Dominance: The best of Tiger Woods

Assessing Tiger Woods’ dominance is a daunting exercise. There are so many victories to choose from, and so many imaginable criteria.

Are we talking here about his most dramatic victories? If so the playoff victories over Bob May at the 2000 PGA and Rocco Mediate at the 2008 U.S. Open are right at the top.

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Are we talking about memorable moments? If that’s the criteria, his takedown of Chris DiMarco at the 2005 Masters – with that chip-in at 16 – stands out.

Victories of that stripe, however, are subjective. They rely on our emotions, the visceral reactions, cheers and senses those shots stirred in us.

And viscera are notoriously idiosyncratic. That’s why when the subject turns to best wins, my instinct is to default right to the objective.

And that means dominance. In which events did Tiger Woods most clearly demonstrate the trait we all came to most admire in him: His ability to exceed the natural bounds of human performance and most thoroughly crush, demoralize and otherwise dispatch his competitors.

https://progolfnow.com/2020/07/06/flaw-bryson-dechambeau-game-touch/

What follows is a rating of the ten ‘best’ performances of Woods’ professional career as measured by his dominance in those events.

The yardstick – the tool by which the strength of Woods’ dominance is measured – is the standard deviation of his showing from the four-round field average. That’s the best way of gauging the extent to which he stood out because it normalizes for such vital factors as weather and course conditions that might be masked if one looked merely at margin of victory.