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    Golf Digest Logo COUNT ‘EM!

    The real score is Jack 20, Tiger 18

    Golf failed math, but it’s not too late to correct the record.
    January 28, 2025
    Bettmann
    (Original Caption) Pebble Beach, Calif.: H. Dudley Wysong, McKinny, Tex., (R) runner-up in U.S. National Amateur, congratulates winner Jack W. Nicklaus, Columbus, O., here. Nicklaus, holding trophies, defeated Wysong, 8 up and 6 to go.

    Long before Tiger came along, the pals of my youth were Hoganophiles or infantrymen in Arnie’s Army. I was a Nicklaus guy; I studied all things Jack. My first act of civil disobedience as a teenager was getting a Philadelphia public-library card under false pretenses in the name of “Jack Nicklaus.” I used it to read all the books on the shelf about golf. Every year that Jack didn’t win the Masters was instantly ruined for me, because the Grand Slam—winning four majors in a single season—was out of reach.

    Bobby Jones won the first Grand Slam by carrying off the U.S. Open and Amateur and the British Open and Amateur in 1930. Amateurs were as good as pros in Jones’ time, and those four tournaments comprised the accepted “major championships.” It wasn’t until pros dominated the game that Arnold Palmer invented the modern Grand Slam on a transatlantic flight to the 1960 British Open at St. Andrews—only then did we come to value the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open (now simply called the Open Championship) and the PGA as the four pro majors. Arnie had won the first two that year and announced to Pittsburgh sportswriter Bob Drum over cocktails that he was going for the Grand Slam. He finished runner-up in the Open and later tied for seventh in the PGA, which was the closest he’d ever come.

    “Arnie wasn’t interested in counting, just winning,” says former PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem. Jack embarked on a more historical quest to become the greatest of all time (back before we knew what acronyms like GOAT and POTUS stood for) and saw Jones’ total of 13–five U.S. Amateurs, four U.S. Opens, three British Opens and one British Amateur—as a career numerical target. It was universally recognized that the Amateur championships counted as majors, so Jack turned pro with two U.S. Amateurs in the bank (1959 and 1961). He says he actually “started counting” in 1970 when he won the Open at St. Andrews for his 10th and the Associated Press writer Bob Green told him he “trailed Jones by three.”

    In the preeminent golf history book of our time, The Story of American Golf (1975 edition), Herbert Warren Wind stated unequivocally that by winning the 1973 PGA Championship at Canterbury, Nicklaus “smashed Jones’ old mark of 13 victories in the major championships.” Wind even included a chart that shows Jack’s finishes in all the majors including the U.S. Amateur from 1959 onward. It then totaled 14, to which Nicklaus would add six more. My computation says 14 plus 6 equals 20, but somehow we’ve been convinced it only adds up to 18. How did the game of golf collectively fail math?

    The key evidence is the 1986 Masters, what might be the greatest tournament of all time. I walked the last nine holes and celebrated with Jack in the press building afterward. As Frederick Klein wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “It was his sixth win in the prestige-soaked tourney and his 20th win in a golf major.” Ron Green in the Charlotte Observer concurred: “He has now won 20 major championships, 18 as a professional.” So did Dan Jenkins in Golf Digest, Rick Reilly in Sports Illustrated, Herb Wind in The New Yorker, Jim Murray in the Los Angeles Times, Gordon S. White Jr. in The New York Times, Dai Davies in The (Manchester) Guardian, Art Spander in the San Francisco Examiner, Jeff Williams in Newsday, Joe Greenday in the Philadelphia Daily News, Mike Rabun of United Press International, Tim Rosaforte in the (Fort Lauderdale) Sun Sentinel, Jesse Outlar in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—they all counted 20 majors for Jack. I was the editor of Golf Digest in those days, and we published an art poster showing scenes from Jack’s 20 majors illustrated by Jim McQueen. Browning, the firearms manufacturer, made a commemorative shotgun called The Nicklaus Twenty. The only significant golf writer who dissented at the time, inexplicably, was Bob Green, who for some reason credited him with only 18 in his AP story of the 1986 Masters. Other golf historians like Peter Dobereiner, Charles Price, Dave Anderson, Bob Sommers, Al Barkow, Jaime Diaz, Bill Fields, Guy Yocom and Alastair Johnston all have given Jack 20 majors. I don’t know a single legitimate golf historian who disagrees.

    Do Amateur championships still matter? The collective wisdom is that they count historically even though the game now focuses on the pro majors. The late Dan Jenkins and I debated the issue at length and believed in what we called the Retroactive Rule—that is, Amateurs are validated if a player goes on to win a pro major. Therefore, Palmer’s 1954 U.S. Amateur gets added to his four Masters, one U.S. Open and two Opens for a total of eight majors. Phil Mickelson’s 1990 U.S. Amateur is tacked onto his six pro majors for a total of seven. Viktor Hovland’s U.S. Amateur (2018) awaits validation.

    When did this putsch occur, overthrowing a century of history? “I went to bed with 20 and woke up with 18,” Nicklaus told me recently. “I’d like to know what happened.”

    PGA Tour historian Laury Livsey and I conclude it derives from a research project ordered in 1988 by then tour commissioner Deane Beman to recount, once and for all, the PGA Tour’s official tournaments. From that, Sam Snead’s career total of wins was judged to be 82, the number that Tiger Woods has tied. (Nicklaus has 73.)

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    Andy Lyons

    It’s up to Nicklaus and Woods to correct their own record and speak out openly about their full major championship totals.

    One might assume that it was based on exhaustive study and scholarship in the way Major League Baseball has created an unassailable statistical record book, but the tour’s effort was, to put it charitably, haphazard. Jenkins and I participated in the initial media committee, however it devolved into a series of “blue ribbon” non-expert panels mostly directed by Beman to promote the PGA Tour’s agenda, so no surprise that USGA championships got lost. “A gang of fools, dunces, point-missers,” Dan called them as we walked out of one meeting. They ended up publishing a “history” book ranking players by year that was immediately disputed, as one poignant example demonstrates: In 1953, Doug Ford was ranked No. 1 and Ben Hogan 14th—in 1953, Hogan won the Masters, U.S. Open and Open championships and Doug Ford won the Miami Open, the Labatt Open and the Virginia Beach Open.

    But Beman’s powerful personality and the strength of the PGA Tour’s brand over time discounted all non-pro tournaments and maybe, as an unintended consequence, the Amateurs were left out in the cold. (Ironically, Deane won two U.S. Amateurs and a British Amateur, but no pro majors.)

    Counting all major championships over a career is the one true measure of greatness in golf, and the game needs a new audit. It’s up to Nicklaus and Woods to correct their own record and speak out openly about their full major championship totals.

    For those who care, the facts are these: Nicklaus has won 20 major championships—two U.S. Amateurs, six Masters, four U.S. Opens, three Opens and five PGAs. Tiger Woods has won 18 major championships—three U.S. Amateurs, five Masters, three U.S. Opens, three Opens and four PGAs. And good luck to anyone who can beat those historical records.