Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through a little side project I tackled – figuring out the shortest golfer on the PGA Tour. Sounds kinda random, right? Well, I was watching a tournament the other day, and this guy, maybe 5’6″, was absolutely KILLING it. Got me thinking, who’s the actual shortest dude out there consistently playing?
First thing I did, naturally, was hit up Google. Typed in “shortest golfer PGA Tour”. Got a bunch of articles and lists, but nothing super definitive. Lots of mentions of guys like Kevin Streelman (listed at 5’8″), but I wanted something more concrete. I needed data!
So, plan B: the PGA Tour website itself. Figured they’d have official player profiles. Went digging around, found the “players” section. But man, navigating that thing was a pain. No easy way to sort by height or anything useful like that. Just a massive list of names. Ugh.
Alright, time to get my hands dirty. I decided to scrape the data. I fired up Python (my go-to for this kinda stuff) and used the `requests` and `BeautifulSoup` libraries. Started writing a script to pull down each player’s profile page. It was tedious, slow going, and I kept running into little roadblocks with the website’s formatting. Some profiles had height listed in inches, some in feet and inches, others in metric – total mess!
Had to write a bunch of conditional statements to handle all the different height formats. Converted everything to inches for easier comparison. Then, I created a list to store each player’s name and their height. I’m talking hours of coding, debugging, and tweaking the script to get it running smoothly. I even added some error handling to deal with profiles that were missing height information altogether. Those just got skipped.
Once I had all the data scraped and cleaned, I sorted the list by height. Boom! I finally had a list of the shortest golfers on the PGA Tour, at least according to the heights listed on their official profiles. I cross-referenced with a few other sources just to be sure I hadn’t completely screwed something up.
What I found: Turns out, there wasn’t one clear “shortest” guy. There were several players listed at around 5’6″ or 5’7″. No one under 5’6″ that I could definitively confirm. So, no single winner, but I got a good sense of the range.
- It was a fun little project, even though it took way longer than I expected.
- Reinforced my belief that data is messy and rarely presented in a usable format.
- Gave me a newfound appreciation for the coding skills required to do even seemingly simple data analysis.
Anyway, that’s the story of how I tracked down the shortest golfer (or golfers) on the PGA Tour. Maybe next time I’ll tackle the oldest or the one with the craziest hair. Who knows!
