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Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Top 100 Players Compiled in New Book
Picking golf's top 100 players of all time is not an easy assignment. Just coming up with a formula is hard enough but shuffling through the thousands of players who have played golf, both amateur and professional, over the decades of the game makes the task even more daunting. Advertisement Recently, Michael Arkush wrote a book titled The Golf 100, taking on the difficult task. Spending three years compiling and providing analysis on different players, Arkush brings names known to only golf historians back to life. 'I just was so motivated to write about players I followed as a kid and covered at different publications,' Arkush said, 'I wanted to explore more about their lives, careers, what made them great, what made them flawed.' Cover of The Golf 100 by Michael Arkush The 100 starts with John McDermott and ends with Jack Nicklaus. While some may find Nicklaus's selection as the top player in the game's history controversial, Arkush felt comfortable with his points system, which focused more on majors than normal tour wins. Advertisement The system for majors awarded 2,000 points for each major win, 500 for second place, 250 for third, 100 for fourth, and 50 for fifth. Non-major wins garnered 300 points, and the U.S. Amateur and British Amateur received points as well. Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods smile during the R&A Celebration of Champions four-hole challenge at the 150th Open Championship golf tournament at St. Andrews Old Course Schumacher-Imagn Images Arkush also added or subtracted points in certain cases due to their impact on the game, using Francis Ouimet as an example of a player who, on his strict merits, would not make the list, but if you factor in intangibles, deserved to be in the top 100. Ouimet is 20th. Lastly, Arkush incorporated women into the ranking, starting with Mickey Wright at sixth, sandwiched between Arnold Palmer at fifth and Sam Snead at seventh. Advertisement All told, 14 women, including Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Patty Berg, and Glenna Collett Vare, made the list. Oddly, some players have not made the list as of yet, with Colin Montgomery, Justin Thomas, and Scottie Scheffler on the outside looking in. With the paperback version coming out next year, Arkush will accumulate points up until this year's Tour Championship, which, depending on their success in the remainder of the year, may find both Scheffler and Thomas in the mix. But even after all the painstaking analysis, even Arkush was surprised by some players and their golf success. 'People whom I did not really think that much about, I realized are top players, Leo Deagle, Walter Travers, Jerry Travers, guys like that, who are all-time based on the numerical system I came up with,' Arkush said. 'Harold Hilton. I knew about him as a great amateur but didn't realize how great he was. John Ball, the English Amber, My God, what a career he had, nine majors. I'm counting his eight British amateurs, and he also won a British Open.' Advertisement Arkush also gave bonus points for players where fate had a hand in their careers, like Young Tom Morris dying at 24 or Tony Lima's death in a plane crash at 32. Is it a fair assessment to provide players with points on their potential versus actual accomplishments? Picking golf's top 100 players is just part of a complicated process. Some players are ranked, and some are not even included, which makes the book an interesting read and worth the price if you're a golf fan. Link to the Penguin Random House Website: Related: Kiwi Ryan Fox Wins Myrtle Beach Classic in Playoff
Yahoo
29-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
'The Golf 100' isn't so much a pecking order of greatest players. It's an index of lively profiles
'The Golf 100' isn't so much a pecking order of greatest players. It's an index of lively profiles From left to right, Jack Nicklaus, Mickey Wright, Tiger Woods and Bobby Jones are among author Michael Arkush's greatest players of all time. (Photo Illustration by Los Angeles Times, Photos by Associated Press) From John McDermott's fragile psyche to the sustained excellence of Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods — or Woods and Nicklaus; no spoiler here on who's No. 1 — this countdown of the top golfers is less a list than an index of insightful, lively profiles rife with anecdotes centered on their most joyous and miserable moments. Advertisement "The Golf 100: A spirited ranking of the greatest players of all time" is the 16th title by author Michael Arkush, most of them from the sports realm including New York Times bestsellers "The Last Season" with Phil Jackson and "The Big Fight" with Sugar Ray Leonard. This one is all Arkush and displays his storytelling — some sweet, some savory, a few bitter — in bite-size pieces. He includes greats from the early 20th century. He includes greats from other countries. He includes women. Why? Because their stories are compelling, even if ranking them became messy. So, yes, there are 100 in all, spread over 366 pages. Lists of the greatest golfers aren't a novel conceit. GolfDay published one a year ago. Golf Digest has its own. Folks have concocted lists on Reddit. Bleacher Report took a swing. There is even the website Advertisement Read more: Looking for a tee time? Here are 9 pleasant public golf courses in L.A. Times sportswriter Houston Mitchell got more than 12,000 readers to respond in 2009 to a poll ranking golfers. The top five are among Arkush's top 10, although not remotely in the same order. Most rankings are based on point systems, assigning weighted numbers to categories such as total tournaments won, top-10 finishes, player of the year awards, career longevity and performance in the four majors — the U.S. Open, Masters, British Open and PGA Championship. Arkush prioritized the majors, writing in the forward that they "feature the strongest fields and, more often than not, are staged on the most demanding courses. When history is on the line." Advertisement Still, Arkush allowed himself license after covering professional golf for 30 years (he was an entertainment reporter for The Times from 1988 to 1995). Once the numbers were tabulated, he shuffled the deck by employing subjective criteria such as a golfer's impact or contributions to the sport. "I was similar to a juror who, despite a stern warning from the judge not to let evidence deemed inadmissible be a factor in the verdict, couldn't help its affecting his thinking in one way or another," Arkush wrote. Read more: L.A. touts success at blocking tee time brokers from city golf courses An example is his inclusion of Francis Ouimet, a name unfamiliar to all but the most serious golf history buffs. He won the 1913 U.S. Open at the tender age of 20 over Harry Vardon, a British golf titan credited with inventing the modern grip and swing. Bobby Jones, the epitome of class, came along next, and the pendulum soon swung to the U.S. side of the Atlantic. Advertisement Like so many writers, Arkush was loath to let numbers get in the way of a good yarn, beginning with ranking McDermott at No. 100. The cheeky son of a mailman became the first American to win the U.S. Open in 1911 — at age 19 — one year after he finished second to Scottish immigrant Alex Smith, telling him as they exited the course, "I'll get you next year, you big tramp." McDermott's penchant for popping off soon got him in trouble, and that was followed by a steep fall. He embarrassed the more genteel of his countrymen by bragging about his Open victories in the presence of Vardon. Then he was saved by a lifeboat after being a victim of a shipwreck. Then he lost a fortune in the stock market. Then he was committed to a sanitarium in 1916 and was never the same. Arkush concludes the profile describing a chance meeting between an elderly McDermott and a gracious Arnold Palmer that provides a poignant connection between the infancy of professional golf in America and its elevation in stature to the "Arnie's Army" level by 1970. Only 99 to go. Advertisement Read more: Trump called Tiger Woods a 'true legend.' Now golfer is dating Vanessa Trump, president's ex-daughter-in-law The list includes 15 women, trailblazers and champions such as Mickey Wright, whose 82 Tour victories included 13 majors and whose swing was lauded as the best of anyone regardless of gender by no less than Ben Hogan. Pioneers of the sport, firmly planted in the wellspring of 19th-century Scotland, are given their due. While the Union and Confederate armies were preparing for war across the pond, Willie Park Jr. and Old Tom Morris exuded geniality and competence on the green, dominating the British Open from its inception in 1860 through more than a decade. Old Morris passed on his mashie niblick — an early term for a seven iron — to his equally talented son, Young Tom Morris, who won the British Open four times from 1868 to 1872. They are the only father-son combo among the 100. Advertisement Americans began to hold their own by the 1920s, and professional golf has increased in popularity as a spectator sport to this day. It's also an endeavor that nearly anyone can try and many become passionate about. One hundred is a somewhat arbitrary number to cap excellence, impact and irresistible storytelling. It's plenty for Arkush to mine, though, and relate the history of golf through the very best golfers. Read more: Classic Hollywood: The best golf movies As for the thorny task of comparing golfers across generations and even centuries, Arkush leans on the wisdom of Jones, whose words can be extrapolated fairly to include women as well as men: Advertisement "I think we must agree that all a man can do is beat the people who are around at the same time he is. He cannot win from those who came before any more than he can from those who may come afterward." Get the best, most interesting and strangest stories of the day from the L.A. sports scene and beyond from our newsletter The Sports Report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
