"If a 59-year-old guy looks like the best player in the field at a major championship, there is something wrong with your era."
/Jaime Diaz files a provocative perspective on the Tom Watson run at Turnberry and comes away impressed by Watson but discouraged with the soft modern professional. This is no rant about the all-exempt tour (well there is the money angle), but mostly a statement about skill and the influence of today's equipment.
...the last round at Turnberry provided a revealing snapshot of the current era of golfers—and frankly, exposed them as wanting. For all their power and superior physiques and technical proficiency, the evidence keeps suggesting they are as a group (with one giant exception) competitively softer and less-accomplished shotmakers than their predecessors. And unless a few of them can come closer to being more like the giant exception, their place in history, much like the baby boomers, will end in the shadow of the golf equivalent of the Greatest Generation—a group including Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Johnny Miller and, of course, Watson—that ruled the game in the 1970s and into the 1980s.