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Every golf course is unique. There are several
main reasons for this fact.
Some can't be changed.
1. Design.
2. Maintenance.
3. General weather.
Some can be changed.
4. Preparation for play.
A. Fairways
B. Greens.
C. Pin hole
placement.
5. Tournament Management
of variables
6. Tournament Excitement!
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Tournaments set their goals and
control excitement by what players and how many of
the best players they attract. Some do this by
restricting the number of players by prestige or invitation
or conducting exhibition games and some do it by
setting the size of the purse. "Skins" and
"made for TV events" are exhibition games, just
like the Winston Open and the Budweiser Shoot- Out in
NASCAR, both of which are designed to be exhibitions
of the stars, similar to basketball and baseball
All-Star games. None of which count towards any
championship. They are just for fun.
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The courses also sets par. This is an arbitrary number based on
someone's personal opinion. Someone decides, based on yardage,
that this should be a par 3, 4 or 5. But the course can place the
cup such that a par 3 really requires 4 strokes, while a par 4
only takes 3. Witness the recent 2004 Open where the green was
rolled so hard it was like concrete and the cup placed so close to
a down slope, virtually every player's ball rolled 50 feet away!
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The variables include how short they cut the grass, where they place the pin hole
etc. The governing associations adjust for how
easy or hard the tournament is set up with
"degree of difficulty", "strength of
field" and "slope". These all involve
someone's personal opinion. To us that is not the way
to determine championships. That is how one of our
most favorite sports, Olympic Ice Skating, is
determined. Which is the best example of subjective
opinion gone bad in all of sports!
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We have avoided the
tournament making one easier or harder (degree of difficulty)
than the other by adjusting the best score of every
tournament to 72. The depth of field is covered
in that eventually players will always be competing
against the best in their tour. "Slope" is
the degree of difficulty of the course.
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Using that
when you are trying to compare players all over the
world is fine and they should continue all of those
subjective statistics. But we are only comparing
players who play week in week out in one set of
tournaments. Our adjustment of the best score in
each tournament for all events in one tour covers
all these subjective measurements for our selection of a
champion for that tour. We do not do rankings across
different tours.
Global
warming will affect courses.
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