Green Grass Golf Shop

There is no doubt in anyone’s mind watching the PGA Tour right now as to who has both the weirdest swing and the best all-around game on golf’s biggest stage: Scottie Scheffler. There’s certainly no way that can be argued, especially over the way he’s played the last few weeks, nobody can keep up with him, his own feet can’t even keep up with him he’s moving so fast. The only thing that could stop Scottie was Ted Scott not being on his bag Saturday afternoon at the PGA Championship. Say what you want about “the incident” but he fired a 66 that morning with Teddy on the loop, I don’t personally buy the stress from the day before talk but you can just call that my opinion.

Anyway, I wanted to put Scottie’s historic run into a little bit of historical perspective, first against our most recent historically great season at the turn of the century. So far out of his 13 starts, Scheffler has only finished outside of the top 10 one time, a T-17 at the AmEx his second start of the year. He also has two runner-up finishes on top of his 5 wins so far, and two top 5’s to round it all off, that’s almost 70% of the time he tees it up he’s a legitimate contender to win coming down the stretch on Sunday. To cap it all off, at the moment anyway, he’s won 5 of his last 8 starts dating back to the Arnold Palmer in March. During his 2000 season, one which many consider to be the greatest of all time, Tiger played in 20 events, finishing in the top 10 a whopping 17 times. To go along with his 9 wins, Tiger also finished runner up 4 times, and tacked on another 4 top 5 finishes on top of that, or roughly 85% of the tournaments that he played you could say that one good or bad bounce on Thursday was the difference in him not winning that event. To go even further, out of the 20 events he played, winning 9 of them, he won almost half of the events he played. Basically every other Sunday Tiger was hoisting another piece of hardware or donning another trophy jacket. This included an absolutely historic stretch like we see Scottie on right now, where between the Memorial Tournament in June and the Bell Canadian in September Tiger would win 6 out of those 8 starts. This was when the Tour Championship was played in early November with a long stretch of downtime after the PGA in August. Scottie certainly has a chance to match that if he keeps playing the way he’s been doing, maybe even surpass it and become the first player since Slammin’ Sam Snead won 10 events in 1950 to win double digit tournaments in the same year, a feat even Tiger could never replicate.

But there are two seasons in the game of golf that not enough casual golf fans know about, and granted they were during some pretty significant world events in 1945 and 1946 that some can absolutely argue may have effected the level of competition on Tour at the time, but I’d argue back there were still legends playing against the two golfers we’re going to go over now. First off, and bafflingly somehow the less impressive of the two in 1946, you had the legendary Ben Hogan winning 13 Tour events out of the 32 he played in that year. On top of that, an unthinkable TWENTY-SEVEN top 10 finishes. Even 4 out of the 5 events he didn’t place top 10, he finished in the top 20 and still took home a check, which was the standard at the time and I’ll touch on that more here in a minute. 13 wins in a single year is truly something I don’t think will ever be touched again, how on earth is that less impressive than any other season on Tour, you ask?

Enter Byron Nelson, and step into the time machine one more time to rewind back to 1945. It needs to be stated, before I go over these numbers that Mr. Nelson achieved in 1945, that there were still names in the field like Ben Hogan and Sam Snead, the latter of whom won 6 of his own that year. There are also players from that era that have never been heard of: Jug McSpaden, who beat Nelson the year prior, Horton Smith, and Denny Schute to name a few. During the 1945 PGA Tour season Byron Nelson entered 30 tournaments, he made all 30 cuts, and I say that because the PGA Tour defines “making a cut” as taking home a check in the event, something that only the top 20 finishers did at the time. This means, as a quick aside, that his streak of 113 consecutive cuts made is not even just that, it’s actually 113 straight top 20 finishes in PGA Tour starts. But back to the 1945 season, out of those 30 starts, Byron Nelson won 18 of them, and finished in 2nd 7 of the other 12 events, which isn’t even the most impressive part. That’s because starting March 11 with a win at the Miami Four-Ball event, through August 4 with his win at the Canadian Open, Byron Nelson won ELEVEN CONSECUTIVE PGA TOUR STARTS. This streak even included a Major championship win at the PGA in July of that year. For those that want to say the fields were trimmed with the ongoing World War, Mr. Nelson should silence with a stamp on the season of a 68.33 scoring average for his 18-hole tournament rounds, a record that stood until Tiger broke it in his historic 2000 season.

I love runs like this, not just for the player on the run like Scottie is now, but because it gives me a good excuse break out the history book and talk about the unbreakable records that don’t get the shine they deserve. We all love to have the conversation around unbreakable records in July and August when hardly any sports are on TV. I’m not here to argue that DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak or Wilt’s 100 point game are beatable records at all, quite the opposite I think those are just as unbeatable as almost any other record in the game. What I do wish would enter the conversation more, though, are the two set by Mr. Nelson in the 1945 golf season. Anyone who wants to argue, with the depth of the fields and shortened seasons of modern PGA Tour golf that anyone could ever sniff 18 wins in a season, or 11 wins in a row didn’t listen to Marshawn Lynch, they didn’t take care they mentals. (Someone might want to check they chicken…)