After Tiger Woods won his third Masters on Sunday, many scrambled to find the correct hero with which to compare the champion golfer. Some like to rank his accomplishments with those of Jack Nicklaus, the current greatest golfer in history. Perhaps he is the Michael Jordan of golf, or the Wayne Gretzky of the greens.
Certainly, all of these figures enjoyed much time at the top of their sport. But only one man's track record equals the sheer dominance that Tiger has exhibited on the golf world since turning pro in 1996. That man is George Herman Ruth.
Babe Ruth is unquestionably the most dominant athlete in the history of athletics. This is not to say that he is the best of all time, but that the disparity between his accomplishments and those of his peers was bigger than that which existed for any other star.
When Babe Ruth broke in with the Red Sox, the perennial home run champion was the Philadelphia A's Frank "Home Run" Baker. The "slugger" would top the league in round trippers by knocking 11 or 12 per year. When Babe Ruth hit 26 home runs in 1925, the baseball world was amazed in the same way as Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds have astounded modern fans.
When he hit 52 in 1926 and then 60 in 1927 he simply revolutionized the game. Ruth's home run numbers equaled many team's numbers during his era. Perhaps Bonds' 73 is hard to believe, but can you imagine him hitting 220 this year?
They didn't have foul poles before the Babe because no player consistently hit the ball long enough or high enough to warrant such things. Ruth's greatness changed the entire offensive strategy of the game, shifting the emphasis from bunts and singles to doubles and homers. Simply put, Babe Ruth transformed the game because he was much better at slugging a baseball than anyone else. Jordan and Gretzky did not literally change their respective sports. They were better than everyone else, but they had competition. The Babe did not. He made other batters look as if they had something wrong with them.
So what about Tiger's accomplishments are similar to Ruth's? Well, we can start with his record. At the age of 26, Woods has won seven major championships, including six of the last 10. In 1997, he humiliated the field at Augusta and gave a repeat performance during the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, shattering course records each time. At his current pace, Tiger will have 19 major championships before he is 30, sailing past Nicklaus' record which was once thought to be unbreakable.
Those who don't follow golf all that carefully might not find Tiger's accomplishments to be all that dominating. After all, six out of 10 is not close to perfect. But one must realize that winning a golf tournament requires outplaying every top golfer in the world. If you play one bad round (most tournaments consist of four rounds), you are done. Because of this, in pre-Tiger days, 10 or 11 of the world's top golfers would generally contest a major championship, with one of them eventually out-dueling the others. Tiger has changed everything.
He has won regular tournaments and majors at a frequency that is simply unheard of. While six out of 10 is not perfect, it can be considered tantamount to a baseball player batting .600 for the year. Hitting a baseball is simply too hard to perform at that level and winning a major championship should be just as hard. But Woods has thrown that way of thinking out the window.
Like Ruth, Woods makes his peers appear as if there is something wrong with them. Take the just-completed Masters. As Tiger cruised through his fourth round, his closest chasers, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh, were taking turns hitting the ball into the water, cracking under the pressure. Els, of course, is a two-time U.S. Open champion and Singh won the Masters in 2000. But when they go up against Tiger, especially in the big ones, they look like amateurs.
Like Ruth, Woods has caused a physical change in the playing fields. Many courses have extended their par 5's and par 4's in order to lessen the impact of Tiger's huge and accurate drives. But this "Tiger proofing" has obviously not provided much of an impediment.
Tiger Woods is expected to win every tournament that he enters. Again, this is akin to expecting a batter to get a base hit for every at-bat. But over the last 10 major tournaments, Woods has succeeded more often than not. His dominance may serve to change the way success is measured in golf. He has set a standard that is simply miles ahead of his extremely talented peers. Not since the Sultan of Swat have we seen such a difference between best and second-best.
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