The admired and at the same time feared Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, North Carolina, will be the epicentre of the golfing world this week with the PGA Championship, the second major of the season. The best players on the planet will face each other there, putting aside for a few days their differences regarding the way of understanding this sport that emerged with the arrival of LIV Golf. And for seventy players, there will be a mission at stake…
This is the number of non-American golfers present at the PGA Championship, a long list of stars who, in addition to glory, the trophy, the advantages in terms of future exemptions offered by the title, and a substantial cash prize, will seek to prevent United States from matching its longest streak of consecutive victories in the tournament in the ‘stroke play’ era. Because since 2016, the stars and stripes have not stepped down from the top of the podium…
Until 1958, when the PGA Championship switched from ‘match play’ format to the stroke play format, the Americans had dominated their tournament. Only the Englishman Jim Barnes, who later became a national of the country where he settled, had been able to beat them, winning the first two editions in 1916 and 1919. But since the new stage of the tournament, the series always found some ‘firewall’.
In 1972, Gary Player, with his second PGA Championship, left the number of consecutive American victories at nine. David Graham, in 1979, stopped another series that reached six consecutive titles for USA. And the longest streak came in the eighties, from Jack Nicklaus‘s victory in 1980 to the late Payne Stewart‘s win a few months before he died in a tragic plane accident in 1989.
Those 10 consecutive victories, in which Larry Nelson, twice, Raymond Floyd, Hal Sutton, Lee Trevino, Hubert Green, Bob Tway, and Jeff Sluman joined Nicklaus and Stewart, remain as the most successful series for USA in the ‘stroke play’ PGA Championship. A record that the representatives of the North American country could match in this edition of the tournament… unless one of the 70 ‘foreigners’ present in the field manages to prevent it.
The latest winning streak for the USA began in 2016 with Jimmy Walker. After him, two titles from Justin Thomas (2017 and 2022), another three from Brooks Koepka (2018, 2019, and 2022), along with those of Collin Morikawa (2020), Phil Mickelson (2021), and Xander Schauffele (2024) have raised the number of consecutive titles for the Americans to nine, who will try to match the absolute record for their country in the tournament this week at Quail Hollow.
This series is, along with the 10 consecutive titles in the Open Championship, the lowest for USA golfers in the majors. At the Masters de Augusta, they managed to win 24 times consecutively until Gary Player triumphed in 1961. And in the US Open, their record is 35 consecutive victories, which was also ended by the South African Gary Player in 1965. However, the 10 consecutive victories in the British Open for United States have a catch…
They came between 1924 and 1933, but the second of them, in 1925, at the Prestwick Golf Club, was achieved by Jim Barnes, who years earlier had won the US Open twice as an English golfer. Barnes eventually became a naturalised American, the country where he settled and made his career, and won the Open as a North American citizen. If it weren’t for this detail, the lowest series in a Major for USA would be eight… We’ll see if any of the 70 ‘foreigners’ at this week’s PGA Championship fulfils their ‘mission’ and spoils the record.
