JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM

Numbers Alone Expose a Bad Lie (Thomas Boswell, May 20, 2003, Washington Post)

In discussions of what Annika Sorenstam will shoot this week in the Colonial, only one aspect of her performance is overlooked: the facts.

You would think that no human had ever before moved back and played from a different set of tees. Actually, few things are more common in golf.

You would think that no one had ever calibrated the difference in difficulty between one set of tees and another, then, after examining thousands of rounds, reduced that difference to a simple number. Yet exactly such numbers are on the scorecards of almost every first-rate golf course.

You would think that nobody had ever noticed that men on the Champions Tour (formerly the Senior Tour) play on courses of similar length to many LPGA events. In fact, there's no great difference in how a normal Champions Tour event and many top LPGA events are "set up."

Given the parallels between conditions on the Champions Tour and the LPGA Tour, you'd think everybody would intuitively ask: "Well, how many strokes higher do Tom Watson and Ben Crenshaw shoot when they take a crack at the PGA Tour? Annika will shoot about that much higher, too."

But, so far, nobody has asked such questions. Certainly no one in Las Vegas, where the "over-under" line on Sorenstam's first round at Colonial is 76.5. The guys in Vegas better polish up that line before all the female golfers in America find out about it and end up owning the Strip.

Even Sorenstam couldn't hold her tongue when told about that cynical gambler's estimate of her ability. "I can do better than that," she told lpga.com.

By any and all available statistical methods, it is reasonable to assume that Sorenstam's average score, if she played the PGA Tour, would be about 71, perhaps 71.5 -- compared to her stroke average of 68.7 on the LPGA Tour last year. Above 72 is almost out of the question.

In other words, if Sorenstam played the PGA Tour full time, she'd probably crack the top 100, make the cut about half the time and, perhaps a couple of times in her career, win a regular weekly Tour event.

All of the data available, and there's a ton of it, indicates that Sorenstam, whose average drive this season is 275 yards, should feel right at home at Colonial. She's not out of her league. Actually, she's probably right in the middle of it in terms of talent. She's a typical PGA Tour pro. Most likely, this is the first time she's been in the right golf league for her. On the LPGA Tour, where she won 11 times '02, she's just much too good.

Who is she like statistically? Probably a Tour player such as 5-foot-9 Jay Williamson. He had a 71.38 scoring average last year and had an average drive of 275.8 yards. He's finished 125, 106, 109 and 144 on the money list the last four years and made the cut 47 percent of the time. He has never won on Tour, but he was once fourth at Pebble Beach and has been a contender at the Kemper Open twice. Last year, he was ninth
here.

Who the heck is Jay Williamson? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 21, 2003 7:46 AM