Tournament of Champions: Ranking the top 20 players in tournament history

The season-opening Tournament of Champions has a rich history spanning more than 60 years. Considering the exclusivity of the winners-only event, we’ve seen some of the best the game of golf has to offer tee it up in the yearly opener. But who was the best? We’re breaking down the top 20 players in tournament history.

The Tournament of Champions dates its lineage back more than a half century. Wilbur Clark, a Las Vegas casino owner and marketer, conceived the event in 1953 as a promotional device for his new Desert Inn resort. He made it exclusive, limiting the field to the previous year’s tournament champions, and invited them to compete for a pot amounting to the then-princely sum of $40,000 …payable in silver dollars.

Over time, the Tournament of Champions has shifted sites and dates several times. At the Desert Inn through 1966 and then the nearby Stardust for two seasons, it was moved a few years after Clark’s death to the LaCosta Resort and Spa, and it remained in southern California through 1998. It has been played in Hawaii since 1999.

For years after its inception, the tournament was contested in late April or early May. But in 1986, tour officials took obvious advantage of the event’s unique format and transformed it into a season opener, a position it occupied until the shift to a wrap-around season about a decade ago. When that change was made, the TOC assumed what had in practice become its iconic role as a calendar year opener.

For its initial two decades, the event operated without a sponsor. But in 1975, MONY signed on to that role, continuing through 1990. When that deal expired, Infiniti jumped in for three years, followed by Mercedes, which rebranded the event as “The Mercedes Championship.” Since Mercedes’ replacement by Hyundai in 2010 – and subsequently Sentry – the event has been known as what it has always been, a “Tournament of Champions.”

Two men have won the event three times in succession. Gene Littler did that as a young tour pro between 1955 and 1957, followed by Stuart Appleby from 2004-06. Appleby’s record in the event is a singularly curious one for a three-time champion. In his other three appearances, he never finished higher than a tie for 13th, coming home 30th of 32 in 2011.

The TOC’s status amounting to the Tour’s annual coming out party makes it worthwhile to review the performance of the best players ever to challenge themselves against their fellow champions. The rating that follows utilizes three criteria.

The first is a minimum of five appearances. Those eligibles – and there are more than 100 – are ranked on two additional components. The first is the absolute value of the standard deviations of their performances. (Absolute value is the number minus the plus or minus sign; in golf, where low scores are better than high ones, the best standard deviations are always negative.) The final criteria is victories, one point for each.

We can use Stuart Appleby to illustrate the method. The absolute value of the standard deviations of Appleby’s six TOC appearances was 2.39. He won three of those, giving him three additional points and creating a “score” of 5.39. As we’ll soon see, that’s just low enough to keep Appleby outside our top 20.

For each top 20 member, we’ve provided the name, the number of tournaments competed in, the range of dates, his best performance or performances, the sum of his standard deviations, and his overall score.