These 11 have a legitimate chance to win this week’s virtual Major
This weeks’ Virtual British Open championship presents a field of contenders that is deeper than any field – real or fantasy – ever assembled.
Across 160 years of play, the British has featured – and been won by – most of the game’s immortals. That means that although we looked yesterday at a dozen players with the tournament profiles to be leading contenders, several others have the record to upset the odds.
Today we’re considering 11 more great champions whose victory this week would not be viewed as surprising.
As noted in an introductory piece to this simulated tournament, there are two qualifications to entry. The first is that a player must have won at least one British Open since the tournament was created in 1860. The second qualification is that they must have competed in enough Opens during their careers – a minimum of seven – to furnish a sufficient data base for a performance chart.
Each player is measured based on the standard deviation of his British Open performances during his peak period of 10 consecutive seasons. For these 11 second-tier candidates, the standard deviation of their average performance during their 10-year peak period ranges from a low of -1.21 to a best of 1.57.
As a group, these 11 claimed 21 Open titles in decades beginning during the 1870s and continuing through as recently as 2012.
Here’s a more detailed look at the pre-tournament credentials of these 11 strong contenders. For each, the introductory material includes the year(s) of their title(s), the 10-year period of their peak performance at the tournament – that’s the span on which their rating is based – and the standard deviation of their average performance during that peak.
Hey are presented in four distinct groups: The early British, the later British, the Americans, and the rest of the world.