geometry and physics.

Though Earl Woods passed away in 2006, over the years others joined his “Messiah chorus.”
Esquire
magazine described Tiger as “Yahweh with a short game.” The commentator
Johnny Miller once declared, “Like Moses, [Tiger] parted the Red Sea and everyone else just drowned.” Even Woods’s mother, Kultida, seemed to buy in, at one point remarking: “He can hold everyone together. He is the Universal Child.” Inevitably perhaps, a website,
tigerwoodsisgod.com
, “celebrating the emergence of the true messiah,” came into being. (The site’s “Ten Tiger Commandments” include the directive “Thou shalt not covet Tiger’s game.”)

Charles Barkley, always good for the unvarnished truth, declared that other PGA Tour players “are afraid of black Jesus.” Perhaps because it’s easier to rationalize the ritual butt kickings, check out how other golfers characterize Woods. “He is something supernatural,” declared
Tom Watson. “He is superhuman,”
asserted Paul Azinger. The apotheosis, so to speak, of Tiger deification came a few years ago when EA Sports made a golf video game. On one of the holes, Woods removes his Nikes, rolls up his slacks, and walks into a pond to hit a shot that naturally lands in the cup. It’s known as the Tiger Woods Jesus Shot.

On Thanksgiving night in 2009, Woods was injured in what was first described as a “car accident.” The car accident quickly morphed into a train wreck, a sensational sex scandal that, perhaps you’ve heard, linked Woods to an unceasing string of women—porn stars, diner hostesses, reality show rejects—none of them his wife. Apart from the sheer tawdriness, the scandal had “legs” because of Tiger’s starring role. Headlines the likes of “Tiger’s Harem Grows” were jarringly at odds with a figure perceived as immortal. As Woods sought to assure us in his first public statement: “I’m human and I’m not perfect.”
^*

But even before the scandal there existed conclusive proof that Tiger Woods is in fact mortal. What’s more, this proof comes from the way he golfs. Tiger putts the same way you and I do. He’s immeasurably more accurate, fluid, and poised, and his scores are much lower. But at least Tiger is subject to the same faulty thought process as we are.

Recall
loss aversion, the principle that we dislike losing a dollar more than we enjoy earning a dollar. As a result of loss aversion, we change our behavior—sometimes irrationally—paying too much attention to purchase price and avoiding short-term loss at the expense of long-term gain. In theory, tax purposes notwithstanding, what we paid for something is irrelevant. All that should matter is what it’s worth today and what it will be worth in the future. But we don’t behave that way. Investors routinely sell winning stocks too early and hold on to the dogs for too long. Home owners often do everything in their power to avoid selling their property for less than the purchase price. Texas hold ’em players
depart from their strategy when their stacks of chips diminish. And
golfers, even the pros, neglect their overall score to avoid a loss on a single hole.

How do we know this? A few years ago, two professors, then at Wharton,
Devin Pope and
Maurice Schweitzer, began looking at the putting tendencies among 421 golfers on the PGA Tour in more than 230 tournaments. Using over 2.5 million laser-measured putts from tour events held between 2004 and 2009, they measured the success rate of nearly identical putts for birdie, par, and bogey. The idea was simple. Each hole on a golf course has a “par” score—the number of strokes you’re expected to take before depositing the ball in the hole. A shot in excess of par is, of course, a bogey. One shot less than par is a birdie. Put another way: A bogey is a “loss” and a birdie is a “gain” on that hole.

In golf, however, the only measurement of true significance is the
total score
at the end of all 18 holes, so a player shouldn’t care whether he is putting for a birdie or par or a bogey on a hole. The idea is to maneuver the ball into the hole in as few strokes as possible on
every hole, no matter what
. Analogize this to your retirement portfolio. You simply want the most favorable total at the end. It shouldn’t matter how you got there.

The study, however, found something peculiar. When a golfer on the PGA Tour tries to make a birdie, he is less successful than when he lines up the
exact same putt
for par. The researchers were careful to measure the exact same distance (accurate to within a centimeter) of each putt, from the exact same location on the green, and from the exact same hole. In other words, they were looking at literally the
same
putt for birdie versus par from the same location on the green on the same hole. Even Tiger Woods—so unflappable, so mentally impregnable—changes his behavior based on the situation and putts appreciably better for par than he does for a birdie, evaluating decisions in the short term rather than in the aggregate.

The explanation? The same loss aversion that affects Wall Street investors, home sellers, and consumers informs putting on
the PGA Tour. Professional golfers are so concerned with a loss that they are more aggressive in avoiding a bogey than they are in scoring a birdie. Remember the dieters who weren’t motivated to lose weight until they faced the possibility of paying a $1,000 fine? Golfers operate the same way. Dangle the “bonus” of a birdie—the gain of a stroke—and it’s all well and good. Says Pope, “It’s as if they say,
Let’s get this close to the hole and see what happens.
” But threatened with the “deduction” of a bogey—the loss of a stroke—they summon their best effort. “They’re telling themselves,” says Pope, “
This one I gotta make.
”

The professors also found something interesting to confirm the more aggressive behavior on par versus birdie putts. When professional golfers missed their putts for a birdie, they tended to leave the ball disproportionately short rather than long. This was evidence of their conservative approach. They were content to set up an easy par by leaving it short and not risk overshooting, which might leave a more difficult putt for par. When the same putts for par were missed, it wasn’t because they fell short.

The two researchers also tried to rule out all other potential explanations by controlling for the day of the tournament, how far off a golfer was from the leader board, how the previous holes were played, and what number hole was being played. None of those factors changed the tendency to putt differently for par than for a birdie.

The authors estimated that when the average golfer overvalues individual holes at the expense of his overall score, it costs him one stroke for each 72-hole tournament he enters. That may not seem like much, but most golfers would kill to improve their game by one stroke. For a top golfer like Woods, this mismanaged risk has the potential to cost him more than $1 million in prize money each year.

Tiger even appears to be aware of his loss aversion. As he told the
New York Times
, “Anytime you make big par putts, I think it’s more important to make those than birdie putts. You don’t ever want to drop a shot. The psychological difference between
dropping a shot and making a birdie, I just think it’s bigger to make a par putt.”

It’s somehow reassuring that Tiger is, at least in this respect, decidedly human. However, Pope has a point when he says: “If Tiger Woods is biased when he plays
golf, what hope do the rest of us have?”

This was thrown into sharp relief at the 2009 PGA Championship at the Hazeltine National Golf Club in Minnesota. Heading into the final round, Woods appeared to be cruising inexorably to still another Major championship. It wasn’t just that he was carving up the course and leading the pack, eight shots under par. His unlikely challenger, Yang Yong-eun, Americanized to
Y. E. Yang, was unknown even to hard-core golf fans.

Yang’s anonymity was such that television researchers and media members scrambled to find basic biographical info. It turned out he was the son of South Korean rice farmers and didn’t discover golf until he was 19. Until then, Yang had been an aspiring bodybuilder, but he injured his knee and channeled his frustrations at a local driving range. Teaching himself golf mostly by watching instructional videos, Yang was able to break par by his twenty-second birthday. Unfortunately, that was also the year he was required to show up for mandatory military duty. When his service ended, he returned to golf and slowly worked his way up the sports org chart, from the Korean regional tour to the Asian tour to qualifying school, eventually earning his card on the PGA Tour.

Heading into 2009, Yang, then 37, was making a living but not much more. He had never won a PGA event and had posted only one top-ten finish. Even at Hazeltine, he was lucky to make the cut after shooting a shaky 73 in the first round. (Tiger had shot a 67.) Now here he was in a showdown against Tiger Woods for a Major. Even Yang admitted that his overarching goal was to not embarrass himself. “My heart nearly exploded from being so nervous,” he recalled.

But under the principle of loss aversion, in the face of loss, we
perform more aggressively. Sure enough, facing an almost certain loss, Yang could let it rip and play with devil-may-care abandon. Woods, by contrast, was facing an almost certain gain—a lead, an inexperienced challenger, and, above all perhaps, a 14-for-14 record of closing out Majors when leading after 54 holes. But in the face of gain, we perform conservatively, more concerned about “don’t-mess-this-up” defense than about “gotta-get-it-done” offense. In essence, the entire round was one big birdie putt for Woods.

You may remember the remarkable outcome. Playing with a striking absence of aggression, Woods shot three shots above par, a score of 75 that included an astounding 33 putts. “I felt that with my lead, I erred on the side of caution most of the time,” Woods conceded. Yang, in contrast, played with what
Sports Illustrated
called “carefree alacrity.” He smiled, shrugged, and went for the pin every time. A stroke ahead on the eighteenth hole, Yang continued to play with a level of audacity that suggested that he still believed he was facing a loss. After a solid drive, he was 210 yards from the hole. On the approach, he used his hybrid club to try to loft the ball over a tree and onto the green. It was a shot as intrepid as it was difficult. And Yang nailed it, maneuvering the ball within eight feet of the hole. He putted out for a sensational birdie and won the tournament, becoming the first Asian to capture a Major championship in golf. And with the help of loss aversion, he’d humanized Tiger Woods.