When Gene Sarazen died in May at the age of ninety-seven, the obituaries dutifully noted that "The Squire" was one of only four players to win each of the four major championships of men's golf: the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship, and the British Open (which begins again this year on July 15). Sarazen would have been grateful; not long before his death, he told Dick Enberg that winning each of the majors was what he wished to be remembered for.
Winning just one major is hard enough. All of the players in John Feinstein's new book, The Majors: In Pursuit of Golf's Holy Grail, attest to the difficulty of playing well in a major and how much harder still it is to play well on the final day if one has a chance to win. Course conditions are always more difficult in the majors, but the main obstacle is simply the intensity of competition. The stakes could hardly be higher. As Feinstein puts it, "Although winning a major championship does not guarantee greatness, not winning guarantees that you will never be considered great. Deep in his heart, every golfer knows this. He knows that there will always be a blank page on his golfing resume if he doesn't win a major."
Readers of Sarazen's obituary may have been surprised that he is one of only four golfers -- Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player being the other three -- to have won "career Grand Slams." But those four tournaments became fixed as the undisputed majors only after Sarazen's playing days were long over. Ben Hogan played in the British Open only once, in 1953, after more than two decades of playing professional golf. (Despite his two major victories that year, he was required to play for two days just to qualify.) After winning the tournament, Hogan never returned to the British Open. Few Americans entered the British Open in those days, because it conflicted with the PGA Championship. In other words, it wasn't even possible to compete in all four majors in the same season.
Today's majors were firmly established as the four premier tournaments with the rise of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus in the early 1960s. As one account has it, Palmer was responsible for establishing the current list of four in the public mind. After winning the Masters and the U.S. Open in 1960, he announced that if he were able to win the British Open and the PGA, he would have captured the Grand Slam. As it turned out, Palmer was never able to win the PGA -- the one great disappointment of his career -- although he finished second three times.
Many of these anecdotes are contained in Feinstein's book, but The Majors is not a history of the Grand Slam events. It is instead a chronicle of the way those four tournaments unfolded in one year, 1998. Feinstein has used this same one-year formula in other books, including the 1995 bestseller A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour, which remains his best effort.
Since the events recounted in The Majors are fresh in the minds of all likely readers, Feinstein concentrates on the lives of a dozen or so key players and little-known aspects of each championship. The profiles, unfortunately, are over-done, which accidentally proves just how make-or-break the majors are. It's not very interesting to read about golfers like Scott McCarron and Dudley Hart who didn't find the stuff to win a major or even come close. The tournament arcana is, strangely, more dramatic. Feinstein delivers a compelling account of just how much control the members of Augusta maintain over the Masters in every respect: ticket sales (who gets them), access to players (how much, when, and where), negotiations with TV networks (play coverage, commercials, choice of announcers), and so on. But what really saves the book from being simply a detailed rehash of the 1998 majors are Feinstein's descriptions of the psychological turmoil, the ups and downs of tournament play, inflicted on winners and losers alike.
The biggest story of the 1998 majors, and of Feinstein's book, was that of Mark O'Meara, formerly known as "King of the B's" (second-rank players), who threw off the burden of being the best active player never to win a major. After two decades as a professional, O'Meara broke through in the Masters and went on to win the British Open as well.
As interesting as the story of how O'Meara finally got the monkey off his back at Augusta is the account of Nicklaus's performance in the same tournament. At age fifty-eight, Nicklaus stayed within striking distance of the lead through the first three days and then made his move on Sunday. Although he ultimately tied for sixth place, Nicklaus climbed to within two strokes of the lead after playing nine holes, a run that electrified the crowd and sent chills up the spines of his competitors.
All of them were well aware of Nicklaus's record in the majors: eighteen titles in all, six in the Masters. Palmer may be responsible for settling the issue of which tournaments belong in the Grand Slam, but it is Nicklaus who elevated the status of the majors far above all other individual contests. Again, Feinstein has it right when he says that Nicklaus "built his entire year around peaking on four weekends and made no bones about it."
Who will be the next player to join Nicklaus, Sarazen, Hogan, and Player among the ranks of those with a career Grand Slam? The two best players at the moment are clearly Tiger Woods and David Duval, and each has shown both the necessary talent and passion. Both have also played brilliant golf in recent majors, and Woods's still-incomprehensible twelve-shot victory at the 1997 Masters has to count as the most impressive performance ever in a tournament. On the other hand, that is the only major victory either of them has earned. Both players are still quite young, especially Woods who is only twenty-three, so there is plenty of time to see if they have what it takes.
There is little time to see if Tom Watson can join the career Grand Slam club. He needs only a PGA Championship, but he's been short that one title since 1982, and it would be astonishing for him to win it now, at 49, when he is nearly eligible for the senior tour. Speaking of seniors, Ray Floyd is only missing a British Open title to complete his set of major championship trophies. But as with a PGA Championship for Watson, a British Open victory for Floyd would take a miracle.
Sarazen's clique doesn't figure to get less exclusive anytime soon.
Montgomery Brown is communications director for the American Enterprise Institute.