Studying improved performance in golf

The topic of improved performances by athletes in both team and individual sports has shown that each sport has its own unique set of characteristics and these have to be analysed accordingly. This paper presents an extensive analysis of the nature and extent of improvement in golf by analysing the performances of the top players in the Masters tournament throughout the entire history of the event. The results indicate that golfers are obtaining lower scores over time and that the variation of the scores has declined. Further, the distributions of scores are symmetric and display a monotonic reduction of peakedness (kurtosis). These findings are indicative of rapid and improved performance and increased competition.