Estate Living Digital Publication Issue 7 July 2015 | Page 14

BU
S
I
NE
S
S
OF

GOLF

Clouds, hoolies, rain and silver linings!
Golf is not a one-on-one game like singles
tennis where each round brings up a new
individual contest between two players.

the play on the Friday at this year’s Open was lost,
as the wind was blowing a hoolie (colourful Scottish
vernacular for a strong gale), which was moving golf
balls around on the greens and making it difficult for
players to stand, forcing play to be abandoned.

A player wishing to win any professional medal in a
golf tournament is likely to be squaring up against
about 140 players in round one and these odds will
reduce by about only 50% for the final two rounds of
any event.

Post 1900, it is interesting to note that the only
golf Major where a player has exerted any form of
concentrated dominance has been Walter Hagen’s
run of five victories, which included four wins in a row
and a runner-up spot in only seven years between
1921 and 1927 in the USPGA Championship. Of
course, in those years, the championship was,
perhaps not unsurprisingly, a man-to-man matchplay event – the format was only changed to medal
play in 1958.

I make these observations because the absence
of one man from a field of players in a medal golf
tournament, even a Major Championship, will not
have as much impact in golf on the potential result
as a similar level of player not entering a tennis event.
There are, of course, other factors that come into play
and that prevent the type of dominance that some
tennis players have been able to exert both at times
in their careers and/or on particular surfaces. Such is
the variety of courses on which the golf Majors have
been played that it is unlikely that any one player will
dominate an event like Rafael Nadal has dominated
clay court tennis in general and the French Open in
particular. The tennis Majors have been played at only
four venues, whereas, for the same four golf Majors
(in the modern era; i.e. post-World War II), 81 different
courses have been used. Golf is played in the rain,
whereas tennis is not, and the high winds that golfers
often have to contend with will have driven the tennis
players off the court hours earlier. Ironically, most of

Jack Nicklaus’ five victories in the same
Championship, quite a remarkable feat in its own
right, were all in the medal play version of the
event and were spread over 17 years.
The only course to host the Masters has been
Augusta National and even a fixed venue has only
produced one stand-out multiple winner in Jack
Nicklaus, who annexed the title six times. Even
allowing for the relative career longevity enjoyed
by golfers against their tennis-playing counterparts,
Nicklaus’ record suggests that he should have won
more Masters titles. However, the nature of the
game of golf and the vagaries of the conditions meant
that his victories were spread over 21 years. The last
of these was in 1986 and, with Nicklaus winless in