When do golfers decline

And it is true. The message is this: Professional golfers — like every other athlete — age at a much, much faster pace than you want to believe. But the conclusion seemed obvious. Golf offers the illusion of timelessness. And, on the highest level, Tom Watson can almost win the British Open at Jack Nicklaus can wake the echoes at Amen Corner at I realize only going back to does exclude Ben Hogan and Sam Snead and others who played very well into later ages, but those guys almost never played the British Open.

The average and median age for major champions is That number has stayed pretty constant for plus years. Players 35 and younger have won more than three-quarters of all the majors since Less than 10 percent — just 20 of — of all majors were won by players 40 and over. It does happen, especially at the British Open the last three British Open champions were all somethings.

But since , only one golfer — year-old Vijay Singh — has won a Masters, U. Open or PGA Championship. Then, as mentioned, I compared the aging pattern against major league pitchers.

There have been major championships since , and there have been pitchers who had a season of 6. So, you can see that golfers tend to age at about the same rate as pitchers, only not quite at the same time. Golfers tend to start later. Importantly, they should invest in digital marketing and use social media, blogs, and websites for marketing themselves.

Over the years, golf has been perceived as a sport for the wealthy and elite. Additionally, golf is nowhere close to inclusive. Making golf more inclusive and cheaper can go a long way in turning the sport around for the better. Among the ways of meeting customer needs include improving clubhouse facilities, revamping membership packages, and providing different formats of golf. Flexible packages would appeal to time-crunched golfers and golf enthusiasts alike.

Importantly, eliminating the stuffy members-only clubhouse barrier would see the flourishing of many golf clubhouses. Golf is overridden with a negative perception. In movies, for example, they depict a person who plays golf as a bad guy, crook, or wealthy. With such perception, many people keep off the sport. To avert the decline of golf, you must change its negative perception.

Golf should be presented as a good sport for all people regardless of socio-economic status. Also, country clubs should show that golf is fun, and an excellent family sport with numerous health benefits.

The decline of golf can be perceived as a perfect storm for golf clubhouses. It is a way to get clubhouses out of their comfort zone to chart a different course than its competitors. The clubs that capitalize on the opportunities the storm presents will survive and thrive. It will gradually and surely head to its death bed. This study from observed that while baseball hitters have tended to peak around 27, their ability to hit for power home runs, doubles, etc.

Typically the PGA Tour sets up Trackman on one hole per tournament to gather information about the club head speed, ball speed, launch angle, carry distance, etc. I prefer using this data to measure driving distance because it places all golfers on an even surface.

The hole is selected for whether most golfers will hit driver and the carry distance measures only distance in the air removing the effects of firm or soft fairways. I used the same delta method as above to measure the increase or decline in carry distance between consecutive seasons. That yielded pairs of seasons. Golfers out-drive the field by 6 yards before the age of 24, declining to roughly average by age 35, and then decline heavily from that point onward — losing almost 20 yards to the field by age This is the exact pattern suggested by the baseball power hitting aging curve above.

Now, at this point you may be wondering how a golfer can lose so much driving distance over the course of their career and still remain competitive. Elite golfers are elite because they have overcome many of the age-related obstacles that derail other golfers. This curve merely shows what we should expect out of the typical PGA Tour golfer. That is a direct consequence of aging; a large number of golfers simply do not age well whether due to injury, lack of commitment to practice, or general physical decline and find themselves off the PGA Tour by age Below is a graph of three golfers — two elite, top-ten-of-the-lastyears types and one above-average player.

It gives you an idea of how even very good golfers decline in driving distance. Greg Norman was one of the best golfers in the world in the ss; he won 20 times on the PGA Tour and 14 times in Europe, largely by relying on his superior distance off the tee. That year at age 28 he out-drove the field by 19 yards — equal in performance to Bubba Watson and Dustin Johnson currently. He was only a part-time player from that point. Vijay Singh was a late-bloomer on Tour, not becoming a full-time member until when he was He out-drove the field by 14 yards that season.

Even at age 40 he out-drove the field by 16 yards as he rivaled Tiger Woods for the 1 ranking. Stuart Appleby was a very good PGA Tour player by , winning eight times and recording top 25 stroke averages in several seasons. He out-drove the field by 10 yards on average between ages However from onward he declined sharply, averaging only average driving performance between and — winning only a single tournament and basically being a non-factor on leaderboards.

Driving distance is correlated strongly with performance. That looks small, but it suggests that the absolute best drivers are gaining roughly a 0. Applying the 0. In all, a decline in driving distance explains roughly half of the decline in tee to green play. They begin to decline, on average, in their late 30s and their skills degrade far below where they started in the early 20s.

In short, golfers experience a small and steady increase in performance in their twenties before suffering a large and steady decrease in performance in their forties. However, all of those studies considered performance in the aggregate — driving, approach shots, the short game, and putting — which prevents deeper analysis of why golfers improve slightly before declining greatly. I anticipated that golfers would noticeably improve their putting games in their twenties; they would learn to read greens better and approach putts using a more optimal strategy gained through experience.

I then anticipated that they would decline by age This decline is suggested by the constant references to age-related putting yips. Mitchell Lichtman explains the concept in this article and a general Google search for delta method aging curve provides more information. The major impediment to this study is the consideration of survivor bias.

When I ended up forming my sample, roughly a quarter of seasons that qualified in Year 1 did not qualify in Year 2. I included in my sample all golfers who recorded at least 30 measured rounds rounds where the Shot Link system was available to calculate SGP in both Year 1 and Year 2. The years used were , , , , and These included seasons averaged a SGP of 0. These seasons averaged a SGP of This suggests that on average those included in the sample were better putters and likely better golfers overall.

My results showed a very slight increase in putting skill in the twenties, followed by a steady decline beginning in the mid-thirties. A graph of the curve follows with a smoothed aging curve in blue. I smoothed the curve using a weighted average of the two years before and after the age in question. What surprised me was the small size of the improvement and decline.

Recall in terms of overall performance golfers improve by around 0. Putting improvements are a very minor part of the age-related improvement of golfers in their twenties.

Similarly, the general age-related performance decline per season from the late 30s is roughly 0. The decline due to putting declines in total only 0. I can only conclude, again, that putting does not form a significant part of the age-related declines in golfers. When I initially observed these results I guessed that survivor bias was distorting the results somehow. In my first foray into constructing an aging curve, I failed to properly account for survivor bias and my result was an aging curve that was largely flat until the mid-thirties before declining steeply.

That graph looks a lot like the one linked above. To test whether survivor bias was affecting my results I constructed another overall aging curve using only the golfers and seasons used for this study in fact, I also only included the results from rounds played on ShotLink courses. The same sample of seasons was used, using the z-score method to measure performance on all strokes.

The graph this study produced is linked below, smoothed using the five year weighting method described above. In red is performance on all strokes, in blue is performance on only putting strokes, and in green is performance on non-putting strokes. The overall performance looks almost identical to my aging curves that incorporated measures to eliminate the impact of survivor bias.

Overall performance shows a small steady improvement the the early thirties followed by a steady decline from the mid-to-late thirties. More importantly, this graph shows the impact of putting on overall improvement and decline.

In short, there is very little impact. While overall performance declines by 1.