The Masters: Ranking the 25 most exceptional performances at Augusta
By Bill Felber
The Masters is truly one of the greatest events in all of sport, and it has brought about a number of magical moments in its 85-year history. Here, we take a look at the 25 greatest performances in the history of Augusta National.
The Masters is the most prestigious invitational golf tournament in the world.
It is played on an iconic course co-designed by one of the game’s most iconic figures, Bobby Jones. It has an iconic award – the Green Jacket. When television brought golf to the world in the late 1960, it did so at Augusta, in effect partnering with Arnold Palmer, the game’s magnetic personality of that era.
Palmer won four Masters in that era, and golf’s popularity simultaneously shot skyward. Since then, the Masters has been a touchstone for growth of interest in the game.
Its champions, too, gain a measure of immortality. That was true of Palmer in 1958, 1960, 1962 and 1964; it was true of Jack Nicklaus six times, and it has been true of Tiger Woods, who cemented his position in the world’s consciousness by his memorable victory at the 1997 Masters.
That leads to a provocative question: Which Masters performances were the most exceptional?
By exceptional, we don’t mean dramatic. Playoffs are dramatic, but they tend to climax tournaments that lacked true standout performances. Rather, we’re looking for exceptionalities…performances of a singular and rare quality.
To determine the 25 most exceptional performances in Masters history, we’ve examined the records of every Masters champion relative to the performance of all players in the field during that tournament. We’re asking a simple question: By how large a margin – measured by standard deviation – did those players separate themselves from the performance of the game’s best players in that moment?
In each case, the introductory material includes the player’s name, season, 18-hole score, score below par in parenthesis, and the standard deviation of that performance from the four-round tournament average.