Golf Sim Clubhouse Forum

In getting back to playing JNSE I noticed there is a difference in how the the statistic "Closest to Pin" is calculated between this version and the original Jack NIcklaus' Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf (I'll abbreviate as JN Greatest 18). (I played JN Greatest 18 using a Commodore 64 emulator last night to confirm the below.)

In JN Greatest 18, it is calculated as the closest to the pin on any green you make in regulation throughout the 18 holes.
In JNSE, it is only calculated as the closest to the pin only on par-3 holes.

While the latter calculation in JNSE makes sense from the closest to pin contests I've seen at the few golf events I've attended, it seems dumb (in my opinion) to have a statistic that is applicable to at most only 1/3 of the holes on any given course (if you have three par 3s to two par 5s for each nine on a course that would equate to 6 of 18 holes). Therefore I can see why it was calculated in the manner it was for JN Greatest 18.

I can also see that it was meant to be calculated as is in JNSE all the long but perhaps the logic was not available to do that with the memory size of computers in the late '80s when JN Greatest 18 came out. I've found different version numbers of the main JNSE .exe online but notes with those versions don't appear to have changed this difference.

Does anyone have an opinion of which one is or should be "correct" amongst these two methods?

It seems like an odd thing to include as a statistic at all. In golf competitions, closest to the pin is specific to a particular hole, not amongst all par 3's or all holes. There may be more than one hole with the closet to the pin competition but then it's separate prizes for each hole. It can also be on non-par 3's but usually then it's phrased as "closest in 2" for par 4's or "closest in 3" for par 5's. If they were looking to make a statistic out of it they could have went for something like proximity to the hole which is your average distance from the hole over the round. But that's a stat that didn't exist in the real game yet, since these games predate the ShotLink system for collecting data on the PGA Tour, so it's probably not something they thought of even though the game would have the capability to do it.