⛳Great Matches

The four men's major championships are the Masters, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open and the Open Championship, played in that order between April and July each year. The Masters, at Augusta National since 1934, is the only major staged at the same venue annually. The Open, first played in 1860, is the oldest and the only major held outside the United States, on British links courses. Winning all four in a career is the Grand Slam, achieved by only six men: Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and, in 2025, Rory McIlroy. The women's game has its own separate set of majors.

A handicap is a number that represents a golfer's demonstrated ability, allowing players of different standards to compete fairly. Under the World Handicap System, your handicap index is calculated from the best 8 of your most recent 20 rounds, adjusted for course difficulty. In a match, the higher-handicap player receives strokes on the hardest holes, so a net score, gross strokes minus handicap, decides the result. This means a beginner off a handicap of 24 and a scratch player off zero can play a genuinely competitive match. The maximum handicap index is 54.0, and lower numbers indicate better players, with the elite competing at plus figures.

Par is the number of strokes an expert golfer is expected to need on a hole or course, based on length: par 3, 4 or 5 for holes, and typically 70 to 72 for a full course. Scoring is described relative to par. One under is a birdie, two under an eagle; one over is a bogey. For most amateurs, breaking 100 for 18 holes is a solid milestone, breaking 90 is good, and breaking 80 is very good. Professionals routinely shoot several strokes under par; a round in the mid-60s is excellent, and anything in the 50s, like Jim Furyk's 58, is historically rare.

Strokes gained is a statistic that measures how much better or worse a player performs than the field average on each shot. From any given distance and lie there is an expected number of strokes to finish the hole, and a shot is credited with the difference it makes to that expectation. Developed by Mark Broadie and introduced on the PGA Tour in 2011, it is split into four categories: off-the-tee, approach, around-the-green and putting. Its great insight is that approach play, not putting, is the biggest factor separating the best players, and that distance is generally worth more than accuracy. It has become the standard way analysts, coaches and players evaluate performance.

The debate centres on two players. Jack Nicklaus holds the record of 18 professional majors and 19 runner-up finishes across a career spanning from the 1960s to the 1980s, the strongest argument by the sport's most valued measure. Tiger Woods has 15 majors but an unmatched peak: he won the 2000 U.S. Open by 15 shots, held all four majors at once, and spent a record 683 weeks at world number one. Most observers place these two at the top and argue the order according to whether they value total achievement and longevity, which favours Nicklaus, or peak dominance, which favours Woods. There is no settled answer.

The PGA Tour is the long-established elite men's circuit, running dozens of 72-hole, four-day tournaments a year with a 36-hole cut and a season-long FedEx Cup. LIV Golf, launched in 2022 with Saudi Public Investment Fund backing, is a rival league that signed many stars to large guaranteed contracts and uses a different format: 54 holes, no cut, shotgun starts and a team competition alongside the individual event. The split caused suspensions and lawsuits, and a 2023 framework agreement between the PGA Tour and LIV's backers to combine commercial interests has not yet produced a final deal, leaving the men's professional game divided across competing tours.