From Playoff Suspense to a Thriller at Brookline, Ranking the Year's Best Majors
As a reward for knocking out all 14 major championships before mid-August, you may all take the rest of the year off.
Fourteen majors? That’s right—five each on the LPGA Tour and PGA Tour Champions and four on the PGA Tour. Sorry, Players Championship, you still haven’t been admitted to the club. Keep throwing money at the players, though, and maybe you’ll get there. (Wait, who let Greg Norman edit that last line?)
We watched them all and The Ranking considered drama, superior play, shotmaking, marquee levels and historical factors in choosing this year’s best, if not bestest, majors. Here are the results.
10. AIG Women’s British Open
There was unexpected drama as the women played Muirfield for the first time. Ashleigh Buhai of South Africa had a five-shot lead in the last round, lost it after a triple bogey at the 15th; missed a short birdie putt at 17 and ended up in a playoff with multiple-major champ In Gee Chun. On the fourth playoff hole, Buhai hit a terrific bunker shot and holed a short par putt for the win after Chun drove into a pot bunker, wedged out and made bogey. Whew.
9. Chevron Championship
The only drama here was whether Jennifer Kupcho was going to do a Greg Norman (ouch, did Jay Monahan write this sentence?) and dropkick a six-shot lead in the final round. She struggled but held on for a two-stroke win. History was made—or ended?—when Kupcho made the final winner’s traditional leap into Poppie’s Pond. Next year, in How To Ruin a Major, the event begun by Dinah Shore leaves Palm Springs and moves to Texas, just north of Houston, and a Jack Nicklaus Signature Course. If there’s a pond a winner can jump into there, rest assured Jack designed it for a left-to-right leap.
8. Senior Open Championship
The final round was disrupted by rain. What? Rain in Scotland? Say it isn’t so! Eventually, Darren Clarke of Northern Ireland found himself just short of the par-5 18th green in two and tied for the lead with Padraig Harrington. Clarke opted to putt from 90 feet, rolled it to three feet and holed that for the victory to join Gary Player, Bob Charles and Tom Watson as the only golfers to win the Open and Senior Opens. “From when I turned 50, this is the one I wanted to win, so I could set it (the trophy) beside the other one,” Clarke said. Did he drink adult beverages out of each to celebrate? Do you have to ask?
7. Senior PGA Championship
Here are the words that sent electrifying goose bumps through golf fans this summer: Steven Alker is the hottest player in senior golf. Yes, that Steven Alker, the New Zealander whose PGA Tour career you undoubtedly missed. The Senior PGA was Alker's third victory in four starts and he did it at Harbor Shores in Benton Harbor, Michigan, by overcoming a four-shot deficit going into the final round with a closing 63. Sizzling, scorching stuff. Please make the goose bumps stop, they’re starting to hurt.
6. KPMG Women’s PGA Championship
Nothing could go wrong this time. Lexi Thompson had a two-shot lead with three holes to play at stately Congressional Country Club. It had been eight years since Thompson last won a major championship and she’d had some gut-wrenching defeats during that period but it wasn’t going to happen again, not again! Uh-oh, it happened again. Forget the gory details. Thompson had a putting meltdown that allowed In Gee Chun to take the title. It was a stunner of a finish, was hard to watch and hard to forget.
5. PGA Championship
This thriller featured Justin Thomas and a guy you’d never heard of who is now a guy you can’t remember. He was Chile's Mito Pereira, a Van-de-Velde-ian Cinderella, and all he needed to win the PGA was a par on the final hole or a bogey to get into a playoff. He got neither after he badly blocked his drive into a creek. Thomas, meanwhile, came from seven strokes behind, made a clutch birdie putt on the final hole and then beat professional runner-up Will Zalatoris in a playoff.
4. Evian Championship
Let’s get wild. In Sunday’s finale, the top two players—Brooke Henderson and So Yeon Ryu—each four-putted; a spectator picked up a ball that landed by her feet; and there was a seven-way tie for the lead at one point during the final nine. It all came down to LPGA rookie Sophia Schubert and Canada’s sublime Brooke Henderson. They were tied when Schubert, playing in the group ahead of Henderson, left her birdie putt an inch short at 18. Henderson hit a wild hook off the 18th tee that caromed back into play, laid up, wedged to eight feet and holed the putt for the win.
3. Masters Tournament
Golf gave birth to a new superstar, Scottie Scheffler, when he won a final-round duel with Cameron Smith. The third hole provided a rare memorable moment when Scheffler intentionally plowed his pitch from the left rough into the greenside bank, watched it pop onto the green, slow down and go into the hole for an unlikely birdie after he’d fluffed his first pitch. Smith fluffed his, too, but made bogey. Scheffler was impressive but his final-green four-putt won’t make any highlights but there was a stellar sideshow when Rory McIlroy holed an imaginative bunker shot for birdie at 18 (to shoot 65) and watched Collin Morikawa, his playing partner, top him by holing his bunker shot. It was a feel-good day, unless you were watching from home with COVID-19.
2. Open Championship
The Rory McIlroy Redemption Tour stumbled over a length of mullet owned by putting genius Cameron Smith in an Open at a burnt-out Old Course that played so short, it’s lucky no one put up a 59. Smith, the Aussie who won The Players Championship with a closing 64, did the same thing this time. Also, there should be a plaque at 17 where Smith putted around the fearsome Road Hole bunker and holed a crucial par putt—future tourists are going to wear that spot out. McIlroy, the man the crowds were pulling for, watched his 54-hole lead slowly disappear under Smith’s siege and he finished third behind Cameron Young, whose heroic 18th-hole eagle forced Smith to make a short birdie putt for the win. It was a good day to be a Cameron.
1. U.S. Open
Matthew Fitzpatrick’s 68-68 finish at The Country Club doesn’t tell the story of golf’s most compelling weekend of the year. Saturday’s third round featured The Rise and Fall of A Buncha Guys, including Scheffler, and this Open was in doubt to the end. That’s when England’s Fitzpatrick hit the best 72nd-hole fairway bunker shot since Sandy Lyle at the 1987 Masters, and Fitzpatrick’s degree of difficulty was far higher. A tense battle, a slew of big names in the mix (second was shared by Scheffler and, what did I tell you, Zalatoris, with Hideki Matsuyama, Morikawa and McIlroy all in the top 5) and a dab of history (Fitzpatrick joined a short list of players to win the U.S. Amateur and the U.S. Open at the same course) made this Open was so good that, by the end, we completely forgot that Tiger Woods skipped it.
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