Golf's Four Majors: A History
What Makes a Major
In men's professional golf, four tournaments stand above all the others: the Masters, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open and The Open Championship. Careers are judged largely by how many of them a player wins. Jack Nicklaus holds the record with 18 majors, Tiger Woods is second with 15, and Walter Hagen is next with 11. The four events have different organizers, different histories and very different personalities, and the idea of grouping them together is younger than any of them. This guide traces how each began, how the "Grand Slam" came to mean what it does today, and which players have managed to win all four.
The Open: Where It All Began
The oldest of the majors was first played on October 17, 1860, at Prestwick Golf Club on Scotland's Ayrshire coast. Eight professionals played three rounds of Prestwick's 12-hole course, and Willie Park Sr. won by two strokes over Tom Morris Sr. There was no prize money; the winner received a red leather Challenge Belt. Amateurs were admitted the following year, which is where the "Open" name comes from.
Father and son dominated the early decades. Old Tom Morris won four times, and his son, Young Tom Morris, won three in a row from 1868 to 1870, which under the rules let him keep the belt for good. No championship was held in 1871. When it resumed in 1872, Young Tom won again, and his name became the first engraved on the new trophy, the Claret Jug. Harry Vardon later set the record of six Open titles, the last in 1914. Today the championship rotates among links courses in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland, and the Old Course at St Andrews, first used in 1873, has staged it 30 times, more than any other venue.
The U.S. Open and the PGA Championship
The newly formed United States Golf Association held the first U.S. Open on October 4, 1895, at Newport Country Club in Rhode Island. It was a modest affair, 36 holes in a single day, won by a 21-year-old English professional, Horace Rawlins. British-born players won most of the early editions, and the championship did not truly capture the American imagination until 1913, when a young local amateur, Francis Ouimet, beat Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in a playoff at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. The U.S. Open went on to earn a reputation as golf's hardest examination, with narrow fairways, thick rough and firm, fast greens. Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh has hosted it a record 10 times, most recently in 2025, when J.J. Spaun won with a 64-foot putt on the final hole.
The PGA Championship came from the working side of the game. The Professional Golfers' Association of America was formed in 1916 with backing from department-store owner Rodman Wanamaker, whose name is still on the trophy, and its first championship was played that October at Siwanoy Country Club in Eastchester, New York. Jim Barnes beat Jock Hutchison 1 up in the 36-hole final. The PGA stayed a match-play event through 1957 before switching in 1958 to 72 holes of stroke play, the format all four majors now share.
The Masters: Bobby Jones's Invitation
The youngest major is the only one played on the same course every year. After retiring from competition, Bobby Jones set out to build his ideal course, and with investment banker Clifford Roberts and architect Alister MacKenzie he created Augusta National Golf Club on the grounds of a former plant nursery in Augusta, Georgia. The first tournament, played March 22 to 25, 1934, was officially the Augusta National Invitation Tournament, and Horton Smith won it by one stroke over Craig Wood. Players and writers called it the Masters from the start, and the club adopted that name officially in 1939.
Traditions piled up quickly. The green jacket worn by club members was first presented to a champion in 1949, when Sam Snead won, and was then awarded retroactively to earlier winners. The writer Herbert Warren Wind named the stretch of the 11th, 12th and 13th holes "Amen Corner" in a 1958 Sports Illustrated article. Some of the game's most celebrated moments have happened here, from Nicklaus winning his sixth Masters at 46 in 1986 to Woods claiming his fifth green jacket in 2019.
From Bobby Jones to the Modern Grand Slam
The phrase "Grand Slam" first attached itself to golf in 1930, when Jones, still an amateur, won the four biggest events open to him in a single year: the British Amateur at St Andrews, The Open at Royal Liverpool in Hoylake, the U.S. Open at Interlachen in Minnesota and the U.S. Amateur at Merion near Philadelphia. He retired from competitive golf that year at 28. No one has repeated the feat, and with the amateur championships long since diminished in stature, no one realistically can.
The professional version was born in 1960. Arnold Palmer had won the Masters and the U.S. Open that year, and on the way to The Open at St Andrews he and Pittsburgh sportswriter Bob Drum discussed a modern equivalent: the Masters, U.S. Open, Open Championship and PGA Championship in one season. Drum wrote it up and the idea stuck. Palmer finished second at St Andrews, and no man has won all four in a calendar year since. The closest anyone had come was Ben Hogan in 1953, who won the Masters, the U.S. Open and The Open at Carnoustie but could not play that year's PGA Championship because its dates clashed with the trip to Scotland.
The Tiger Slam
The nearest thing to a professional Grand Slam came from Tiger Woods between June 2000 and April 2001. He won the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach by 15 strokes, still the largest margin in major championship history, then took The Open at St Andrews by eight and beat Bob May in a three-hole playoff at the PGA Championship at Valhalla. When he won the 2001 Masters, he held all four major titles at once. Because the wins spanned two calendar years, the run became known as the "Tiger Slam" rather than a true Grand Slam, but no other professional has held all four trophies at the same time.
The Career Grand Slam Club
Winning each major at least once over a career is rare enough. Gene Sarazen was first, completing the set at the 1935 Masters after holing a fairway wood for a double eagle on the 15th hole of the final round and then beating Craig Wood in a playoff. Hogan followed in 1953 by winning the only Open he ever played. Gary Player became the first non-American member at the 1965 U.S. Open, Nicklaus completed his set at the 1966 Open at Muirfield, and Woods finished his at St Andrews in 2000, at 24.
The sixth member waited the longest. Rory McIlroy had won the U.S. Open in 2011, the PGA Championship in 2012 and The Open in 2014, then spent more than a decade chasing a green jacket. At the 2025 Masters he let several leads slip on the final day before beating Justin Rose with a birdie on the first playoff hole. He won the Masters again in 2026, one shot ahead of Scottie Scheffler, becoming only the fourth player to defend the title after Nicklaus, Nick Faldo and Woods. Scheffler, a two-time Masters champion who added the PGA Championship and The Open in 2025, is now the likeliest candidate to join the club and needs only the U.S. Open. For how the majors fit into the wider tour season, see our guide to the majors and the PGA Tour.
