The worst time of year for sports is upon us.  The NBA and NHL playoff years are officially done, and with pro football a couple of months out, we’re left with the annual vortex of sports doldrums – a sportex if you will.  Baseball doesn’t get interesting until August, when the pennant races really start to take form.

The US Open is this weekend, but, as usual, Tiger Woods is the only real story there.  If Woods isn’t in contention on Sunday, there really isn’t anything else worth watching about it.  The Mickelson return is a slightly interesting subplot, but I’ve never liked him very much, so I don’t really care about that.  Nor do I root for the underdog just for the sake of doing so.  His situation sucks, and I feel for him because I’ve been through something similar.  But I’m not going to root for him just because his wife is sick.

Speaking of golf, is there a more backhanded compliment in all of sports than calling someone the “Best to Never Win a Major”?  Right now I think it’s Sergio Garcia that holds this unesteemed moniker.  Isn’t this the same as calling someone The Finest Loser in Golf?  Just as a cross section to reference, look at the 14 majors that Woods has won since 1997.  Of those 14, there were a total of 16 runners up including ties.  Only two names appear more than once on the list – Chris DiMarco and Ernie Els.  DiMarco has never won a major and Els has three.  Of the other 14, eight of them have no major championship victories.

The point is, if you take Tiger out of the equation, you’d have nine different guys that you could never put that

tag on – including Garcia.  But that doesn’t make them any better at golf.  I once heard Jack Nicklaus refer to two major wins as “nothing.”  This, from the guy that won 18 of them and was runner up in 19 more.  So, along with being (statistically speaking) the best golfer in history, is The Bear also the greatest loser?

A common epithet that surrounds the Super Bowl, and to a lesser extent all the other professional team sports is that history doesn’t remember the losers.  And it’s true.  I found all sorts of easily accessible lists of the winners of Golf’s biggest tournaments, but I was hard pressed to find an organized collection of runners up.  It was actually faster to do the legwork and look each one up manually than to hunt for a list.  I could publish what I’ve found, possibly saving someone the trouble sometime down the road.  But I won’t.  Because no one cares about who finished second.  Calling someone the best golfer never to win a major is nothing more than a celebration of mediocrity.

You what I like about the Major tournaments? They’re short.  A quick and easy compression of competition that has all the same buildup and anticipation of any other professional sport.  A golf tournament by it’s halfway point determines who has a legitamate chance to win and dumps the rest.  It’s very efficient.  The first two days of a golf tournament are like the regular season of any other sport.  Some people pay close attention, but for the casual observer it’s just a formality to figure out if Tiger is in contention, and if so who the the lambs to slaughter are.  The third day is like the playoffs, whittling down to just a handful of players for the last day – the finals.  Six months of chaos reduced tidily into a four day weekend, culminating in the perfect amount of suspense to wrap up a nice Sunday afternoon.  And, it repeats itself four times a year, never losing it’s luster despite it’s repetition.  Brilliant.

• The Birth of a Legacy

Tags: best to never win a major, golf, phil mickelson, Tiger woods, us open

This entry was posted by TSDMike on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 1:07 pm and is filed under PGA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.