Professional players, watch out! Rory McIlroy’s wife just had the couple’s first child and that means she’s about to start winning the majors again!
If you think it’s a joke, it’s not. At least, not according to a British economist and golf betting analyst. Keith Elliott is pretty serious about what he calls “The Nappy Factor”. Elliott first wrote about this strange gambling theory – a “diaper”, by the way, is a diaper – in his “The Golf Form Book 1996”. And he is still behind.
“Over the years, I’ve been told in a number of sports that the Diaper Factor works, “Elliott told James Corrigan of The Telegraph.” I’m not sure why, but he’s more powerful with children as the first child and with the second child as the first child. I’m sure it will work for Rory given her personality. “
Elliott’s theory is backed up by statistics: he is an economist after all. When he first wrote about it, he listed Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Greg Norman and Nick Price as some of the notables whose game had benefited from becoming a father, specifically, a new father.
In the case of McIlroy, whose daughter, Poppy, was born on August 31, the timing couldn’t be better. The 31-year-old who hasn’t won a major since 2014 is defending his Tour Championship title this week before playing in two major leagues, the US Open and the Masters, over the next two months.
As Corrigan points out, Danny Willett won his Masters in 2016 just days after his wife gave birth to their first child. Of course, the Willetts added a second child in 2018 and the Brit has yet to add another major. That said, it has had a real resurgence from a terrible post-green jacket collapse. . . Hmm. . .
And while we think about the feasibility of this theory, another golfer has apparently already done some calculations on his own. We will give you a guess. . . Yes, Bryson DeChambeau.
“I no longer keep the figures, but I know from two different sources that DeChambeau recently revealed to fellow pro Andrew Landry that he calculated the win rate of the new fathers and it is abnormally high,” Elliott told The Telegraph.
It looks like the 26-year-old bachelor may have his next long-term project chosen.
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