Okay, so yesterday I was messing around trying to figure out how many pars were made at the 2023 Masters. Seemed like a simple enough question, right?
First thing I did, I hit up Google. Just typed in “2023 Masters pars” and sifted through a bunch of articles and leaderboards. Lots of mentions of birdies, eagles, and bogeys, but finding a straight-up number of pars was proving to be a pain.
Next up, I went to the official Masters website. Figured they’d have all the stats I could ever want. Dug around in the tournament summary and player stats sections. Found some info on average scores and percentages of holes played at par, but still no total number. Frustrating!
Then, I had a brainwave. I remembered seeing detailed hole-by-hole data on some golf stat sites. So, I went over to a couple of those, like maybe * or similar sites that track every shot. Started clicking through each round and each player, looking for a tally. This was tedious, I tell ya.
What I ended up doing, was downloading the raw data for each round, if the site allowed it. Some sites had downloadable CSV files or something similar. I imported that into a spreadsheet (Excel, you know the drill). Then, I wrote a quick formula to count the number of times each player scored par on each hole across all four rounds.
The actual formula was something like: =COUNTIF(range of scores, “par score for that hole”) . I had to adjust the “par score for that hole” part based on whether I was looking at a par-3, par-4, or par-5. Bit of a headache to set up, but once it was done, I just copied and pasted it across the whole dataset.
After that, it was just a matter of summing up all the individual par counts to get a total for the entire tournament. Took me a good couple of hours to get all the data in and the formulas working right. There may have been some colorful language involved, especially when I kept screwing up the ranges in my formulas!
So, the final result? After all that digging and spreadsheet wrangling, I finally had my answer for how many pars were made during the 2023 Masters. I’m not gonna give you the exact number here (because I’m not about to redo the whole process just to make sure my memory is correct!). But hey, that’s the story of how I tracked it down. Turns out, sometimes the simplest questions take the longest to answer!
Lessons learned: Next time, maybe I’ll just ask someone who already knows the answer! Or find a website that actually lists it clearly. Data analysis can be fun, but sometimes it’s just plain hard work.
