Effect of Pressure on PGA Golfer's Performance

• Activity Number: 439
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Sports
• Author(s): Jeffrey Wu* and Russell Zaretski and Yunfeng Dai
• Companies: Eastside High School and University of Tennessee and University of Florida
• Keywords: PGA TOUR ; pressure of winning ; relative to par score ; driving distance and accuracy ; green in regulation ; proximity to hole and strokes gained putting

Abstract

It is commonly believed that golf is one of the most mentally intense sports played around the world. Along with meticulous strategy and sharp focus, the ability to perform well under pressure may be a quality that separates the good golfers from the elite ones. Using the ShotLink data from the PGA TOUR collected from 2003 to 2014, we investigate whether the pressure of winning a tournament affects the performance and whether a player's age, winning experience, and ranking after 3 rounds influences the pressure effect.

The performance measures include relative to par score (RTP), driving distance (DD), driving accuracy (DA), greens in regulation percentage (GIR), proximity to hole (PTH), strokes gained putting (SGP) and saving percentage (SP). Our results indicate that: (1) Overall, players performed better in RTP, DD and GIR but worse in PTH while in the top ten. (2) Players with major winning experience performed significantly better in RTP, DD, DA, GIR and PTH than those without major wins, and they were affected significantly less by pressure in DA and PTH. (3) The higher the rank after the first three rounds, the larger the pressure effect on SP; and there is a trend suggesting that the rank affects players in DA and PTH. (4) Younger players drove the ball farther and less accurately than older players, but age did not have a significant impact on the pressure effect.