[...]... tomorrow, or next century is this—professional golfers will always play for money It’s what they do! Choosing the Greatest Eighteen Ever Why eighteen? More than a couple of centuries ago some Scotsmen in Fife thought it was the number best suited to golf, so why change a winning formula? Which eighteen? Perhaps the hardest choices are whom to leave out There is a small and very select group that automatically... really quite simple—the search for an unbiased standard by which to compare the greatest players of the modern age of golf The methodology was equally straightforward, even if achieving the summary-numbers required several thousand hours of research and computing time! What we’ve done within these pages is put golf ’s greatest eighteen players on the same course, playing for the same prize money Hypothetical... given every great player in his Golf ’s Greatest Eighteen a fascinating opportunity—playing on today’s world tour for the same rewards to see who comes out on top This remarkable feat of accurately balancing many thousands of events over ninety years reveals some remarkable and previously unconsidered aspects of the game’s all-time heroes So who really was the greatest of all time? In the spirit of... multitude of public-domain and contributed sources to provide the most comprehensive career records ever assembled on the players who make up Golf ’s Greatest Eighteen Each year of each player’s tournament life is here, an analysis that has incorporated approximately eighteen thousand event appearances Taking account of each and every player’s Top 25 finishes over his career has meant sifting around 450,000... these last nine months is that composite ready-reference books on player winnings, or indeed comprehensive major championship money records, simply did not exist—until now New-Money Rankings of Golf’s Greatest Eighteen Before we turn to the individual giants of the game, let’s take a look at where things stand through the end of the 2002 season xv Introduction First, let’s review the total career wins... carom back into play “Slamming Sam” was able to save par there, but not on the eighteenth hole, where his approach was short and he three-putted from a distant fifty feet That bogey forced an eighteen- hole play-off the following day, and Snead again lost a late lead, this to a Nelson birdie, producing another dead heat Another eighteen holes were called for but almost didn’t take place In a bizarre development,... Introduction xvii Of course, as the following eighteen stories confirm, there are many measures used to evaluate greatness, and who knows what money number or final rating Tiger Woods will achieve when he reaches Jack Nicklaus’s age? However that may work out in the future, here’s a new and different way of summing up the fabulous achievements of golf ’s greatest heroes for the twentieth century and... that automatically selects itself—Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus probably the most obvious Maybe even the secondary list, let’s say the Greatest Ten, would not be too difficult to assemble, although numbers nine and eleven would probably be as hard to choose as numbers eighteen or twenty-one So we set one standard Those eligible for inclusion must have captured more than one modern-day major championship,... Hogan, and others And I know all these writers and admire their passion for our game’s great history—passion obvious in each turn of phrase, each word of praise No false flattery here The authors of the eighteen essays here know their men and their times Past greatness simply flows from their pens, chapter after chapter, leaving the warm afterglow of having met excellence, in its own time I hope you will... summing up the fabulous achievements of golf ’s greatest heroes for the twentieth century and beyond—as well as a means for each and every reader to reach a personal decision on who really was or is the Greatest Player of All Time This page intentionally left blank P A R T O N E Front Nine Copyright 2003 by Dave Mackintosh Click Here for Terms of Use 1 S c o t l a n d ’s F a v o r i t e S o n Tom Watson . LF’S GREATEST EIGHTEEN This page intentionally left blank. TODAY’S TOP GOLF WRITERS DEBATE AND RANK THE SPORT’S GREATEST CHAMPIONS G LF’S GREATEST EIGHTEEN EDITED. who make up Golf’s Greatest Eighteen. Each year of each player’s tournament life is here, an analysis that has incorporated approximately eighteen thousand