PGA TOUR: Ranking the five greatest individual seasons of all time
By Bill Felber
The PGA Tour has been in existence for nearly 90 years, with generations of greatness etching their way into the history books. But of all the legends that have come along, who had the best season of all time? These are our top five picks.
Who had the best season in the history of the PGA Tour?
Tiger Woods is a plausible candidate in any such discussion. In 2000, Woods famously swept the final three majors on his way to winning nine of his 20 starts. His $9.188 million in official winnings was more than twice that of any other player. Woods’ 67.79 stroke average was 1.5 strokes better than runner-up Phil Mickelson, giving him a larger margin over Mickelson than Mickelson had over the No. 40 ranked player on the list.
That’s a good season But Woods wasn’t the first player to win three professional majors in a season. That distinction belongs to Ben Hogan, who in 1953 swept the Masters, U.S. and British Opens. Hogan lost his chance for a Grand Slam through no fault of his own. Due to severely short-sighted scheduling, that season’s PGA Championship was scheduled to conclude the day before the British Open began, making it physically impossible for any player to win both.
Old-timers, of course, will point to Byron Nelson’s immortal 1945 season. Nelson won 18 events that year, 11 of them in succession, and captured the only major championship not halted by World War II, the PGA. His margin in his 16 stroke play victories averaged 6.25 strokes.
Consideration also has to be given to the best seasons of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. In 1960, Palmer won nine of his 27 starts, including the Masters and U.S. Open among them. In 1972 Nicklaus also counted the Masters and U.S. Open among his seven victories. With four runners-up, he finished first or second in more than half of his 20 starts, and set a single-season earnings record.
There are too many significant distinctions between the way the seasons played out to make a definitive, objective assertion of which of those seasons was better. Among other problems, the sporadic nature of record-keeping in the PGA TOUR pre-1980 prevents assembling a full data base that would support a precise calculation of the standard deviation of either Nelson’s performance in 1945 or Palmer’s in 1960.
We can, however, compile reasonably complete estimates of the average standard deviation of each player’s seasonal performance compared to the 20 best competitors in each player’s tournaments. So that will be our method. In the slides that follow, we’ll lay out the facts and the data underlying those facts. You can come to your own conclusion regarding which was best.