Tiger Woods: How gracefully will his game age moving forward?

Tiger Woods turned 43 this past December. While he looks to make a return to the top of the golf world, this is normally a major statistical turning point for most TOUR players. While nobody in the last 30 years has played to Tiger’s level, these comparisons may give us some idea of how his game will age.

Will 2019 mark the beginning of the decline of Tiger Woods?

The question is meant to be a slight of Woods’ amazing talents. Nor is it a prediction. As he tees it up in the Farmers Insurance Open for his 2019 season debut, it’s merely a recognition that having recently turned 43, Woods has reached the statistical point of no return for most players’ careers.

Consider the performance of prominent PGA Tour players who turned 43 during the Strokes Gained (post-1904) era. That age marks the precise line where their stroke averages begin to move in the wrong direction. Not by much, and certainly not unanimously, but as a group and inexorably.

In an effort to forecast what might be expected of Tiger Woods at age 43, we looked at 20 of his contemporaries, all of whom have turned 43 since Strokes Gained data was first accumulated in 2004. The Strokes Gained qualifier is important, because examining Strokes Gained data provides the best quantification of the impact of aging on skills that are related to scoring…and therefore on scoring itself.

The 20 players representing the control group, (and the seasons they turned 43), are: Mark Brooks (2004), Duffy Waldorf and Steve Elkington (2005), Vijay Singh (2006), Davis Love, Lee Janzen, Jeff Maggert, Billy Andrade and Woody Austin (all 2007), David Toms and Jerry Kelly (2009), Steve Stricker (2010), Angel Cabrera and Ernie Els (2012), Jim Furyk, Phil Mickelson and K.J. Choi (all 2013), Robert Allenby (2014), and Stewart Cink and Boo Weekley (2016).

Although this does constitute a representative group of  Woods’ physical peers, that does not mean they are his equals. In fact, the 69.35 stroke scoring average Woods compiled during his age 42 season of 2018 is lower than the age 42 stroke averages of any of the 20. Singh came the closest to equaling Woods at age 42 with a 69.619 stroke average in 2006.

That, however, is not necessarily the point. What’s important is the direction and extent of movement of that scoring average – and other group averages – between the players’ age 42 and age 43 seasons. While the individual numbers can (and do) vary based on idiosyncratic factors, each of which may also influence Tiger Woods this year – conditioning, injuries, etc. – the averages should provide some sense of what happens to a golfer’s abilities as they begin, even if slowly, to descend from the playing peak.