There were almost too many on-course moments to chose from in golf over the last year.
As the month of December winds down and January approaches, it’s time to look back on 2023 and reward some of the best moments the game of golf provided fans over the last year.
The staff at Golfweek originally had plans for a “Moment of the Year” but there was too much that happened both on and off the course to pick just one, so we’ve split the honor into two different awards.
From the Solheim Cup to the Masters to the PNC Championship and the World Wide Technology Championship, here are the Golfweek staff’s favorite on-course moments of the year in 2023.
Brush up on your Ryder Cup history with this list of all-time points leaders for Europe and the U.S.
Over its nearly 100-year history the Ryder Cup has featured some impressive performances from the world’s best players, especially since the competition switched to include all of Europe back in 1979.
From Nick Faldo and Arnold Palmer to Sergio Garcia and Tiger Woods, a handful of players have stood out with their play and find themselves on the all-time points list in the biennial bash.
Of the top 10, six are European players, but when it comes to the top 20 — which includes a handful of active players — the split is right down the middle at 10 a piece.
As the teams of 12 from both the United States and Europe prepare to square off in the next round of matches at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club in Italy this week, take a scroll through the all-time points winners in Ryder Cup history from both squads.
In 1988, each of the four men’s majors was won by a player using a Ping putter, a first.
The fourth and final putter in the Ping Slam Limited Edition family will be made available on Tuesday, July 18, 2023, and it commemorates Seve Ballesteros’s 1988 British Open victory.
In 1988, each of four men’s professional major championships was won by a player using a Ping putter, an accomplishment that had not been done before and that has not been achieved since. Before the start of the Masters, Ping made 88 special Ping Slam Pal putters available to commemorate Sandy Lyle winning the 1988 Masters. To honor Jeff Sluman’s win at Oak Tree Golf Club, 88 PLD Limited Pal 2 putters with a natural finish were sold, and last month, before the U.S. Open, 88 PLD Limited Zing 2 putters honoring Curtis Strange’s 1988 U.S. Open victory at The Country Club were sold.
“Even though at the time it was the third major of the season, it’s fitting to complete this part of the ‘Ping Slam’ celebration by recognizing Seve’s win at the Open Championship that year,” said John A. Solheim, Ping’s executive chairman in a release. “Seve was our most loyal and accomplished Anser user, earning 47 wins with it, including all five of his major championships. His victories are represented in more than three rows on a rack in the Ping Gold Putter Vault and have helped make the Anser the winningest putter of all time.”
Ping Limited-edition PLD Anser Ping Slam. (Ping_
The limited-edition PLD Anser is milled and has been given an antique finish that makes it look like Ballesteros’s tarnished, manganese bronze original Anser. And, like the Spanish Hall of Famer’s putter, this Anser has a floating face, otherwise known as a sound slot, cut into the sole for a crisper feel and sound.
Like the three previous Sing Slam putters, only 88 are being offered, and all of them will be available starting at 2 p.m. ET on Tuesday for $990 on pingpld.com. The three previous Ping Slam putters offered in 2023 sold out in minutes.
On Dec. 5, 2023, Ping will make 35 complete, four-putter sets of the limited-edition PLD putters available for $4,990, and each will come with a custom-designed display unit.
With Jon Rahm winning the Masters, how many other golfers from Spain have won a green jacket?
Spanish golfer Jon Rahm walked away with the green jacket at this year’s Masters Tournament, and he shared an awesome moment with fellow Spaniard Jose María Olazábal after his win.
The moment makes you wonder, how many fellow golfers from Spain have won the Masters?
In the history of the tournament, Rahm joins Spanish golfers Sergio García (2017), Seve Ballesteros (1980, 1983) and Olazábal (1994, 1999) as the fourth person from Spain to win the Masters.
Rahm’s win is the sixth for the country, as Olazábal and Ballesteros own two green jackets a piece. Spain now passes South Africa as the second-most awarded country at The Masters behind the United States with those six victories.
Rahm closed his Masters run with an impressive 12-under par.
With the Masters victory, Rahm is now halfway to a career Grand Slam as he won the U.S. Open in 2021. He tied for fourth in the PGA Tournament in 2018 and tied for third at The Open in 2021.
As Rahm tries to join golfing history with those two victories, he’ll be able to claim history as only the fourth golfer from his home country to win a green jacket at Augusta.
It’s almost as if Rahm’s win was destined to happen as Sunday was the late Ballesteros’ birthday.
Some coincidences that make this win for Rahm particularly special…
Today is two-time #TheMasters winner and Spanish great Seve Ballesteros' birthday. He passed in 2011.
Rahm's caddie is wearing the No. 49, with those numbers being given out in order upon arrival to ANGC.
“To feel the support from the crowd on that 18th hole is hard to believe.”
Jon Rahm made the most of his latest trip home to his native Spain, winning the DP World Tour’s acciona Open de España presented by Madrid.
The 27-year-old Rahm grew up in the Basque coastal town of Barrika, population 1,500, and fairly or not, he’s been compared to the great Spanish golfers who came before him since his teens: Seve Ballesteros, Jose-Maria Olazabal, Sergio Garcia. He met the legendary Ballesteros at a prize-giving ceremony when he was around 12, four years before the shot-making maestro’s passing. Olazabal happened to be there, too. Rahm shook his hand but caught up in the moment, he nearly missed that of Ballesteros.
“My dad almost had a heart attack,” Rahm recalled. “I have that memory. I never got to meet him again, never got to speak to him again.”
With a sizzling final-round 62, Rahm lapped the field by six strokes to claim his third national open title, equaling the haul of Ballesteros in his home Open. Following in Seve’s footsteps, Rahm collected the trophy at Club de Campo Villa de Madrid, where Ballesteros claimed his third Spanish Open victory in 1995, and his 50th and final DP World Tour victory.
“You know, Seve is a great hero of mine and to do something he took his whole career to do in just a few years is quite humbling, I’m not going to lie. It might not be the strongest field I play all year but sometimes this could be the hardest to win, right?” Rahm said. “When I’m at home, I’m supposed to win, everybody is betting on me to win and to come out and play a Sunday like I just did it’s hard to describe. It was my lowest round, my lowest score out here, it was pretty much a perfect week.”
It’s a pleasure to watch @JonRahmpga when he’s firing on all cylinders, but this win will further help encourage a new generation of Spanish golfers into our beautiful game. Vamos Rahmbo 👊🏼🏆
In addition, Rahm, who won this tournament in 2018 and 2019 when he won by five strokes, became the first player since Max Faulkner (1953 and 1957) to win the Spanish Open by five or more strokes more than once. Rahm also became the second fastest Spanish player to win eight titles on the DP World Tour – in just 62 appearances – only one event more than Ballesteros, who captained Europe to victory at the 1997 Ryder Cup at Valderrama in Spain.
“I’ve spoken many times about how that 1997 Ryder Cup and Seve making the win that week, some friends of my dad’s started me playing golf otherwise who knows what else I’d be. I’m here because of that alone, and everything else is down to the path that he’s paved for so many of us,” Rahm said. “Not only him but Olly (Jose Maria Olazabal) after him and then Sergio (Garcia). I mean Sergio has been instrumental as well, somebody that carried records after them for so long. You know it’s not only for me but it’s also for them and hopefully the many who come.”
Rahm’s 9-under 62 gave him a 72-hole total of 25-under 259, six strokes better than France’s Matthieu Pavon. With four birdies on the front nine, including a 13-foot birdie putt on the par-3 9th hole, Rahm built a two-shot lead. An eagle on the par-5, 14th hole, followed by two back-to-back birdies at the end of his round solidified his first DP World Tour title since winning his maiden major at the 2021 U.S. Open. He also bested Seve’s lowest scoring record on the Club de Campo Villa de Madrid Black course.
“To feel the support from the crowd on that 18th hole is hard to believe,” Rahm added. “I know it’s supposed to help but in golf and in individual sports sometimes that crowd can get in your head and it’s something that is hard to get used to. I’m proud I was able to do what I did. Truthfully, moments like this, pressure packed moments, make it better. Pressure makes diamonds, sometimes you get a diamond like this one.”
Rahm is trying to equal Ballesteros’ mark of winning the Spanish Open three times.
Justly so, Seve Ballesteros is regarded in Spanish circles as the nation’s greatest golf product, revered for his five victories in major tournaments and leading the all-time list of European Tour winners with 50 titles.
But Jon Rahm is carving out his own slice of Spanish golf history, having held the top spot in the Official World Golf Ranking for more than a year and becoming the first Spaniard to capture the U.S. Open.
This week, Rahm is trying to equal Ballesteros’ mark of winning the Spanish Open three times, and if Thursday’s opening round is any indication, he just might do it.
Rahm, who won the event in 2018 and 2019 but couldn’t go for a natural three-peat since it was canceled last year due to COVID, fired an opening-round 63 at Clube de Campo Villa de Madrid. Ballesteros won the event in 1981, 1985 and in his final Euro Tour victory in 1995.
“It would be very unique. I know names like Ollie (Jose Maria Olazabal), he couldn’t win it,” Rahm said earlier in the week. “I would hope to be able to get to a third not only to tie Seve but to win it three times in a row.”
There’s still work to be done as Rahm is two shots off the pace after the opening round — Englishman Ross McGowan led the way with a 61 while Sebastián García Rodríguez is alone in second after firing a 62.
Rahm was a star at Arizona State and now lives in Scottsdale, but he was thrilled at the reception he received.
“When I see my face on buses and billboards I realize the impact that I’ve had,” he said. “Little by little I’m getting used to it. I’m very motivated, there is nothing like the support of these fans.”
No cliché is more kindly yet bromidic than the assertion that a slumping star will win again simply because he or she is too good not to.
Among the plentiful clichés permeating golf commentary, there is none more kindly yet bromidic than the assertion that a slumping star will win again simply because he or she is too good not to. It’s a polite fiction, peddled about almost every prominent professional who achieved early success only to plunge into, if not obscurity, then at least irrelevance. As analysis, it lies somewhere between sentimentality and sycophancy, but nowhere close to sound.
Golf’s recent run of resurrections began—appropriately enough, for those particular to the low-hanging fruit such narratives represent—on Easter Sunday, when Jordan Spieth won the Valero Texas Open for his first victory in almost four years. A week later, Hideki Matsuyama’s Masters triumph ended a drought of similar duration. And on Saturday, Lydia Ko completed the trifecta (or trinity) with a seven-stroke romp at the LPGA’s Lotte Championship after three years wandering the desert in search of a title.
These comebacks—particularly those of Spieth and Ko—are welcome positives for their respective Tours. Both are likable and engaging personalities whose lack of form never once manifested itself in a lack of class or professionalism. All slumps are relative, of course. The results posted by Spieth and Ko suggest they were more searching than wholly lost, with the odd encouraging hint of familiar brilliance amid too much mediocrity.
Jordan Spieth walks off the first tee box during the third round of the 2021 Valero Texas Open. (Photo: Daniel Dunn-USA TODAY Sports)
But whatever led them back to the winner’s circle—determination, talent, hard work, perseverance—it was assuredly not the mawkish twaddle that they were just too good not to be there again.
Just as cemeteries are full of indispensable people, lesser Tours and broadcasting booths are peopled with those thought too good not to win again. Some of the falls from grace were so precipitous as to become shorthand reference points even for casual fans.
The obvious one is David Duval. He won 13 PGA Tour titles in under four years, culminating in his Open Championship victory at Royal Lytham 20 years ago. A few months later in Japan, two days after his 30th birthday, he cashed his last winner’s check.
The Claret Jug can seem a poisoned chalice for some of its recipients. Ian Baker-Finch won it a decade before Duval, but six years later he wept in the locker room at Royal Troon when he couldn’t break 90 in the opening round. That afternoon he withdrew from the Open and quit tournament golf.
Seve Ballesteros won three Opens but was only 38 years old when the victories dried up, his swing and body decayed beyond repair. A friend of mine once asked Seve—a man not given to modesty—who would win if Europe’s ‘Big Five’ of the ‘80s faced off at their best. “Sandy would win,” Seve replied firmly. “But I would be second.” Yet Sandy—as in Lyle, Open and Masters champion—was finished even earlier than Seve, at age 34, not counting a European Seniors win and a couple of hickory events in his native Scotland.
Lyle’s Open came at Royal St. George’s, where the championship makes its overdue return (pandemic permitting) in July. Four years earlier at RSG’s, Bill Rogers won the Jug, one of seven worldwide titles the 30-year-old Texan claimed in ’81. By ’88, Rogers was working in a San Antonio pro shop, burned out and far removed from his last win. Yani Tseng won two Women’s British Opens among her five majors and 15 LPGA titles, all in a four-year span. She was 23 when the slump started. She’s now 32 with a world ranking of 1,025th. We can reach back further. Ralph Guldahl: 16 wins, three majors, done at 29.
Every one of those stars met the treacly threshold of being too good not to win again,
Ko’s win proved that fine players can rediscover the magic, but if you knew where to look the same week bore reminders that that many simply can’t, no matter how hard they try. Martin Kaymer was third in the European Tour’s Austrian Open on Sunday. The German hasn’t won since the very day he was proclaimed golf’s dominant force—June 15, 2014, the day he won the U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2 by eight shots, a month after having won the Players Championship. He was 29 years old with two majors on a 23-win résumé. He’s now 36 but the résumé requires no updating.
Men with lesser records sail on, their careers glorious wrecks of what was once promised. Luke Donald was runner-up in the RBC Heritage five times, but this week he missed the cut for the 15th time in his last 17 starts. The former world No. 1 is almost a decade distant from his last W, and ranked 584th. Matteo Manassero won the British Amateur and made a Masters cut at age 16, and had four European Tour wins at 20. He’s now playing now on the Alps Tour, not a circuit anyone wants to play his way back to.
None of the aforementioned are working less assiduously than did Spieth and Ko, and stand as testament that talent and determination is not always sufficient for reward at the highest level. This is a capricious sport, and the road back to relevance will prove impassable for most. After her victory, Ko credited Spieth with inspiring her. She knew he had been tilling fields that had lain fallow for several seasons before his win in Texas. Perhaps hers will in turn spark someone else who knows they are good enough to win again, and who understands that none are too good not to.
The R&A’s “The Open for the Ages” broadcast will bring together many of golf’s greatest champions for the first time.
In light of the Open Championship being canceled this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the R&A had to figure out a different way to take note of championship week. The governing body will engage in a bit of time traveling to stage a very clever celebration of the great champions to hoist the Claret Jug through the years.
The R&A’s “The Open for the Ages” broadcast will bring together many of golf’s greatest champions for the first time to compete against each other over the Old Course at St Andrews in a three-hour broadcast production on July 19, what would have been the final round of this year’s Open at Royal St. George’s.
Using 50 years of archived footage from past championships – edited together with the addition of modern graphics and new commentary – the R&A will allow viewers to imagine a championship contested by some of the game’s greatest, including Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Seve Ballesteros, Tom Watson, Sir Nick Faldo and Rory McIlroy.
The three-hour final-round program – which follows a week of digital highlights, clips and statistics – will be broadcast across a handful of networks, including Golf Channel in the U.S. and Sky Sports in the United Kingdom.
Commentators include Ewen Murray, Nick Dougherty, Butch Harmon and Iona Stephen.
The winner of “The Open for The Ages” will be determined by a fan vote that has registered more than 10,000 responses and a data model developed in partnership with NTT DATA, which utilizes player career statistics alongside the input by fans to calculate the champion.
“Golf is one of the very few sports where this concept can be created and brought to life,” Martin Slumbers, Chief Executive of the R&A, said in a release. “The way in which the sport is filmed allows us a truly unique opportunity to reimagine history and bring together the greatest players from many different eras on a scale which has not been done before, either in golf or in other sports.
“We are all keenly feeling the absence of The Open from the global sporting calendar this year and so we hope that this broadcast will generate real interest and enjoyment for the millions of golf and sports fans who closely follow the Championship every year.”
The 2021 Open Championship will be played July 15-18 at Royal St. George’s. The Open returns to the old course at St. Andrews in 2022 for its 150th playing.
Paul Azinger is the perfect chap to meet for a round of cocktails at the 19 th hole. Face it, the guy likes to talk. Likes to laugh. Is passionate and intense. And does he have stories. In a life spanning 60 years now, Zinger won the 1993 PGA …
Paul Azinger is the perfect chap to meet for a round of cocktails at the 19th hole.
Face it, the guy likes to talk. Likes to laugh. Is passionate and intense. And does he have stories.
In a life spanning 60 years now, Zinger won the 1993 PGA Championship, 12 PGA Tour titles and two more on the European Tour. Captained the U.S. to victory in the 2008 Ryder Cup. Played on winning Ryder Cup teams in 1991 and 1993. Spent 300 weeks in the top 10.
He held his own against the best in the world, including Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Greg Norman, Jose Maria Olazabal, Ernie Els, Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and his late best friend, Payne Stewart.
And he kicked cancer’s butt.
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Now Azinger talks a great game as the lead analyst for NBC and Fox.
“Well, I love golf,” Azinger said in a chat with Golfweek. “I can’t tell you how much I love the sport and how much I love watching it. I love playing the game.”
While he’s “chomping at the bit” to get back to work, Azinger has kept busy sheltered at his home in Bradenton, Florida, since the COVID-19 global pandemic halted play on the PGA Tour in March.
“I just don’t let myself get bored as much as anything,” Azinger said. “Self-isolating isn’t too bad. I’ve done a lot of work around the house. I’m neater than I think I am. I can clean if I want to.”
The current state and the fear of the unknown concerning the coronavirus is mindful in some ways to Azinger’s successful battle against cancer that began in 1993 when lymphoma was discovered in his right shoulder blade. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments as well as Azinger’s perseverance conquered cancer.
“When I first heard the words, ‘You have cancer,’ immediately it was sort of a similarity to hearing there is a virus going around and we’re all going to have to shelter in place,” Azinger said. “When I heard what the treatment was for (cancer), that’s when I knew it was a big deal. This, you’re just trying to avoid the treatment.
“It’s a weird situation. For a long time there, we all but wondered if we could get it and could it make us sick enough that we could succumb. And that’s just a terrible feeling. And that was similar to the feeling I had when I had cancer, for sure.”
On a lighter note
Azinger’s love for motorcycles: “It’s a feeling of freedom.”
Playing against Tiger Woods at the zenith of his powers: “We were watching something we thought we would never see.”
His love for the Ryder Cup: “The whole patriotism aspect.”
Johnny Miller, Paul Azinger and Dan Hicks in the NBC booth during the third round of the 2019 Waste Management Phoenix Open. Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images
Azinger also addressed comments he made about Tommy Fleetwood and Lee Westwood ahead of the final round of this year’s Honda Classic that turned him into a European Tour punching bag. One word – that – got Azinger in trouble when he said you have to win on the PGA Tour. Fleetwood, a five-time winner on the European Tour, was trying to win his maiden PGA Tour title.
“A lot of pressure here,” Azinger said on the broadcast. “You’re trying to prove to everybody that you’ve got what it takes. These guys know, you can win all you want on that European Tour or in the international game and all that, but you have to win on the PGA Tour.”
That European Tour. Oops.
“I’m sure I’ll be some bulletin board material for them at the Ryder Cup,” Azinger said. “I respect all wins. I try to use good grammar when I’m in the booth and I failed big-time on that one. And it didn’t come off quite as I hoped.”
Eventually, Azinger will get back into the booth and is a long way from sitting in a rocking chair and reminiscing about a good life lived.
“I’m still looking to make today a great day, tomorrow a great day,” he said. “I want to continue to try and achieve in charitable ways, be better as a person. I want to contribute to the game of golf in whatever capacity I can. Try to make the game grow and help the game come back from this devastating virus.”
Scroll up to watch Steve DiMeglio’s discussion with Paul Azinger.
Who could forget Guy McQuitty, a professional who qualified at Turnberry in ’86 then shot 95-87, a stout 42-over par for 36 holes?
In a week when we couldn’t make our way down a padlocked Magnolia Lane, homebound golf fans had to settle instead for memory lane.
Our guides were familiar broadcast voices, many of them — Pat Summerall, Ken Venturi — long stilled. Golf Channel re-aired the 1986 Masters, the Rosetta Stone of major championships that revealed the Sunday strengths of Jack Nicklaus and the comparative frailties even among Hall of Famers in the generation that followed him. Jack was winning too over on CBS, which gave us the epic ’75 Masters, in which he helped Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller add to what would ultimately be a combined seven silver salvers. More recent Masters tournaments were also dusted off: ’04, when Phil Mickelson broke his duck and Ernie Els’ heart, and ’19, when an approaching storm moved up tee times and saw Tiger Woods secure his fifth green jacket by Sunday lunchtime (his first jacket was pretty much sealed by Sunday lunchtime too, but that’s another story).
The retro weekend broadcasts — in addition to the Masters YouTube channel, which contains every final round dating back to 1968 — were a welcome fix for quarantined golf junkies who are otherwise denied until November by the COVID-19 crisis. But for me, two streams diverged in a locked down New York City apartment, and I took the one less clicked upon, at least in April. I opted for the only major tournament we know for certain won’t be played this year.
The Open Championship website has every official film since 1970 — Jack won that year too, of course — and it’s a delightful reservoir of the quaint and the quirky. In my quarantine viewing I elected to skip more recent Opens that remain reasonably fresh in the mind, despite the ample wine intake necessary to stomach small town British food those weeks. It’s earlier Opens, those from the ’70s and ’80s, that offer beguiling glimpses of a time when even major golf was less corporate, and pleasant reminders of players long forgotten because they’re either dead or just not brand-building on InstaGrift.
Like “Mr. Lu,” who lost by a shot to Lee Trevino at Royal Birkdale in ’71. Lu Liang-Huan is a mere footnote today, but he was good enough to win titles across four decades. Or Brian Barnes. The 1975 Open film opens with the late legend arriving on the beach at Carnoustie via hovercraft that ferried him across the Firth of Tay from St. Andrews (a reminder that the complete absence of hotels in Carnoustie was still preferable to the monstrosity now sitting behind the 18th green). Or Jack Newton.
He was one of two talented 25-year-olds who made an 18-hole playoff that week at Carnoustie. Tom Watson won, the first of eight majors. Newton also finished second to Seve Ballesteros in the 1980 Masters, but he’s little-remembered now, his career having been cut short at age 33 when on a rainy night he walked into a plane propeller on the runway at the Sydney airport.
Ballesteros, who would have turned 63 last week, features in so many of the old Open films, as though they were poignant home movie reminders of his brilliance. The summer of ’76, when at age 19 he chased Miller around Birkdale for four days before finishing second; the ‘car park champion’ at Lytham in ’79; the conquering matador at St. Andrews in ’84; the sublime fifth and final major back at Lytham in ’88.
Seve’s are moments not easily forgotten, but the Open films are rife with many curios that have been. Maurice Flitcroft, the unemployed crane operator who gatecrashed a qualifier in ’76 and shot 121. Guy McQuitty, a professional who qualified at Turnberry in ’86 then shot 95-87, a stout 42-over par for 36 holes. He won honorable mention in the official film for not living up to his name and hailing a cab after day one.
Greg Norman of Australia celebrates after winning the title during the final round of the 1986 British Open Golf Championship held on July 20, 1986 at Turnberry, in Ayrshire, Scotland. (Photo by Simon Bruty/Getty Images)
That same Turnberry Open saw an utterly imperious Greg Norman at the height of his powers, quite unlike the luckless figure we see so often in Masters movies. He shot what might be the finest round ever played on Friday that week, three-putting the last for a 63 in weather so foul one wouldn’t even send Brandel Chamblee outdoors in it. That was back when players routinely hit 2- and 3-irons into 450-yard holes, and fairway woods into the par-5s at Augusta National. A bygone era indeed.
That library of old Opens will get many more visits before we finally enjoy the 149th edition 15 months from now. So too will that Masters channel on YouTube, sustenance for another seven months. Sitting at home over the last week, we didn’t get to see if Tiger could defend, if Rory could complete the career grand slam, if Gary Player would boast about outdriving 80-year-old Nicklaus in the ceremonial tee shot. But we will in November, pandemic-permitting.
Until we see another major, we make do with memories. What should have been Masters week was marked by what golf has lost in 2020. But it was also an apt time to revisit everything, and everyone, that shaped and sustained it in the years thus far.
