better with time
Masters 2025: Even we can’t believe this century-spanning Bernhard Langer major stat
Getty Images
Bernhard Langer may have just missed out on teeing off this weekend, but two Masters championships, a World Golf Hall of Fame induction and the nicest Mercedes you ever did see has us thinking that he’ll be okay. The German mainstay has been a golf pro since 1972 and still shot a three over at Augusta National, faring better than Tony Finau, Brooks Koepka, Cam Smith and a host of young guns who weren’t even born when he won his first major in 1985.
The green jackets and the ESPN broadcast gave Langer a royal send-off. And we’re sure that Langer will be back at Augusta National soon enough hitting the links without any of the usual pomp and circumstance.
Stat guru and Normal Sport founder Kyle Porter found the stat of all stats to signify how long Langer has been around, competing against the best of the best. It’s almost impossible to believe.
“Today was Bernhard Langer's last Masters and last major championship,” Porter wrote on Friday. “In his first major—the 1976 Open—Gene Sarazen was in the field. Sarazen was born in 1902. This week, Langer played with Noah Kent, who was born in 2004.”
That’s a 102-year gap between Sarazen and Kent. Plus, if you try to look up any Getty Images of Sarazen, they’re almost all in black and white … that’s how great the time difference is. You can easily play the golf version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with Bernhard Langer, but you might be going for a while.
One commenter even added in that Langer’s “first major was closer to the Great Depression than his last major,” which makes sense because of the unstoppable marching of time or whatever, but it’s still pretty difficult to fully grasp.
What we’re trying to say is that Langer has made a hell of a run at Augusta National, ultimately winning two Masters with quite a few top tens thrown in for good measure. Golf is a game of time, and Langer has put up as good of a fight as anyone else in the sport’s history.
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