If you missed yesterdays post on PGA golfers and success being based on luck, I encourage you to read so that you have proper context of this follow-up from Richard Rendleman, Jr., one of the two professors that was involved in the study.

Mr. Rendleman was kind enough to write me an email with his response and I told him I would post it here. I also told him I would like to retract my statement of calling him and his colleague “fools.” Obviously, that is not the case, based on their qualifications, and by their willingness to respond to our opinion.

In our study, Robert Connolly and I attempted to separate outcomes in golf into skill and luck components. We never implied, nor does the Wall Street Journal article, which summarizes a portion of our work, imply that outcomes in golf are pure luck. In fact, as the WSJ article indicates, our study suggests that Tiger Woods’ level of skill in 2000 was so high that he could have won the 2000 US Open without having experienced any luck at all – but just barely.

What one must realize is that in a typical PGA Tour event with 156 highly-skilled participants, some will experience good luck while others will experience bad luck. Some statisticians might characterize this as positive and negative random variation in outcomes, and we are OK with that interpretation. But no matter what you want to call it, to win a PGA Tour event, one must have either an incredibly high level of skill to overcome the positive luck outcomes that will occur naturally among some players when the field starts out with 156, or perform with a sufficient amount of skill and luck in combination to overcome the collective luck of the field.

Our study shows that when at his peak in 2000, Tiger’s skill level was sufficiently high that he could have placed in the top four in every tournament in which he participated without experiencing any good luck at all. But today, although still the world’s top player, he does not appear to be playing at the same level as in the 2000 season and, therefore, I believe that even Tiger himself would need a little luck to win a PGA Tour event – but not much.

This season, Tiger has participated in seven regular stroke-play events on the Tour, having won two and placed in the top ten in the remaining five. Although our statistical analysis does not include the 2009 season, my best guess would be that Tiger experienced a little bit of favorable luck in winning the Arnold Palmer and Memorial and, perhaps, some bad luck in a few of the other events, including his assigned playing times during the first two rounds of last week’s US Open. Although some might characterize Tiger’s hitting every fairway in the final round of the Memorial as “playing incredibly well,” if it is not something that can be sustained, and it doesn’t appear that it has been, we would characterize his hitting every fairway as part of the “luck factor,” or positive variation in play that comes about when one is blessed with the ability to play with Tiger’s high level of skill to begin with. But despite needing a little luck to win, Tiger’s skill level is still so high that even when he has bad luck, he can end up in the top 10 most of the time.

Does anyone who follows golf really believe that Lucas Glover, having just won the US Open, is the best player in the world? Do we really expect to see Glover, Ricky Barnes and David Duval among the leaders in the remaining Tour events this season? Did Rocco Mediate choke after last year’s’ US Open, winning only $294,000 in nine more PGA Tour events, or did he just get back to his normal game after playing with a very favorable degree of random variation during the Open? Whatever happened to Paul Lawrie, Todd Hamilton and Michael Campbell? Except for finishing 2nd at last year’s Stanford St. Jude Championship, where has Trevor Immelman been since winning the 2008 Masters? And I almost forgot about Shaun Micheel and Rich Beem.

I believe that having a lot of luck might have had something to do with these guys winning majors over the past decade. And I also think that with my 6 handicap, if I were allowed to play in the US Open, there is no amount of good luck I could experience that would enable me to come close to finishing anywhere other than dead last.

Popularity: 2% [?]