So, I got this idea stuck in my head the other day about The Masters tournament. You know, Augusta National. I started wondering about the pars. Like, how many pars do these guys actually make on average over the four days? Seems like a basic question, doesn’t it?
Well, I started thinking about it more. What does “average total pars” even mean? Is it the average number of holes they finish exactly on par each round? Or maybe their average score compared to the course par? It got a bit fuzzy quick. There’s score relative to par, like being ‘-10’, which everyone talks about. But just counting the number of pars seemed different.
I decided I wanted to figure out something specific, something I could actually count myself. So, I thought, let’s just look at the winners. How many holes did the champion, on average, score exactly par on per round? That felt like something I could track down without needing some fancy stats degree.
Okay, so I started digging. Fired up the computer and went looking for old Masters scorecards. The official site has some stuff, other sports sites too. I grabbed scorecards for a few winners I remembered watching. Think Tiger Woods’ wins, maybe Phil Mickelson, and a more recent one like Scottie Scheffler.
Getting Down to It
This was the tedious bit, honestly. I had to pull up each scorecard, one by one. Then I went through it, round by round, hole by hole.
- Look at Hole 1, a par 4. Did the player score 4? Okay, that’s one par.
- Hole 2, par 5. Score was 4? Nope, that’s a birdie. Doesn’t count for my par tally.
- Hole 3, par 4. Score was 5? Nope, bogey. Don’t count it.
I literally did this for all 18 holes for the first round. Wrote down the number of pars. Then did it again for Round 2. And Round 3. And the final Round 4. For each winner I picked.
Once I had the total number of pars for the whole tournament for one winner, say Tiger in ’05, I just divided that total by 4. That gave me his average pars per round for that specific win.
Putting it Together
I repeated this whole process for the few different champions I’d selected. Got an average pars-per-round number for each of them. Then, just to get a rough idea, I averaged those averages together. Took a bit of time, mostly just careful counting.
And you know what I found? Or rather, what I felt? The number, the average pars per round for winners, wasn’t always as high as I might have guessed before I started. It made me realize something.
Winning at Augusta, yeah, you gotta avoid disasters, make pars on tough holes. But the winners? They make a lot of birdies. They attack the par 5s, stick it close on par 3s sometimes. They aren’t just grinding out 18 pars a day. Pars keep you in it, but birdies, especially eagles, often win it. It’s about the overall score, that number relative to par, way more than just the count of holes played at par.
So, my little investigation into “average total pars” showed me it’s not really a stat people focus on for a reason. It doesn’t tell the whole story. The real deal is the final score under par. But hey, it was kind of interesting to go through the process, look at those old scorecards, and see how the winners actually craft their rounds. It wasn’t just a simple number.
Anyway, that was my little project. Just thought I’d share the steps I took. Sometimes you just get curious about something specific and have to figure it out yourself.
