THE POWER OF 3
The first four Majors of the new decade are imminent and three names dominate grill-room speculation and lockerroom trash talk. The question is… can these superstars deliver again on pedigrees long the envy of their fellow competitors? Paul
Trow hails this box-office trio, but suspects the support cast will not let them have things their own way
The history of elite golf is defined by triumvirates—rivalries that stirred the public’s imagination and drove playing skills to unprecedented levels of excellence.
The first truly dominant trinity comprised Harry Vardon, James Braid and J.H. Taylor, winners in total of 16 [British] Opens and one U.S. Open during the two decades prior to World War I.
Three personalities towered over the inter-war years— Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Bobby Jones—but it is disingenuous to regard them as a harnessed g-force because Jones was a dyed-in-the-wool amateur and the other two were showman professionals. Quite simply, they moved for most of the time in different circles.
The names consistently at the top of leaderboards from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s—Byron Nelson, Sam Snead and Ben Hogan—were all born in 1912 and were major champions on 21 occasions.
By the 1960s, most homes had a TV set and golf fans were delighting in the exploits of a trio of champions branded by Mark McCormack, the master marketer, as the Big Three. Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player accumulated a total of 34 Majors between 1958—the King’s first Masters’ triumph—and 1986—the Golden Bear’s sixth Green Jacket at the age of 46. But once that era had passed it was felt we might not see their collective like again.
After a period of steady if unspectacular growth, characterized by improved prize money and a burgeoning cast of potential winners, the arrival of Tiger Woods a generation ago shook up the entire game. His main contemporaries—Mark O’Meara, Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh and Retief Goosen—were all older and between them claimed 16 majors. By any measurement that’s a worthy total, but it’s just one more than Tiger’s current tally.
Sure, there was an edge between Tiger and his pretenders, but usually there was only one winner. Not even McCormack could have styled it as a genuine, cutting-edge rivalry and kept a straight face.
Remarkably, at the dawn of a new decade and another round of majors, Tiger is still the man to beat. Since his return to the big time in 2018 after several years of backinjury hell, his PGA Tour titles have swelled from 79 to 82, level with all-time record-holder Snead. Last April, cue much hyperbole and fanfare, he moved within three of Nicklaus’s majors benchmark with his glorious fifth Masters win - fully 22 years after landing his first, aged 21.
But he is now 44 and a Hall of Fame berth beckons once he’s celebrated his next birthday on December 30. So, looking forward to spring and summer, there are questions to be answered. Surely he can never be as dominant again? Never intimidate his opponents into errors, as much of temperament as technique, as he did in his pomp? Never summon the stamina and concentration to seal the deal down the stretch as relentlessly as he used to?
Or can he?
LEADERSHIP POTENTIAL
As things stand, two players, who just happen to be ranked first and second in the Official World Golf Ranking at the time of writing, expect to have quite a lot of their own to say about how the 2020 majors unfold. Indeed, if their plans come to fruition then Tiger might find himself engaged, for the first time in his storied career, in a proper threecornered fight.
Step forward Brooks Koepka and Rory McIlroy, a duo of four-time major champs. Obviously it’s premature to style Woods, Koepka and McIlroy as the new Big Three, but at least the raw ingredients are in place for a fierce set-to over the next two or three seasons, as long as Tiger’s back stays loose.
McIlroy, who turned 30 last year, is the game’s most charismatic exponent since Palmer, Seve Ballesteros and Woods himself (though Mickelson and his ever-recurring ‘bombs’ might have something to say about that). However, it has already been six years since McIlroy won the last of his major quartet—the PGA Championship at Valhalla.
Since then the Northern Irishman has had a few near misses, but his greatest frustrations have come at Augusta National where he seems almost to want to win too much to complete his personal Grand Slam. Raking over old coals, he succumbed to one of the most visible implosions in the white heat of battle there on the last day in 2011 when a snap-hook off the 10th tee, while leading by four shots, put paid to his first serious tilt at the Green Jacket. He has remained haunted by the whispering pines of Augusta ever since.
Lapping the field for his maiden major in the U.S. Open at Congressional two months later and following up with impressive wins in the 2012 PGA Championship at Kiawah Island and the Open at Royal Liverpool in 2014 says a lot about his durability as well as his sublime class.
Since 2014 McIlroy has carried on winning with near monotonous regularity (12 times across the PGA and European Tours). He has also racked up 10 top-10s in majors during that time and helped himself to two FedExCups for good measure, the most recent last fall.
Koepka has been a contender at eight of his last
10 major appearances
His game plan from now on, apparently, is to eschew conservatism, attack every course he plays and enjoy himself. Winged Foot, this year’s U.S. Open venue from June 18-21, might be the ultimate riposte to that strategy. We shall see!
Koepka’s record over the past three seasons is even more impressive. Apart from back-to-back wins in the U.S. Open (2017-18) and PGA Championship (2018-19), he was runner-up at both the Masters and U.S. Open last year along with a tie for fourth in the Open at Royal Portrush where, in a rare, unscripted aberration, home favorite McIlroy missed the cut following a horrendous first round.
A long hitter who cut his teeth in far-flung corners of the globe before settling, somewhat anonymously initially, on his home tour, Koepka has been a contender at eight of his last 10 major appearances. And during that stretch of impressive form he has always seemed relaxed and controlled at the business end of affairs.
With apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan, the 29-year-old Floridian is the very model of a modern major general, a clone from the Nicklaus template perhaps, and can be expected to challenge again and again for golf’s greatest prizes over the next decade or so.
In terms of the distance they propel the ball, Koepka and McIlroy should be strong challengers for the Masters (April 9-12). Meanwhile, Woods, who can still get it out there but maybe not quite so far, will need to fall back on subtlety and his vast knowledge of the former Fruitland Nurseries because his chances of out-muscling the young bucks have evaporated.
There has been much talk about the hallowed rightto-left dogleg par-5 13th being lengthened off the tee so the copse of trees on the right side of the elbow can be pushed back to around 300 yards from the tee. No doubt that will happen in due course, but word is not for the 2020 Masters.
None of the remaining venues for this year’s majors is overly long by modern standards, but all three pose a variety of difficulties that are not necessarily length-related.
Next up after the Masters is TPC Harding Park alongside Lake Merced in southern San Francisco, a publicly-owned parkland layout that will stage the PGA Championship for the first time from May 14-17.
A regular PGA Tour venue in the 1960s, revisited for the 2005 WGC-American Express Championship (won by Woods after a playoff with John Daly), the 2009 Presidents Cup (won by the U.S.), and three Charles Schwab Cups between 2010-13 on the Champions Tour, Harding Park last featured on the public stage in 2015 when McIlroy beat Gary Woodland 4&2 in the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play final.
The U.S. Open will take place for the sixth time over the magnificent, A.W. Tillinghast-designed West Course at Winged Foot in Rochester, upstate New York. The roll call of former Open champions at this undulating, tree-clad brute consists of: Jones (1929), having holed a treacherous left-toright, downhill 12-footer to force a playoff with Al Espinosa; Billy Casper (1959), by one shot from Bob Rosburg; Hale Irwin (1974) with a seven-over-par total of 287; Fuzzy Zoeller (1984), following a one-sided playoff with Greg Norman; and Geoff Ogilvy (2006), who was gifted the crown by catastrophic closing errors from Mickelson, Colin Montgomerie, Padraig Harrington and Jim Furyk.
It is a racing certainty that the rough will be up, the fairway widths like ribbons and the bounces always in the wrong direction. In honesty, the winner could be the best player in the world, or someone no one’s ever heard of or has long since been eliminated from enquiries.
This potential scenario might also be true of Royal St. George’s Golf Club where the 149th [British] Open will be held from July 16-19. The last two winners over this bleak, windswept, links monster beside the tiny, sleepy town of Sandwich in the county of Kent were little-known Ohioan Ben Curtis in 2003—who was ranked 396th in the world at the time—and fading 42-year-old Ryder Cup Ulsterman Darren Clarke in 2011.
This will be the Claret Jug’s 15th visit to the links designed in 1887 by Dr. William Laidlaw Purves as a Sassenach rival to the Old Course at St Andrews. And to be fair it has provided the setting for victories by many of the game’s greats—Vardon (twice), Taylor, Hagen (twice), Henry Cotton, Bobby Locke, Sandy Lyle and Norman in the Open; Palmer, Nick Faldo and Ballesteros in the European Tour’s PGA Championship; and Nicklaus as a teenager in the prestigious Grand Challenge for amateurs.
If the R&A decides to let the rough thrive and squeeze the fairways—as they did in 1981 when Texan Bill Rogers was the winner—then expect someone like Woods, hitting ‘stinger’ irons from most teeing areas, to be there or thereabouts.
Woods, Koepka and McIlroy are the names everyone will look for first on this year’s leaderboards, but they are far from the only game in town. Numerous other major champions, like Jordan Spieth, Bubba Watson, Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Justin Rose, Henrik Stenson, Louis Oosthuizen, Sergio Garcia, Adam Scott, Danny Willett, Webb Simpson, Jason Day and the two current Open champions, Woodland and Shane Lowry, will all hope to hit form at least once when it really counts.
And what about another huge chunk of the cast who have not even entered the magic circle yet? Think Rickie Fowler, Jon Rahm, Tommy Fleetwood, Patrick Cantlay, Xander Schauffele, Matt Kuchar, Mark Leishman, Bryson DeChambeau, Tony Finau, Hideki Matsuyama and Paul Casey. It won’t be long before several of these names are rewarded for their consistency and excellence with one of the game’s blue ribbons. But not all will. Some will forever be consigned to the outside looking in. After all, several dozen into four simply won’t go.
But three into four? That certainly fits.
Some will forever be consigned to the outside
looking in... several dozen into four simply
won’t go