Although relatively few people watched it, you probably know that Louis Oosthuizen won the British Open last weekend. Oosthuizen had missed the cut in all the previous majors he had entered, except for the 2008 PGA Championship, in which he finished 73rd. Nonetheless, he dominated the field in winning by seven strokes. Oosthuizen joins Graeme McDowell, Lucas Glover, Y.E. Yang, and Michael Campbell as a relative unknown who have recently won majors.

Golf is a particularly difficult sport to be consistent in, but we see the best athlete or team lose all the time in sports. In the World Cup, because the better team scores so few goals, inferior teams can win or draw because flukey plays and accidents often lead to goals. Statisticians say the better baseball team wins a postseason series only 55% of the time.

So do sports not determine who truly is best? Well, we have to determine what we mean by best. Oosthuizen, for example, who won by seven strokes, was the best golfer over the four days of the British Open, but it would be absurd to say he is the best golfer. Often, though, chance causes the best team, even if it plays best in a series, to not win. Determining the best cannot be done by examining just one tournament or one season, but who repeatedly does best, or close to best. Hence, we say Tiger Woods is the best golfer because he does best over a period of years, even though he may not win a particular major. Consequently, perhaps in the early 90's, the Buffalo Bills were better than the Giants or Redskins, even though each of these latter teams won a Super Bowl and Buffalo did not.

The point is, to say a team was the best in year X because it won a championship that year is relatively meaningless, since the best frequently do not win in a given year. That being said, in this era of free agency in which teams do not stay intact from year to year, it may be impossible in team sports to say which team truly is best. One could argue that the team with the best regular season record is best, but this is misleading because not all teams play the same opponents equally during the regular season, and because of trades and injuries, teams do not even have the same rosters over the course of the season.

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