Joining the greatest at Augusta National

This weekend’s Masters provides one of those relatively rare opportunities on the world’s golf calendar for a player to establish his standing among the game’s greatest. And it would come on one of golf’s most famous courses, Augusta National.

The way we judge performance in modern golf is so linked to the four established Majors that they are the primary vehicles by which greatness is achieved. Don’t believe it? Answer this question: Who’s the best player to never win a Major, and where does that player stack up in the game’s communal mindset compared with anybody who has done so?

A few players – and it is literally only a few — tee it up at Augusta National Thursday morning having laid the career foundation to take that huge step toward immortality. To do so, however, they need to win.

There are probably several ways to assess any player’s standing among the game’s greatest, but the best way is to assess the exceptionality of a player’s performance in Majors when that player is at his peak. In my book, The Whole Truth, I laid out such a system and used it to rank more than 200 players across the game’s history. (For the record, Tiger Woods was No. 1.)

Those interested in the details of how the rating works can consult the book. The one-sentence explanation is as follows: Calculate the standard deviation of a player’s performance in his 10-best Majors over a period of five consecutive seasons.

Standard deviation, rather than score, is used because it normalizes for all the many changes over time – in courses, weather, equipment, training and the like – that would befuddle any attempt to use simpler or more familiar numbers.

More than a dozen men who have already done enough, as measured by that standard, to be considered among the 200 greatest golfers in history, are expected to compete Thursday. Most, however, are far enough removed from their five-year window of peak performance that there is nothing they can do this week to affect it.

That’s true, among others, for such luminaries as Jordan Spieth (20th all-time), Dustin Johnson (40th), and Rory McIlroy (49th).

But five players in particular enter this weekend with a chance to either crack the game’s all-time 200 or climb further up the list. If – and it’s a big if – they can snag that Green Jacket Sunday night.

Here’s a look at the five…plus a sixth who can’t quite mathematically get there this weekend, but who might in the near future.