Tuesday
Aug112009
"There are 10 Lee Trevinos today"
Rich Lerner wonders about today's players and poses the "soft" question to Paul Goydos.
"There are 10 Lee Trevinos today," he said. "And the only time there's more depth than today is tomorrow."
Goydos makes valid points, but as Tiger keeps winning he not only burnishes his own reputation as perhaps the best ever, he also diminishes the stature of those he's beating, fairly or unfairly.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 10:53 AM
Reader Comments (10)
What a FARCE!!!
Jack and company, Trevino, would not have let a 59 year old man beat all but one of them, in a playoff at that I might add
Oh, and what Jay said. The TOUR is much wider, maybe even deeper in some respects, today. But there is no depth approaching Trevino (6 Majors), Watson (8), Palmer (8), Player (9), Ballesteros (5). Not to mention Floyd, Casper, Miller. All of whom Big Jack had to beat and none of whom were three-jack give-up artists to Jack or anyone else (well, maybe Miller about the three-jack, but he didn't give up until after he had 25 wins). That is all.
I remember the 90s, when the standard complaint was that nobody had stepped up to take the mantle from the generation of the 80s. People liked and admired Couples and Love, wanted them to do well and cheered when they finally did, but nobody seriously ranked Couples and Love on the same level as Watson, Seve, Faldo, Floyd. Today the depth of talent on tour is still in the Couples and Love category--at best. One major and done, if that, and before Tiger ever came along to scoop them up.
This debate is not new and my comments won't end it. But I am reminded of a comment that Cary Middlecoff made many years ago about playing against Hogan and Snead (might not be his exact words, but pretty close): "They never handed me a tournament. They never folded coming down the stretch. The times I beat them, I just beat them."
Compare that with the average score of the guys that have played with Tiger in the last group on Sunday over the years. CBS or somebody has that statistic. What is it, something like 74? If we did have a Trevino out there now, paired with Tiger in the last group, he might not beat Tiger but he'd be a good bet to throw a 69 at him. Nobody today does even that.
Oh, an addendum: last year I looked up the members of the 2006 US Ryder Cup team (that lost in Ireland) in the current (sometime in 2008) OWGR, and IIRC fully half the team were no longer in the world top-50. I think one or two were no longer in the world top-100. (And FWIW, the Euro team had a couple similar cases). No sign of our 10 Lee Trevinos.
I do think that this a different argument than the argument that Jack faced tougher competition than Tiger. People often include Watson and Seve in the argument, but Watson didn't win a major until Jack was two years older than Tiger is now, and Seve didn't win one until Jack was 39. In fact, in the first twelve seasons of Jack's professional career (1962-1973), the guys who won multiple majors were:
Nicklaus 12
Player 4
Trevino 4
Palmer 3
Casper 2
Boros 2
Jacklin 2
In Tiger's first 12 seasons (1997-2008:
Tiger 14
Mickelson 3
Harrington 3
Singh 3
Els 2
Goosen 2
O'Meara 2
Add the thirteenth year and Trevino moves to 5 and Player moves to 6, while Cabrera enters the modern list with 2. The same number of multiple major winners, and the same number of 3-time winners. Sure, guys like Palmer, Player and Trevino won more in their careers, but not when playing against Nicklaus in his first 12 years on tour.
Since this debate is just a proxy for comparing Jack to Tiger, I say that a fair comparison can't be made until the end of Tiger's career. If Mickelson ends up with 5 majors, Harrington with 4, Garcia with 3, Anthony Kim with 7, and Jamie Lovemark with 9, then Tiger's career record will seem all the more impressive, even though those are all the same chumps he's playing against now.