Math and golf! Charles Murray says that Tiger won’t burn so bright. Here’s the open:

Predicting that Tiger Woods can win five more majors assumes that nothing has significantly degraded the freakish combination required for extreme accomplishment. That assumption is untenable.
I know, I know: This essay guarantees that Tiger Woods will win the PGA Championship in a few weeks and win all four major golf championships next year. But even if he does, he shouldn’t have, in theory, which is the most important thing. Here’s why:
One of the fascinating byproducts of the research for my book Human Accomplishment was the light that golf sheds on the nature of extreme accomplishment. Unlike greatness in science, literature, music, or art, greatness in golf has an objective measure: the number of wins in major championships. But golf also has many objective measures of component skills—greens hit in regulation, putts per round, driving distance, etc., all of which are tracked by the PGA for every shot that a player makes.
The component skills form almost perfect normal distributions—bell curves, if you prefer. Here, for example, is the distribution of putts per round among pro golfers:
The same is true of all the component measures. Furthermore, it is not the case that a Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods is at the top on several of these component skills. The great champions do well on all of them, but not necessarily the best or even close to the best. Even in Nicklaus’s prime, his colleagues considered his short game pedestrian and gave Lee Trevino the nod as the genius shot-maker of his generation. But not one of them doubted that Nicklaus was the greatest golfer among them, because he could put it all together—especially on Sunday afternoon with everything on the line.
And so when it comes to the number of major victories, there is no bell curve. Instead, the graph looks like this even when the sample is limited to golfers who won at least one major—a severe constraint indeed. The figure comes from Human Accomplishment. It is based on golfers who had completed their careers by 2001, so it omits Woods.