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If there’s one position that is guaranteed to provoke the “woke” and have them foaming at the fingertips on social media, it’s this: Golf has five major championships, the four accepted by all plus the Players Championship.
Simmer down now.
Golf, or at least men’s golf, has had its number of major championships fixed at four for almost a century, since O.B. Keeler coined the phrase “the impregnable quadrilateral” in reference to his pal Bobby Jones’ Grand Slam in 1930. What constitutes those four majors has changed over the decades. Two legs of Jones’ Slam were amateur championships, both long since discarded from any reckoning. That was a quaint era when golf writers wielded sufficient power to bestow status on tournaments. Thus did the “Augusta National Invitational” become the Masters. Today’s golf writers, consumed with speedwriting hot-take blog posts about Phil’s latest cute Instagram video, enjoy no such influence.
The arguments against the Players as a major are limited in quantity and quality, and can often be boiled down to reflexive begrudgery.
The PGA Tour is eye-rollingly obvious in wanting its premier event to be considered equal to the other majors. Rory McIlroy earned the same number of FedEx Cup points for winning the 2019 Players as Tiger Woods did for winning the Masters a few weeks later. The World Golf Hall of Fame qualifying criteria accords those wins equal stature too. All of that is reason enough for some golf fans to immediately reject the notion by return post.
Sure, some rejectionists just want to preserve what they see as historical continuity and avoid cheapening the major currency by creating more of them. But there’s no shortage of woke folk who would cheerfully advocate war if the PGA Tour preached world peace.
Consider the areas in which the Players is equal to — or in some cases superior to — other majors. It has the best field assembled all year, every year. It has history, now almost a half-century’s worth. And if that’s not sufficient time to acquire major cachet, then go tell Jack Nicklaus that his five victories in the first 39 Masters Tournaments don’t count either. It has an iconic venue, not a type I personally relish playing but iconic nonetheless. It has a legacy of Hall of Fame winners — Nicklaus, Trevino, Floyd, Norman, Woods, Mickelson, McIlroy …
Stephen Ames, you counter? Tim Clark, you say? I’ll see them and raise you a Danny Willett, a Lucas Glover, a Todd Hamilton and a Y.E. Yang.
But the most logical argument for the Players as a major is also the one most likely to trigger fury: the political one.
Men’s golf is run by five families: the USGA, the R&A, Augusta National Golf Club, the PGA of America and the PGA Tour. We can debate who runs the more powerful body – Chairman Fred or Commissioner Jay – but only one of those organizations doesn’t host its own family picnic in the form of a major championship. Realpolitik is reason enough to acknowledge the Players as a major championship. If that seems unpalatable, wait a few years until the Premier Golf League takes off and money-grubbing players start telling us how the Saudi International is their major.
The LPGA and the PGA Tour Champions each have five majors and both suffer for the fact. But those tours have accorded major status based on pressing commercial considerations. A major with a title sponsor is in truth a minor major. That’s not true of the regular men’s tour. The Players would not dilute the prestige associated with majors, and the only rationale for denying that reality is sheer querulousness.
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