Thursday, November 5, 2026
For those of us who are sports fans, and in our case, particularly golf fans, we love to compare. We love superlatives. We love putting the suffix “est” on just about everyone and everything in the sports world. Who is the greatest? Who is the best? Who hit it the farthest? Who was the most talented?
While these debates make for entertaining conversation at the 19th hole or the local tavern, they are, in my opinion, essentially meaningless. And, more importantly, fundamentally unfair. It’s the classic apples-to-oranges comparison.
Of course, this phenomenon runs through every sport, but since this is a golf article, we’ll limit our discussion to golf.
How is it even remotely fair to compare Bobby Jones, who dominated golf from 1923 to 1930, with Tiger Woods, who dominated from 1997 to 2009? Everything—and I mean EVERYTHING—about the game was different.
Let’s start with the modern-day debate over the greatest of all time, or GOAT. In golf, this usually comes down to Tiger versus Jack. Others prefer to frame the question as, “Who belongs on golf’s Mount Rushmore?” Was Bobby Jones better than Ben Hogan? Was Sam Snead better than Arnold Palmer? Was Jack Nicklaus better than Tiger Woods? After about the fourth beer, nobody is ever wrong. They simply become more convinced that they know the answer to an unanswerable question!
And why is it unanswerable? Because, quite simply, they weren’t playing the same game! Consider a few examples.
At the 1940 U.S. Amateur Championship, the great Lawson Little reportedly arrived carrying 40 golf clubs. FORTY! In those days, the rules governing equipment were quite different from those we know today.
Chick Evans, another great champion from golf’s early years, won the 1916 U.S. Open playing with just seven wooden-shafted clubs. Seven!
In 1980, the average driving distance on the PGA Tour was approximately 261 yards. Today, that number is over 300 yards.
In 2008, there were reportedly 46 tour players generating ball speeds of at least 170 mph. More recently, that number has grown to approximately 145.
Are today’s players simply that much better? Or are they playing with equipment that allows them to do things their predecessors could only dream of?
Consider the golf club itself. Modern titanium drivers, with their enormous heads, lightweight shafts, and advanced technology, can produce dramatically greater distance than the persimmon woods of yesterday. Testing by MyGolfSpy, for example, found a modern driver carrying the ball nearly 28 yards farther than its persimmon counterpart. And distance is only part of the story.
The old wooden drivers demanded remarkably precise contact. Miss the center of the clubface and you paid a considerable penalty. Today’s drivers, with their high moments of inertia, are designed to resist twisting on off-center strikes. The result is greater forgiveness, more consistent ball speed, and considerably better performance on mishits.
The golf ball itself has undergone an equally remarkable transformation. The balata balls of yesterday were soft, spun considerably, and could be damaged by a single poorly struck shot. Today’s multilayer, solid-core golf balls are extraordinarily durable and engineered to optimize launch, spin, and distance.
Now consider the golf courses.
In earlier generations, green speeds were considerably slower than those found on today’s championship courses. Greens that once measured perhaps six or seven on the Stimpmeter may now measure 12 or 13 during major championships.
Think about that for a moment. Many of the world’s great courses were designed by architects who could never have imagined the speeds at which their greens would eventually be maintained.
Donald Ross, one of the greatest golf course architects in history, certainly never envisioned some of his already demanding putting surfaces rolling at today’s championship speeds! And yet we compare the putting statistics of players separated by half a century as though they were playing under identical conditions.
Here’s another example that many younger golfers may not even know existed. Until the early 1950s, match play included a rule known as the stymie.
Imagine your opponent’s golf ball coming to rest directly between your ball and the hole. Today, of course, your opponent simply marks and lifts his ball.
Not so in the stymie era! You had to play around it—or, if necessary, CHIP OVER IT! Can you imagine that situation in today’s Ryder Cup?
Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, and Sam Snead all competed during the stymie era. It was simply another part of the game they were required to master.
Equipment, golf balls, course conditions, rules, agronomy, instruction, physical conditioning, and even the way professional golfers travel and prepare for tournaments have changed enormously. To list every way in which golf has evolved would require a book, not merely an essay.
And that brings me back to my original point. How can we possibly compare the accomplishments of golfers who competed under such radically different circumstances?
We can’t. We can admire Bobby Jones for what he accomplished with the equipment and conditions of his time. We can marvel at Ben Hogan’s extraordinary ball striking, Jack Nicklaus’s championship record, and Tiger Woods’s remarkable dominance.
But to declare that one was unquestionably better than all the others is to ignore the circumstances under which each competed. Each was a product of his time. Each mastered the game as it existed in his generation. And each deserves recognition for what he accomplished against the competition of his day.
So perhaps it’s time to retire one of the most overused expressions in sports. Forget GOAT.
Let’s call it GOTE. Greatest of Their Era.
It’s a much fairer comparison. And besides, it should give us something new to argue about over that fourth beer!
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