In June of 2000, the greatest golfers in the world gathered in Northern California.
One of the sport’s four major events – the United States Open – was being held at the Pebble Beach Golf Club that year. And these elite golfers were seeking to claim the $800,000 winner’s prize.
The stage was set. The players were in place.
And the golf…largely underwhelmed.
You see, Pebble Beach Golf Club is as treacherous as it is picturesque. Its location atop steep oceanside cliffs leaves it susceptible to wind, fog, and the rest of Mother Nature’s fury.
These factors can cause a flying golf ball to go awry. And they were all in full force that week in June of 2000.
For all their greatness, the world’s pro golfers simply could not contend with the elements.
Indeed, after four days trekking around the 18-hole course, all but one golfer scored worse than the club average — better known as par. The second-place golfers were three over par, the fourth-place golfer was four over par, and the fifth-place golfers were five over par.
But that first-place golfer? He didn’t just break the average. He obliterated it.
Tiger Woods finished the tournament a whopping 12 under par. He made it around the golf course in 15 fewer strokes than the second-place finishers.
The performance set a record that still stands in professional golf. A record for margin of victory in a major championship.
Tiger’s tournament seemed to break all the rules. The rules of physics. And the law of averages.
It was truly a unicorn event.
Or was it?
Regression to the mean.
If you’ve taken a statistics class in your lifetime, you’ve likely heard this phrase.
The idea is straightforward. Anyone taking on a task can perform it exceptionally well — or exceptionally poorly — one time, or even two. But given enough opportunities, their overall performance will average out about where that of others do.
Regression to the mean infers that humans are interchangeable. It states that over the long run, no one is truly that exceptional or that inept. Our bodies, our minds, and the environment we inhabit are not designed to maintain such long-term deviation.
To borrow a phrase from a different stick-and-ball sport — baseball — all it takes is more at bats for the phenomenon to play out.
I want to believe in this concept. After all, it can simultaneously provide hope for those in a rut and humility for those on a roll. What a perfect balance.
But it turns out that it’s too perfect. It’s too neat and tidy for a world that often defies explanation.
I mean, think about it. The best golfers on earth had plenty at bats at Pebble Beach. They played 72 holes of golf over four days, in a variety of challenging conditions.
Yet, despite that fact, Tiger Woods refused to regress to the mean. Instead, he calmly lapped the field.
And he wasn’t done.
A month later, he went over to Scotland and won the Open Championship by 6 strokes. A month after that, he won the PGA Championship in Kentucky. Eight months after that, he claimed the green jacket at the Masters Tournament in Georgia.
It was the famous Tiger Slam. An unprecedented sweep of golf’s signature events, all within a one-year span. He would go on to win each major event twice more over the remainder of the decade.
The at bats didn’t matter. The law of averages was not about to catch up to Tiger Woods.
Nothing was.
Around the time Tiger Woods was making waves in the golf world, a different athlete was dominating that other bat and ball sport. But in a far different way.
Randy Johnson was an intimidating force on the pitching mound. Standing at 6 foot 10 inches, the left hander came after hitters with a 100 mile per hour fastball and a wipeout slider. When batters saw Johnson scowling down at them, with his long hair flowing in the breeze, they surely felt fear and doubt.
This aura was at its apex during the Tiger Slam era.
Indeed, in 2000, Randy Johnson struck out 347 batters and won 19 games. In 2001, he struck out 372 batters, won 21 games, and led the Arizona Diamondbacks to a world championship.
Johnson won baseball’s National League Cy Young Award in each of those seasons, as well as the ones bookending them (1999 and 2002).
I saw him pitch in person during that final Cy Young season. He proceeded to give up a home run to a batter taking his first swing in the big leagues.
Everyone in the stadium was stunned that the rookie could catch up to Johnson’s fastball. After all, the pitch was that much better than the rest of the heaters in the league. It took something special to drive it 400 feet.
Randy Johnson is long retired now. But these days, there are dozens of pitchers that throw as hard as the Hall of Famer once did.
And while some hitters do knock those blazing fastballs over the fence, most of them head back to the dugout shaking their heads.
The numbers bear this out. Back in 2000, the overall batting average for major league hitters was .270. In 2024, it was .243.
Instead of pitchers regressing to the mean, the mean itself is receding.
The thing is, it’s still difficult to blow a fastball past a major league hitter repeatedly. I couldn’t do it if I tried. And most likely, neither could you.
But a growing cohort of hurlers do have that magic in their arm. And they show no sign of returning to that label we call average.
Regression to the mean? It’s a fallacy.
So why all this talk of Tiger Woods and Randy Johnson? What does it mean for everyone else?
After all, 99 percent of us don’t play professional sports. Our “at bats” come in the form of emailed assignments, sales opportunities, and so on.
The law of average surely applies to us, right?
Well, maybe not.
You see, whether we shuck corn or trade stocks, whether we construct buildings or run companies, our performance is sure to vary.
Some of us will be savants, riding the tailwinds of innate skill and good fortune to prosperity. Others of us will be forced to iterate in the wake of challenging headwinds.
But regardless which path we find ourselves on, we’re unlikely to regress to the mean.
There’s just too much of a natural differential between those who’ve got it and those who don’t. There are just too many people predisposed to defy the norms.
This is the state of play we find ourselves in. And it makes our next move critically important.
We must do better than to count on regression to save us. We must do more than pray for our rotten luck to turn around, or to expect our good fortunes to fade.
We must instead lean into our strengths, and pivot away from our weaknesses. We must channel our inner Tiger Woods. And we must avoid attempts to catch up with the Randy Johnson fastball.
Following this strategy will only widen the gap. It will add data points to the edges of the graph, while leaving the middle ever hollower.
But that’s the whole point.
There is not much to gain in being average. So, let’s head full bore toward excellence.
We’ll be better for it.