Okay, so I got thinking about golf majors the other day. You know, who actually won the big ones? Sounds simple, right? Turns out, not so much when you actually try to pin it all down.
How It Started
It wasn’t like some grand plan. I was just watching some golf highlights, saw Tiger Woods, then someone mentioned Jack Nicklaus, and I thought, “Okay, who else has won a bunch of these things?” My first idea was just to, you know, remember them. Bad idea. My memory’s not that good. I could name maybe five or six guys with multiple wins off the top of my head, but then it got real fuzzy, real fast.
Hitting the Books (Well, the Internet)
So, next step, I figured I’d just look it up online. Easy peasy. I typed in something like “golf major winners list”. And yeah, tons of results popped up. But here’s the thing – they were all kinda different. Some listed winners year by year for each major. Others just had a total count next to a player’s name. Some lists looked super old, maybe not updated? It was a bit of a mess, honestly.
I spent a good while just clicking around. Found one site, looked promising, then realised it only went back like 20 years. Useless! Another one had so many ads I could barely read the names. It got annoying pretty quick.
Trying to Get Organized
I realised I needed a system. Just grabbing random bits of info wasn’t working. So, I decided to focus. What did I really want to know? Mostly, who won the most? And maybe see the list of winners for the main ones: The Masters, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open, and The Open Championship (the British one, you know).
I actually grabbed a notebook first. Old school, I know. Started writing down the names I was sure about: Jack, Tiger. Then I started trying to verify their counts, checking a couple of different sites against each other. If two or three reliable-looking places said the same thing, I wrote it down. This took way longer than I thought it would.
Seriously, cross-referencing this stuff felt like detective work.
- Find a player’s name.
- Check multiple sources for their major wins.
- Note down which majors and which years (if I was feeling ambitious).
- Repeat. For. Every. Player.
The Grind and the Result
It turned into a bit of an afternoon project. Went down a rabbit hole looking at guys from way back, like Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen. Pretty interesting, but man, it was tedious trying to confirm everything. You find a name, check the majors, tally them up. Sometimes sources disagreed on the exact number, especially for the older players and how things were counted back then. Had to make a judgment call on which source seemed more legit.
Eventually, I had my list. Not super fancy, just names and numbers, focusing on the guys with multiple wins because honestly, listing every single winner ever felt like too much work. It’s probably not perfect, but it’s good enough for me when someone asks, “Hey, how many majors did Player win again?”
So yeah, that was my little adventure into figuring out golf major winners. Started simple, got complicated, ended with a messy notebook page and slightly more golf trivia knowledge. Probably could have just found a single perfect list somewhere, but hey, where’s the fun in that?
