One trick ponies of the PGA
In the 1996 movie "Happy Gilmore," Adam Sandler's title character couldn't chip from the fairway or putt to save his life—but his superhuman drive alone earned him a spot in a big pro tournament. The movie is pure slapstick fiction, but the concept of the one-trick pony is very real in the world of golf—even at the highest levels. Several players on the PGA Tour, including a recent Masters winner, are real-life Happy Gilmores—albeit without all the shenanigans, fights with game show hosts, and battles with bloodthirsty alligators.
It is now possible to identify golf's most lopsided specialists thanks to a Columbia University professor named Mark Broadie. In 2007, the PGA introduced a real-time scoring system and data tracker called ShotLink. In 2011, Broadie used ShotLink data to develop a revolutionary golf-analysis tool known as "strokes gained." Strokes gained is a complicated statistical computation that makes it possible to measure a player's performance compared to the rest of the field while isolating individual aspects of each player's game. Broadie's original formula dealt only with putting. It was the first system that gave greater weight to, say, a 22-foot put compared to a 2-foot put, even though both count as single strokes on the scorecard. In 2016, the PGA Tour expanded strokes gained from only putting to include three new metrics: around-the-green performance, off-the-tee performance, and approach-the-green play.
Using PGA data from April 15 through the Masters, Stacker identified the biggest one-trick ponies in golf. Golfers from a pool of 214 PGA pros were included in the list if they ranked in the top 20 in one of the four strokes-gained skills and lower than 100 in the other three skills. The result is a list of the golfers with the highest skill ranking difference. That's the difference between each player's top skill ranking (be it off-the-tee, approach, around-the-green, or putting) and the average of each player's lowest three skill rankings. For context, the skill ranking difference of all golfers is 82.7. The skill ranking difference between these 11 one-trick ponies is 148.8.
Read on to learn about the one-trick ponies of the PGA.
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