U.S. Open: Want To Homogenize Scores? The Country Club Can
By Bill Felber
Do certain championship-quality golf courses tend to homogenize player performance? Do those courses, simply by their nature, compress scores, and thus make tournament outcomes tighter … and more thrilling?
The record of U.S. Opens played at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., suggests that it may indeed have the ability to homogenize results.
With the conclusion of play at the 2022 edition of the U.S. Open, four national championships have been staged at The Country Club throughout its more than century-long history.
With three of those ending in playoffs and Sunday’s finish decided by a narrowly missed putt on the 72nd hole, the total gap between the champions and runners-up in those four championships now equals exactly one stroke.
That sounds as if some mysterious force is in effect at The Country Club to homogenize results; to make it difficult, if not impossible, for any one player to draw significantly away from the chasing pack.
In Sunday’s U.S. Open championship, Matthew Fitzpatrick and Will Zalatoris battled to the final green before Fitzpatrick emerged with a one-stroke victory over Zalatoris and Scottie Scheffler. Hideki Matsuyama was fourth, three strokes behind Fitzpatrick.
It’s only four tournaments, but we are beginning to build up some interesting data suggesting that there is something in The Country Club that does not let its leaders get very far out in front of the pack.
That’s something the USGA may want to know the next time it wants to ensure a dramatic finish to its flagship event.
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It’s relatively well-known that the first three U.S. Opens held at Brookline all ended in playoffs: Francis Ouimet over Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in 1913, Julius Boros over Arnold Palmer and Jackie Cupit in 1963, and Curtis Strange over Nick Faldo in 1988.
But the evidence that Brookline tends to abnormally homogenize results runs deeper than its playoff record.
In the four U.S. Opens held on that course, an average of 6.5 players finished within three strokes of the winner. An average of 7.75 finished with four strokes, and an average of 9.0 finished within five strokes.
By U.S. Open standards, those are tightly bunched fields. Consider that in the 9 most recent U.S. Opens prior to the one at The Country Club, averages of only 1.56, 2.67, and 3.78 players finished within three, four, and five strokes of the champion respectively.
That is a sharp contrast with the Country Club.
The statistical evidence supporting the idea that the Country Club has an innate ability to homogenize U.S. Open results doesn’t stop there.
A total of 14 courses meet two pertinent criteria suggesting that they are both popular and ongoing U.S. Open sites.
Those 14 have hosted at least three U.S. Opens in their history, and at least one of those was played within the past 40 years…that is, since 1982.
From smallest to greatest, the table below lists those 14 courses in order of the average standard deviation of the score of the tournament champion relative to the field average…in other words, in order of the closeness of the finish.
1. The Country Club -1.89
2. Medinah -1.90
3. Merion -2.12
4. Oakland Hills -2.24
5. Oakmont -2.29
6. Winged Foot -2.31
7. Oak Hill -2.31
8. Shinnecock Hills -2.32
9. Southern Hills -2.39
10. Baltusrol (lower) -2.47
11. Olympic -2.51
12. Congressional -2.66
13. Pinehurst -2.70
14. Pebble Beach -2.93
Historically, The Country Club has produced the most-challenged champions of any course in regular modern use for the U.S. Open.
Ouimet won there in 1913 with a score that was 1.78 standard deviations better than the field of the world’s best at the time.
In 1963, Boros won with a score of only 1.72 standard deviations ahead of the field. In 1988, Strange won at 2.03 standard deviations better than his peers. And on Sunday, Fitzpatrick won with a score that was just 2.01 standard deviations superior.
How unlikely is it to win a Major while exceeding the field average by less than two standard deviations? This unusual: In the last 40 Majors, Fitzpatrick was only the second player to do so. The only other was Tiger Woods, whose victory at the 2019 Masters came with a score just -1.78 standard deviations better than the field average,
Based on the data, the polar opposite of The Country Club is Pebble Beach. That may be due to the course’s notoriously unpredictable weather, but it is more likely attributable to the fact that Tiger Woods won there in 2000 with the most superior performance in Major championship history.
Woods’ memorable run measured 4.59 standard deviations better than the field average that week, a figure that happens to be the most exceptional in the history of Major championship play…men or women.
But it isn’t just Woods. In the first Pebble Beach U.S. Open in 1972, Jack Nicklaus out-performed the field by 2.88 standard deviations, the ninth most dominant U.S. Open showing of all time.
In 1992, Tom Kite won with a score that was 3.1 standard deviations superior, No. 4 on the all-time list.
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Woods, Nicklaus, and Kite, then, give Pebble a claim to having hosted three of the 10 most dominant U.S. Open showings in history. No other course has hosted more than one of the top 10.
The data isn’t profuse, but it is beginning to point to a simple conclusion. If the USGA wants to produce a dominant champion, it should go to Pebble. If it wants to homogenize the results and produce a nail-biter, head directly to Boston.