This column is in honor of the first anniversary of my late father’s death. In his last days, Dad enjoyed watching golf, and I’d often join him. Watching the recent British Open, I thought I would apply some basic statistical principles to the final scores.

For example, 83 people made the cut, and the ANOVA of their individual round scores is shown in figure 1.

The two ANOM plots are shown in figures 2 and 3.

Another interesting statistic is the standard deviation of an individual round: square root 8.975 ~ 3. Using the standard Bartlett and Levene tests for equality of variances, I tested the 83 golfers as to whether this was consistent for all of them:

p-value Bartlett: 0.891

p-value Levene: 0.983

Depending on luck and other random factors, an individual’s score could swing by ± 6-9 strokes in a round!

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