The real difference between you & Tiger: our exclusive survey of amateur play at Torrey Pines reveals this: the gap between you and the pros is even bigger than you think

Golf Digest, March, 2004 by Peter McCleery, Dean Knuth

WHERE IS THE GAP WIDEST BETWEEN PROS AND AVERAGE GOLFERS? Where do we amateurs fall short when stacked up against the best the game has to offer? Driving distance? Greens in regulation? Putting? The answer, according to an exclusive Golf Digest study of 90 average golfers playing a PGA Tour course, is all of the above--and then some. As that noted golf pundit Mark Twain put it in another context, the difference between pros and amateurs "is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."

Just for starters, when compared with PGA Tour players, even better-than-average amateurs give up more than 70 yards off the tee. On the greens, tour pros are likely to hole it from a distance three times as far away. And when it comes to hitting greens in regulation or scrambling to get up and down once we do miss the putting surface, we hackers are even more hopeless.

This and other revealing data was uncovered during a research project conducted at a celebrated and difficult public venue, the South Course at Torrey Pines in La Jolla, Calif. The course is the annual home of the Buick Invitational (which Tiger Woods won by four strokes in 2003) and is the site for the 2008 U.S. Open, not to mention the muny track of choice in Southern California for some 72,000 locals and visitors a year.

A 7,568-yard par-72 layout where even the PGA Tour pros scored an average of 73.3 during three rounds in '03 (the pros play one of the first two rounds on the statistically easier North Course), Torrey Pines South habitually attracts a level of play far above the publinx norm, and it did on our randomly chosen day. Data was gathered on 87 male players, who were also asked to analyze their games. (Only three women played during our test period, too small a sample to analyze and include. Sorry, ladies.) Among the 33 golfers who had a course handicap of 10 and under, seven were scratch players, helping lower the amateur group handicap to 12, well below the national course-handicap average of 17.

So how did these better-than-average amateurs fare? The average score for the entire test group was 96--24 over par--six shots worse than their reported averages. When broken down into higher handicap (over 10) and lower handicap (10 and under) players, even more major differences reveal themselves. (See accompanying diagrams for more detailed hole-by-hole analysis.)

Distance and accuracy off the tee The golfers in our test averaged 212 yards per drive on the measured holes (Nos. 4 and 9). The tour average during the Buick event was 285 yards; Woods averaged 298. So Tiger has an 86-yard head start on our players. Our 10-and-under handicappers bridge this gap by nearly a quarter, to 232 yards, trailing Tiger by 66 yards. Woods' driving accuracy at Torrey Pines in '03 was subpar (48.2 percent; the tour average was 66.2 percent). Tiger made up for it with his approaches, hitting 73.6 percent of greens in regulation, against the field's 64 percent. On the year, Woods hit 62.7 percent of fairways (ranking 142nd in driving accuracy) and reached 68.6 percent of greens in regulation (26th).

The difference in driving accuracy between our higher- and lower-handicap players was fairly small, 44 versus 40 percent, on the two longest measured holes.

One of the most telling numbers was how dramatically the amateur players inflated their driving distances. The lower handicappers claimed their average drives went 247 yards, while driving-distance stats taken on two holes documented an average of 232--a 15-yard exaggeration. Higher handicappers claimed a driving average of 227 yards and, in actuality, hit it 198 yards--a 29-yard lie of the mind.

Many conclusions can be drawn from this data, but the hard lesson on this aspect: The worse the players, the more they kid themselves about how good (and long) they are. Nobody wants to admit he drives the ball less than 200 yards. Succumbing to self-delusion, it seems most amateurs tend to equate their best drive with their average drive.

From the fairway (or thereabouts)

While our amateurs largely held their own in finding the fairways, their performance typically went downhill from there: For example, although 27 of 87 golfers hit the fairway on the 432-yard par-4 first hole, only seven of the 27 also hit the green in regulation.

On the shorter (347-yard) par-4 second, GIR percentage for those who hit the fairway improves to 66 percent. Among those who missed the fairway, however, only 7 percent found the green. In short, if you miss one shot, the chances greatly increase that you will also miss the next one.

Our 10-and-under handicappers hit 30 percent of greens in regulation. When they missed, they got up and down 44 percent of the time. On tour, the average up-and-down rate is 58.3 percent; Tiger in '03 was at 60.2 percent.

In looking at the self-assessed strengths and weaknesses from the amateurs who hit a fairway and then missed a green, "driving" was named a strength as often as it was a weakness. No other weakness was cited as much, with responses scattered among "short game," "putting," etc. The amateurs' emphasis on the long game was clearly underscored regardless of their performance in our statistical sampling.