Golfer

Overrated A beautiful swing is not enough to earn the excessive praise Tom Weiskopf has received over the years. He didn’t win enough to fulfill the potential his talent seemed to promise because he did not combine obvious physical gifts with the control of the mental side of performance requisite to greatness: a tamed temperament and a consistent will to win.

Underrated Because of his ungraceful swing and his standup comic’s chattiness, which often seemed staged, and because he was an “ethnic” from the other side of the golf establishment, Lee Trevino has never gotten the credit his record deserves. When golf eras are enumerated, we hear of Hagen, Sarazen and Jones, Hogan, Nelson and Snead, Palmer, Player and Nicklaus, Watson, Miller and Norman, Woods, Mickelson, and Duval. Trevino is usually offered only as an afterthought, which should hardly be the case for someone who won 6 major championships and more than 50 tournaments on the PGA and Senior PGA tours and who the real experts acknowledge was one of the best ball strikers and shot makers the game ever had.

Al Barkow, a former editor of Golf magazine, is the author of Golf’s Golden Grind and The Golden Era of Golf.