Jack Nicklaus
Arnold Palmer
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Jack Nicklaus leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Jack Nicklaus at #1 and Arnold Palmer at #7.
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The case for Jack Nicklaus
The Golden Bear set the standard by which every golfer is measured: 18 professional major championships between the 1962 U.S. Open and the 1986 Masters, a record that has stood for nearly four decades. Beyond the wins lies an even more staggering statistic, 19 runner-up finishes in majors, giving him 37 top-two results on the biggest stages. Nicklaus won 73 PGA Tour events and captured each of the four majors at least three times, the only player to complete the career Grand Slam three times over. His 1986 Masters victory at age 46, closing with a back-nine 30, remains the sport's most beloved single moment. Renowned for peerless course management and a genius for peaking at the majors, he combined prodigious power in his youth with the finest strategic mind the game has known, finishing in the top ten in an astonishing 73 major championships.
The case for Arnold Palmer
Arnold Palmer did not merely win; he made golf popular. The King brought a swashbuckling, go-for-broke style and blue-collar charisma that, wedded to the arrival of television, turned golf into a mass-market sport in the late 1950s and 1960s. He won 7 majors, four Masters, one U.S. Open and two Open Championships, and 62 PGA Tour events, and his decision to cross the Atlantic in 1960 revived the Open's global standing when American stars had been ignoring it. Palmer's devoted galleries became Arnie's Army. Though his major haul was smaller than his great rivals', his commercial impact was unmatched: he was the first athlete to build a business empire around his own name, and he defined the modern professional's reach and earning power far beyond the ropes of the course.