Certainly could be correct.
As you all know, ranking the majors by difficulty is an issue near and dear to my heart (do give a damn) so I decided to at least take a cursory look at the numbers. Liz will tell you you can get the maths to say whatever you want, which is true, but I tried to retain some objectivity by keeping it simple. Here goes…
The Wikipedis has Major Champions by
World Rankings. Easy to get the stats for the winners (AVG, SD, Worst Three);
Masters 15.3 (+/- 17.2) #69, #56, #36
US Open 25.4 (+/- 27.3) #99, #90, #80
Open 39.7 (+/- 78.7) #396, #159, #109
PGA 37.2 (+/- 49.6) #169, #168, #110
So there's certainly a case to be made the The Open is really the "clown" show. There are innumerable circumstances entwined in this, just a few…
1. Hale Irwin was #90 winning US Open in 1990, but that was his third US Open title.
2. Winners rise to the top at St Andrews. Raises the question of whether certain "rotation" courses can be outliers in the overall analysis, both ways.
3. Tom Watson went to playoff at Open at age 59. It's a gr8 story, but I don't think that's possible at any of the other three championships.
Note: If you remove the "biggest" clown…Ben Curtis at #396, the Open is third;
Masters 13.4
US Open 22.8
Open 27.0
PGA 32.3
4. The biggest PGA "clown" was Shaun Micheel at #169. The second biggest PGA "clown" was John Daly at #168, a two time major champion.
The point I made in a previous blog post is that an Indian/Chinese statistician could knock this out of the park on his lunch break. Need more numbers, like the ranking of all the finishers. Need to cull the data (remove all the amateurs and aging green jackets etc).
Would be simple. The GolfChannel or Golf Digest could probably solve this for about a grand if they posted it to a job board.
