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List of men's major championships winning golfers

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This article lists the 191 men who have won a major golf championship by the number of majors they have accumulated, and is complete through the 2006 PGA Championship. The four majors are the most prestigious events of the golf season, and the number of wins that a player accumulates in them has a very important influence on his stature in the sport. The four majors taken into account in the main list are the current four professional majors and the amateur versions when those titles were considered majors. See the final section of this article for an alternative historical ranking.

In the chart immediately below, an asterisk (*) in the Masters column indicates that player was in his prime primarily before the initiation of the Masters tournament in 1934 (by Bobby Jones and his partners). An asterisk (*) in any other column indicates that a player won the amateur versions of those titles, when the amateurs were considered majors. For example Bobby Jones won 5 U.S. Open amateur titles when those titles were considered majors and 4 U.S. Open professional titles (indicated by the parenthetical "4" in his box). Additionally, he won 1 Amateur British title when that title was considered a major , and 3 British Open professional titles (indicated by the parenthetical "3"), making his total number of majors 13 .

Name Country Masters U.S. Open Open Ch. PGA Total Winning span
Jack Nicklaus United States 6 4 3 5 18 1962-1986
Bobby Jones United States 0* 9*(4) 4*(3) 0 13*(7) 1923-1930
Tiger Woods United States 4 2 3 3 12 1997-2006
Walter Hagen United States 0* 2 4 5 11 1914-1929
Ben Hogan United States 2 4 1 2 9 1946-1953
Gary Player South Africa 3 1 3 2 9 1959-1978
John Ball England 0* 0 9*(1) 0 9*(1) 1862-1921
Tom Watson United States 2 1 5 0 8 1975-1983
Harry Vardon England 0* 1 6 0 7 1896-1914
Gene Sarazen United States 1* 2 1 3 7 1922-1935
Sam Snead United States 3 0 1 3 7 1942-1954
Arnold Palmer United States 4 1 2 0 7 1958-1964
Harold Hilton England 0* 1* 6*(2) 0 7*(2) 1892-1911
Nick Faldo England 3 0 3 0 6 1987-1996
Lee Trevino United States 0 2 2 2 6 1968-1984
Seve Ballesteros Spain 2 0 3 0 5 1979-1988
James Braid Scotland 0* 0 5 0 5 1901-1910
Byron Nelson United States 2 1 0 2 5 1937-1945
J.H. Taylor England 0* 0 5 0 5 1894-1913
Peter Thomson Australia 0 0 5 0 5 1954-1965

Majors with Amateurs always included

As stated above, before the professional game acquired its modern dominance, the British Amateur and the U.S. Amateur were regarded as majors. Some people consider these tournaments to continue to be major championships in terms of summing a player's major championship wins, while others make a distinction between professional majors and total majors. In any case, if wins in these tournaments up to this day are included, there are four men with ten or more major titles: Jack Nicklaus 20; Tiger Woods 14; Bobby Jones 13; Walter Hagen 11. It should be recognized that John Ball had a remarkable amateur career, winning a record 8 British Amateur titles in addition to his one Open Championship.

The Masters was not universally considered to be a major championship in its earlier years, the quartet of professional majors not being established at the time. In the first half of the twentieth century golf fans in the United States sometimes attributed major status to the Western Open and/or the North and South Open.

See also

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