Tiger’s win shows comparing different eras in sports is, well, impossible

Tiger Woods won The Masters on Sunday and the next day it often appeared the media world was in a race to see who cried the most and could proclaim him the greatest of all time.

I’m not sure he’s the best golfer in the world today, but he was on Sunday.

As for the greatest of all time? Stop it. He’s the best of his era, which was a nice little run from 1996-2011 and that’s just going by the numbers. He also had considerably more marketing than any other golfer in history, but that’s not a criiticism.

You can’t even say his resurrection at The Masters was even the greatest comeback in golf’s history. It certainly wasn’t the biggest position comeback at that event (Gary Player coming from eighth place on Sunday to win in 1978 leaps to mind immediately). Tiger started the day in second place just two shots back.

It may not even be the fastest comeback from a serious injury in the sport’s history to win a major.

Ben Hogan, who basically invented most of what golf is today, had a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus down in Texas in February 1949.

The crash nearly killed him, leaving him with a double-fracture of the pelvis, a fractured collar bone, a left ankle fracture, a chipped rib, and near-fatal blood clots. The injuries caused lifelong circulation problems and other physical limitations. His doctors said he might never walk again.

The blood clots were so bad they had to tie off the venae cava, which returns deoxygenated blood from the body into the heart, which is kind of a big deal.

Hogan won the U.S. Open in 1950, gimping around the course basically on one leg less than 18 months after all of those injuries.

In 1953 he became the first golfer to win three major championships in one year. It might have been four, but the PGA and British Open overlapped in those days and going to the Open is considered a bigger deal.

Tiger did it in 2000, but that was a decade before his back problems. Hogan did it 18 months after nearly dying. He played just a year from the accident and tied Sam Snead in the Los Angeles Open to start the 1950 season before losing in an 18-hold playoff. Snead least Tiger by one in total number of tournament victories.

Hogan won 64 tournaments during his career, but didn’t play that many. The 1953 season where he won three majors was half of the total tournaments he entered. He won two of the other three (yes, he won five of the six tournaments he entered).

Was he better than Tiger? Nobody knows. Bobby Jones may have been better than all of them but he never played professionally, but there would no Masters without him.

Hogan didn’t play with metal woods or finely-engineered clubs with scientifically-developed balls that traveled maximum distance.

Oh, and Tiger didn’t have to go into military service five years into his pro career flying planes for the Army during World War II like Hogan did.

Then you get to Jack Nicklaus. You can even get a pretty good debate from some he wasn’t the best in his era, but nobody else has his numbers (including Tiger). Again, his total tournament wins came in a time when they didn’t play 10 months a year with the overall number of events they have now.

Nicklaus still has the most major tournament titles, though. He is probably still a better putter than nearly everybody on the tour today and Jack is nearly 80.

Golfers in Hogan’s entire era and the early part of Nicklaus’ time had to have real jobs in addition to playing golf.

“Golf was kind of our hobby,” one Byron Nelson told me one time. He was part of the Hogan era and a fairly well-renowed ball-striker. “It didn’t pay enough to feed the family back then.”

Don’t start the GOAT talk. That’s ridiculous in any sport because rules changes, technology, training and medical advances render it impossible without a set of common environments.

Tiger’s win on Sunday was a nice win that had a feel-good ending. He basically saved golf from itself in 1996 when the sport was in dire need of diversity and a personality. The ones who had carried it previously were getting old and doing more hobbling than walking.

Television needed Tiger as much as anything. They really didn’t have anybody that got folks terribly interested. He filled that void.

His win, in perspective, could just end up being an interesting Masters that delivered monster television ratings, especially on CBS on Sunday morning followed by a replay. Some unexpected weather helped there.

Tiger’s win was a nice accomplishment and he deserves all the accolades for coming back from a back issue that threatened to put him in the gallery for good, but it was one win in one tournament.

I’m not real sure, though, it was even the greatest comeback in golf history.

But calling him the greatest in the history of the sport is an impossible evaluation.