The millions of dollars earned by top players around the world have been well documented in recent weeks with the end of the official seasons of the major circuits for another year. A total of 146 players earned at least $1 million in prize money during the 2016-17 season between the PGA Tour and European Tour, to which must be added 17 players from the LPGA Tour.
When it comes to earnings over his entire career, Tiger Woods still leads that ranking despite not having won any prize money since 2016: more than $110 million over the past two decades (Phil Mickelson is a distant second with just over $84 million).
For a statistician, however, there is an even more enlightening figure. With plenty of spare time on his hands, David McSweeney, creator of the advice website noobnoom.com, decided to calculate how much Woods and the current top 10 in the world rankings earn per stroke during their PGA Tour careers.
Of the latter, Jordan Spieth (who already has earned more than 35 million dollars on the PGA Tour in his short career) leads this peculiar ranking with 1.104 per stroke, followed by Rory McIlroy (1 million more than Spieth in prize money in his career on the US Tour) with 1.073, Jon Rahm (875), Dustin Johnson (859), Hideki Matsuyama (775), Justin Thomas (749), Henrik Stenson (631), Brooks Koepka (629), Rickie Fowler (584) and Justin Rose (538).
Five of them (Johnson, Thomas, Rahm, Matsuyama and Koepka) had their highest average money per stroke in 2017; while Spieth had his highest average ($1,897) during the 2015 campaign (when he won two majors). McIlroy had the highest individual season of anyone on the list in 2012 when he earned 2,140 per stroke.
What about Tiger? According to McSweeney, despite starting his career before the era of $1 million winner’s checks, Woods has earned 1,282 for every shot he has hit in an official PGA Tour tournament during his 21-year career. His peak was 4,191 per stroke in 2008 when he won four times in six starts, including the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, the last (at least for now) of his 14 titles Majors.
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