Tiger Woods
Arnold Palmer
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Tiger Woods leads 3 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Tiger Woods at #2 and Arnold Palmer at #7.
Head-to-head FAQ
Who leads more shared metrics?
How do the published ranks compare?
Are these live stats?
The case for Tiger Woods
No player has ever dominated as completely as Tiger Woods at his peak. He has won 15 professional majors, second only to Nicklaus, and 82 PGA Tour events, tying Sam Snead's all-time record. Woods held all four major titles simultaneously across 2000 and 2001, the feat known as the Tiger Slam, and won the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach by a record 15 strokes. He spent a record 683 weeks at World No. 1 and made 142 consecutive cuts, a streak unlikely ever to be broken. His 1997 Masters win by 12 shots at age 21 transformed the sport's demographics, athleticism and prize money at a stroke. After career-threatening back surgeries, his 2019 Masters victory at 43 completed the greatest comeback in golf, a fifth green jacket eleven years after his fourteenth major.
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.