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Ben Hogan was never a great putter and it makes sense that his biggest weakness would be the first thing to go, especially since his car accident did him no favors with respect to his vision. I also think it's unfair to say that Rory McIlroy's skills have been in the decline. Golf and tennis are unusual in that we evaluate players based on their performance in a few selected events rather than over the course of an entire season, even though it's doubtful that this is an accurate representation of overall ability. Mac hasn't won a major in nearly a decade, but he was pretty damn close at this year's PGA. And he's the reigning Tour Champion, and won the Tour Championship just a few years ago. He's currently the No. 2 ranked golfer in the world. Lack of recent major wins is pretty weak evidence that his mental game has collapsed.
I don't know if this is really true among creatives either. It's most notable among musicians who operate in what can broadly be considered the "pop" field, but that's an area where youth is at a premium. It's also a area where more susceptible to fashion, and when styles change it can be hard to keep up when your strengths lie in another idiom. Within the rest of the musical world, this doesn't seem to be much of an issue. Jazz musicians and classical composers don't tend to have careers that drop off after 40, with the exception of some earlier jazz musicians who, for instance, didn't make the transition out of the big band era. For artists, authors, and directors this doesn't seem to be a thing at all.
One of the things about golf is, especially for the majors, anyone who gets in is basically good enough to win if they put four of their best rounds together. And in a field of around 150 players somebody generally comes close to doing that. That's why there are plenty of golfers who were career journeymen with only one or two career wins who randomly win a major.
It was a testament to Tiger Woods' insane dominance that he was winning a majority of the tournaments he played from ~2005-09, because that meant that his average four rounds was consistently better than the rest of the fields' best four rounds.
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