Who better to ask about the greatest putters of all-time than Brad Faxon? And that’s exactly what Golf.com did about a year ago. I decided to take his list and apply some APBA metrics to it.
I took the All-Time Great (ATG) APBA card for each player on Faxon’s list and calculated the percentage of makeable putts for each Putt Distance column on the “GO!” Regular Putting Boards. For McIlroy, I used his 2021 season card since he doesn’t have an ATG card (yet) and because Faxon selected him well into that particular season. In determining the percentages, I considered a putt makeable if the player’s “P” column Play Result Number (PRN) resulted in IN or P for that putt distance.
The first table below shows the Top 10 Greatest Putters of All-Time, according to Faxon, and the percentage of makeable putts for each golfer through 19 feet. Faxon’s rankings are in the far left column. The rank order in which the golfer names appear is based on the APBA numbers I ran. (Note that Watson and Crenshaw tied for 4th and Locke and Olazábal tied for 7th.) Numbers highlighted in yellow represent the best performance in that Putting column.
Through 19 feet, all of these golfers appear to be excellent with only small differences between them. The exception to this is McIlroy whose putting performance falls off significantly after 14 feet.
While Nicklaus, Casper, and Crenshaw each lead or tie for the lead in six of this table’s Putting columns, Jack is the more dominant putter between 7 and 19 feet. Woods begins to show his prowess at 15 feet, making a third of his putts, like Nicklaus, from the 15 – 19 foot range.
The second table shows the percentage of makeable putts for longer putting distances and a Total score, which is simply the sum of all the percentages for each golfer:
Tiger leads or ties for the lead in every Putting column beyond 14 feet. But percentagewise that’s not enough to make up for the even better putting by Nicklaus in the 4 – 14 foot range. Billy Casper, Jr. edges out Tiger by 0.01 of a percentage point for second place in these rankings. This is mainly due to Billy’s putting superiority from 4 – 6 feet (and perhaps, some fortuitous rounding of results).
While McIlroy was picked last by Faxon and finished last in this analysis, looking at his numbers might give us some sense of how today’s pros compare to the best ATG’s. Rory compares favorably from 1 – 14 feet but his percentages nosedive at 15 – 19 feet. He does slightly better than Crenshaw and Olazábal from 20 – 24 feet but essentially trails the pack after that.
If Rors goes for it from 15 – 19 feet, he has about a 20% chance (7/36) of missing that putt by 4 to 5 feet. If that happens, he has about a 10% chance at that point of three-putting (or worse).