Golf Hall of Fame: Rating Tiger Woods and the other candidates
By Bill Felber
Career performance
A player’s career performance rating is calculated by adding up the standard deviations of his or her performance in all major championships between the beginning of his or her professional career and the 50th birthday.
The best career rating in history belongs to Jack Nicklaus at -108.71. Historically, however, the career standard is a less reliable predictor of Hall of Fame success than the peak standard. Since the first major was played, 122 HOF-eligible players completed a full career of at least 10 seasons with a negative – that is good – career rating. Yet only 72 of those 122 (59 percent) have been inducted.
Woods, with a career rating of -61.90 and a rank of fifth all-time, is again an obvious honoree. Five of the other player-nominees retired with scores of -15.0 or better, among whom Pepper’s -31.53 stands out. She ranks 30th, in company with Willie Anderson, Pat Bradley, Ralph Guldahl and Betsy Rawls, all of them Hall of Famers.
Here are the career ratings of the remaining six:
Hanson, -19.81; Palmer, -17.42; Maxwell Berning, -16.73; Weiskopf, +5.73; Farrell, +6.61; and Harrington, +63.20.
Harrington’s number may require some explanation. Because so much money has come into the Tour in recent years, players tend to remain active beyond their truly competitive seasons…and their career rating rises correspondingly. When he was 40, Harrington’s career rating was 35 points better than it is today.
But if you like to measure your Hall of Famers by career-long performance, Woods and Pepper are the obvious choices, followed by one or two among Hanson, Palmer and Maxwell-Berning.