Wall Street Journal Thinks Outliers Will Join the Mediocre: Tiger Woods Edition

Outlier

We feel almost ashamed on this cloudy Saturday morning to focus on something so trivial as Tiger Woods' golf performance, when around the world massive changes are taking place. We could be asking whether Bahrain and Libya will take the sensible approach, embrace the inevitable, and allow for a truly pluralistic ruling apparatus (democracy or some parallel), but instead we will take a look at Tiger.

But only because still another professional sports writer has voiced an opinion and come to certain conclusions that we feel are outright delusional. In a piece provocatively and naively titled, "Why Tiger Will Never Dominate Again" in the Wall Street Journal, John Paul Newport makes his case utilizing the evolutionary musings of dormant scientist Steven Jay Gould.

The long and short of Newport's Gould analysis is that extremes in performance become rare as talent evolves and improves.

Mr. Woods's past stretches of dominance might have been such a hundred-year equivalent. No one, not even Jack Nicklaus or Ben Hogan, the two other most dominant golfers of the last 60 years, recorded two stretches like Mr. Woods's five-for-six streak in consecutive majors from 1999 to 2001 or his six-for-14 streak from 2005 to 2008.

One thing is sure: Mr. Woods's fame and awesomeness have inspired a new generation of competitors—Mr. Kaymer, Dustin Johnson and Rory McIlroy among them—whose own push toward excellence will make the likelihood of Mr. Woods dominating like that again more difficult.

(Newport: WSJ)

Gould's observations about the rarities of extreme performance, and the improvement of talent toward those extremes, will not lead you to Newport's assertion that Tiger will abruptly cease performance and devolve toward the ordinary, any more than one could stop Ted Williams at any point in his career and say, "Oh, there you go, tomorrow he won't do so well."

To look at it another way, you don't sit down at a restaurant like Per Se, and begin having the greatest meal of your life, and then suddenly reach forkful number ten and determine, "Oh wait, it's all downhill now." You might assume some variability in that level of performance, but with the overall performance maintaining a certain internal average, where that Per Se meal is never gonna suddenly remind you of Applebees. Thomas Keller is not suddenly going to create a mediocre restaurant.

Same goes with Tiger Woods. As the example of the performance outlier, he is rather exempt from Gould's assertions. We can expect fewer outliers after the appearance of one, but we won't necessarily expect the outlier itself to revert to some norm, and suddenly. Newport internalizes the entire theory into one person.

Second, and maybe it's a function of our media culture which is immediate and relatively unhistorical, but we've often seen Tiger Woods go through periods of slack performance. And that was when his personal and professional life were in complete sync. His situation is different now. He has lost a lot of fans and respect, and the close knit family support. His advertising base and good will have eroded. Essentially, he has gone through a personal version of the great depression.

Given those circumstances you cannot draw too many conclusions about future performance. In the same way you cannot instantly solve our nation's problems, so too it will take time for Tiger to recalibrate his performance and get on his feet. He may never do it and indeed revert to some normative performance, but you can hardly draw any vast conclusions right this instant. That is where the author (and the headline writer) errs, and errs greatly.

Of course this annoyance with snap conclusions is not just about golf. We see the same thing when it comes to discussing the U.S. economy, or even Obama. While past performance is not indicative of future results, we can however assume that the past performance of  Tiger Woods is just as indicative of future results as the past performance of a host of less able players.