For as long as there has been a Players Championship, hands have wrung over its place in the year’s hierarchy of golf tournaments. In its early days, majors-obsessed Jack Nicklaus gave the Players special attention — as he told Joe Posnanski in The Secret of Golf — “just in case they decide to call it a major championship in the future.”
The Players isn’t a major — it isn’t — but even the there-are-four-majors-and-that’s-the-end-of-it purists acknowledge that, more than any other event on the golf calendar, the Players occupies a strange middle ground between a major and something more ordinary. It is the premier event of the world’s top tour; that’s not insignificant. It brings one of the strongest fields in golf (although the “strongest field” label has some trouble bearing scrutiny). It stakes an obscene purse ($12.5 million this year; in 2018, the purse at the Masters was $11 million). It plays at an iconic golf course, featuring one of the game’s most memorable holes.
The Players isn’t a major — it isn’t — but on paper, at least, it probably should be.
Still, as former actual major winner Geoff Ogilvy put it to Andy Johnson on The Fried Egg podcast recently, “You’re not just playing against the field when you play the Masters, you’re playing against history. You’re playing against — it’s different. You can’t tell me it’s not harder to win the Masters than it is to win the Players Championship. It just is. Sorry.”
It’s Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, retrofitted to golf’s most important events: “I know it when I see it.”
Ogilvy is right, of course: no matter how strong the field that it gathers, and no matter how much prize money the Players doles out, it lacks an intangible but discernible gravitas. It’s just not on the same level as the Masters, or the U.S. Open, or the Open Championship.
But if this is how golf selects the year’s most important events — I know a major when I see it — then consistency demands that we turn that turn that lens on the PGA Championship too.
The PGA Championship is a major, yes. But why? Because it is? Forget that it has an important history; ask the Western Open what that’s worth. On paper, the PGA Championship has no better apparent claim to golf’s highest echelon than the Players. It’s different because we say it is, or because we have said that it is. But I know a major when I see it, and of the four events regarded as major championships, one of these things is not like the others.
This is not a new observation, of course. The PGA Championship is a fun tournament to watch on TV, but in terms of prestige, it trails far behind the other majors. There is no straight-faced argument otherwise. And if the Players’ claim to being a major doesn’t pass the eye test, then neither can the PGA Championship’s. Today, they’re essentially the same tournament. Golf shouldn't pretend that one is extra-special and that the other isn’t.
I’m not suggesting that the history books be rewritten, and that Nicklaus’ tally of majors be docked his five PGA Championships. If it was a major when it happened, then let history continue to consider it so; ultimately, who cares? The point is that if the PGA Championship was ever one of golf’s most important tournaments, then its stature today — whatever it is — is beneath the other majors and is, at best, comparable to another event whose stature also is a cut below the year’s most important championships.
Effectively, if the PGA Championship is a major despite itself, then the Players should be too. And if the eye test cuts against the Players, then it should cut against the PGA Championship too. Either there are five majors — and there aren’t — or there are three.