From Park to Woods: The best at the British Open

There have been some great players to grace the British Open. Here are the 25 greatest.

Who are the greatest players in British Open history?

From Galway to Aberdeen, you could get into a pretty good pub fight over the answer to that question. Especially this week, as The Open returns for its annual renewal. The scene will be Royal Portrush, a course in Northern Ireland that has not hosted the tournament since the 1940s.

The paragraphs that follow present an objective ranking of the 25 best players in British Open history. The ranking is based on the sum of the standard deviation of the career performances of every contestant in a minimum of five events. For further details on the scoring system see “The Hole Truth,” by the author.

Standard deviation is used as the measuring stick because it neutralizes the kinds of changing conditions that occur naturally in golf – or other endeavors – over time, and which would invalidate the use of other yardsticks such as scoring margin.

Standard deviation works for this purpose because it quantifies the degree of a player’s superiority over his fellow competitors, each playing the same course with the same equipment in (essentially) the same weather conditions.

Because golf is a game in which the lower score wins, a player’s rating improves as his standard deviation score becomes more negative. Thus, for this rating, lower scores are better than higher ones.

We may today think of The Open as having been dominated by Americans of the stripe of Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, and Arnold Palmer. The truth is otherwise. Of the 25 people on this list, 13 are British and only eight are Americans.

But the 25 span virtually the entirety of the Open history, including the inaugural champion, Willie Park Sr. He ranks 20th. With the exception of the present decade and the 1940s, the list includes at least one player who was dominant in every decade of the tournament’s history.

Here’s the full list; feel free to debate it.