August 07, 2008
Golf's Littlest Major
By Jeff NeumanThe world's best golfers (minus one) are at Oakland Hills Country Club outside Detroit this week, competing for the 90th PGA Championship. The fourth and final major title of the year has been nicknamed "Glory's Last Shot." This contrasts it with September's Ryder Cup matches, which are "Old Glory's Shot at Losing Another," or the four-week FedEx Cup Playoffs, which are "Golf's Last Shot before You Start Watching Football."
Fans can be forgiven if they have trouble distinguishing the PGA Championship in their minds. The Masters is golf's rite of spring, held every year on the flowering hills of the Augusta National Golf Club, accompanied by green jackets, treachly music, and Arnold Palmer. The U.S. Open is our national championship, contested on courses fringed with grass that's deeper than Kierkegaard, marked by the unhappiness of professionals who've forgotten the joy of making pars. The British Open is held on the windswept links courses where the game began, on land too bare and scraggly to be used for anything else; its recognition of "the champion golfer of the year" predates the election of Abraham Lincoln. The PGA is … the other one, the Zeppo Marx of the group. No child practicing six-foot putts fantasizes that each stroke will win him the PGA.
The PGA was contested at match play until 1958, a format in which pairs of golfers compete head to head in a tournament bracket. Match play's quirks often prevent it from identifying a worthy champion, a trait that continued for the PGA even after it shifted to four rounds of stroke play. Since 1958, the PGA has been won by 22 players who have only that one major to their credit, nearly double the number for any of the other three. Even the PGA's golf courses have often lacked luster; since 1960, it has been played 18 times on courses not currently ranked among the top 100 in the U.S. by Golf Digest. (The figure for the U.S. Open in that time is four.)
The PGA is not the championship of the touring professionals' organization; that entity, the PGA Tour, spun off from its parent in 1968, and it holds its own event, THE PLAYERS Championship, in May, on the PLAYERS Stadium Course at Sawgrass with its famous island green. The PGA's members are mostly teaching pros, working at country clubs and public courses and driving ranges, the hard-working rank and file of a glamour profession.
While the PGA Championship has been held since 1916, its place among today's majors is something of an historical accident, a product of opportunity and hype.
When Bobby Jones won the Open and Amateur championships of the U.S. and Britain in 1930, his accomplishment was hailed as golf's Grand Slam (or the "impregnable quadrilateral," as George Trevor called it in The New York Sun). A 1944 poll of the nation's sports editors voted it "the outstanding sporting achievement of all time." As an amateur, though, Jones was ineligible to enter the PGA's tournament. How major could it be if Bobby Jones couldn't play in it?
In 1953, Ben Hogan won the Masters and the U.S. Open, then announced his intention to play in the British Open at Carnoustie for the first (and ultimately only) time. Entering the British Open meant passing through two rounds of qualifying play before the tournament proper. Those rounds were scheduled on the same days as the semifinals and finals of the PGA Championship; Hogan couldn't have played in both of them if he'd wanted to. (He didn't: he hadn't played in the PGA since his near-fatal auto accident in 1949, knowing that the grind of daily 36-hole matches was too much for his legs.) No one wrote that his decision to go to Scotland would keep him out of the PGA; no one cited the absence of that title as a hole in his resume for the year.
In 1960, Arnold Palmer won the Masters and the U.S. Open, and according to Palmer's autobiography A Golfer's Life, he and his sportswriter friend Bob Drum had a little discussion while flying across the Atlantic for that year's British Open, Palmer's first. Drum was lamenting that fact that the Grand Slam had become a virtual impossibility: no amateur had won the U.S. Open since 1933, or the British since Jones in 1930.
"Then why don't we create a new grand slam?" asked Palmer. "What would be wrong with a professional Grand Slam involving the Masters, both Open championships, and the PGA championship?"
The idea took hold immediately, and the Associated Press account of Palmer's second-place finish at St. Andrews referred to the end of his bid for the "modern Grand Slam." (Quotation marks were used in the original.) If instead he'd declared his intention to match Hogan by sweeping "golf's Triple Crown," we might view the PGA very differently.
The erudite blogger Geoff Shackelford keeps track of all efforts to label THE PLAYERS as "the fifth of four majors." But isn't it more reasonable for it to be the fourth? It's the PGA's position that's the oddity today. Its jurisdictional claim to major status is a thing of the past. The courses on which it is held merely echo the U.S. Open's selections (Oakland Hills has hosted six Opens, the most recent in 1996). As a stroke-play event, it is just 16 years older than the upstart PLAYERS. Its position is an anomaly, though one unlikely to be corrected.
If we were to recognize the PGA as a major only up until the birth of THE PLAYERS (originally called the Tournament Players Championship) in 1974, and treat that as a major from then on, the roster of major winners changes, but in few earth-shaking ways. Greg Norman gets one more major, apt recognition of his dominant performance at Sawgrass in 1994. Fred Couples gains two majors, and Davis Love III gets another one, as do Justin Leonard, Sandy Lyle, Hal Sutton, and David Duval. The monkey is off Sergio Garcia's back. Admittedly, we add Jodie Mudd, Mark McCumber, Stephen Ames, and Craig Perks to the list of major winners, but we lose Wayne Grady, Shaun Micheel, Rich Beem, Mark Brooks, and Bob Tway. Not an unreasonable trade.
We also raise the bar for Tiger Woods (who would no longer be the first African-American major champion, an honor that would belong to Calvin Peete). Jack Nicklaus won three PLAYERS and only two PGAs from 1974 on, so his professional major total would be 19. And Tiger gets knocked back to 11 majors, since he's only won the PLAYERS once, versus four PGA titles. Consider it a handicap allowance, in the horse-racing sense. He's earned it, and I suspect he can handle it.
