That makes some sense, but not quite.

In golf, there are prizes for getting 2nd, 3rd, etc... So if you knew Woods was going to destroy you, you would still play your best game and try to get 2nd place.

Now, for the people who might get 2nd, 3rd, and maybe a few more top spots, they might want to try to best Woods. But people who have no chance would still play their regular game (if your theory is correct).

So I'd be interested to see if the drop in score correlated at all with the average score across previous games.

Indeed. This part constitutes the science: "When the superstar entered a tournament, every other golfer took, on average, 0.8 more strokes." The rest is speculation.

In fact, even that phrasing is slightly misleading, because it suggests causality -- I suspect the evidence only supports correlation.

The article is a particularly idiotic example of uninformed speculation passing for science journalism.

That does make sense, but the article is saying that people screwed up because they overthought their current strategies and played worse than normally, not because they overcorrected in the other direction and took more risks.

The only facts quoted in the article are: Tiger woods in dominant, and "[w]hen the superstar entered a tournament, every other golfer took, on average, 0.8 more strokes. This effect was even more pronounced when Woods was playing well."

Based solely on the above they draw their conclusions. I'm just pointing out that there is a simpler and more rational conclusion one could draw.

in your example I might care because it would pay off 1: 1million that you beat tiger. I would rather play a decent game with tiger and would hope to shoot my best.