The list starts with Brooks Koepka winning his fifth major in the PGA Championship at Oak Hill Country Club in Pittsford, New York.
The most recent addition is Xander Schauffele winning his first major in the PGA Championship at Valhalla Country Club in Louisville, Kentucky.
The streak hasn’t been the main topic of conversation in a golf world filled with endless drama, stemming from conflict between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, private equity and increasing riches. But this much should be noted going into the U.S. Open: The Americans are on a roll in the majors, and not just any one of the players.
Five different players from the United States have won the past five majors: Koepka, U.S. Open champion Wyndham Clark, British Open champion Brian Harman, Masters champion Scottie Scheffler and Schauffele.
It’s the longest such streak in 40 years, when the quintet of Americans was Larry Nelson (1983 U.S. Open), Tom Watson (1983 British Open), Hal Sutton (1983 PGA Championship), Ben Crenshaw (1984 Masters) and Fuzzy Zoeller (1984 U.S. Open).
A revolving door of Americans winning majors would seem to suggest a great depth of talent — which is increasingly true in golf — and perhaps parity.
The latter requires pause for two reasons. Three of the most recent American winners were first-time major champions. Secondly, any conversation about parity at the top would require a blind eye to what Scheffler is doing.
Scheffler has been No. 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking for 13 months and is assured of being at the top for the longest stretch since Tiger Woods ruled from 2005 until 2010.
He is a clear favorite to add another major when the 124th U.S. Open returns to Pinehurst No. 2 in the sand hills of North Carolina. The year’s third major tees of Thursday, and this already has been an unforgettable year for Scheffler in so many ways.
He hasn’t been out of the top 10 since the third week in January. About the only thing that has slowed him was getting arrested and briefly jailed — it’s still hard to erase the memory of golf’s No. 1 player in handcuffs — before the second round of the PGA Championship. He got out of jail in time to make his tee time and still managed to tie for eighth by the end of the weekend. And authorities in Louisville eventually dismissed all charges.
So that’s all behind him. Or is it?
“That’s something that will always, I think, kind of stick with me,” Scheffler said. “That mug shot I’m sure is not going anywhere anytime soon.”
Scheffler was clean-shaven at the Memorial Tournament, which started Thursday at Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio. He entered the weekend at the event hosted by 16-time major champion Jack Nicklaus with a three-stroke lead.
AP photo by Charlie Riedel / Matthew Fitzpatrick, hits out of the bunker on the 16th hole at Pinehurst No. 2 during the third round of the 114th U.S. Open on June 14, 2014, in Pinehurst, N.C.A week before heading to North Carolina, Scheffler has never seen Pinehurst No. 2, save a flyover video of the Donald Ross gem. Most major championship courses, except for Augusta National Golf Club, the annual home of the Masters, are relatively new to the 27-year-old Texan in his only his fifth year on the PGA Tour.
And he’s not alone. Slightly more than two dozen players were at Pinehurst No. 2 in 2014 the last time the U.S. Open was there. Matt Kuchar and Phil Mickelson are the only players in the 156-man field to compete in all four U.S. Opens held there.
The course has been around for more than a century. Pinehurst No. 2 held the 1936 PGA Championship and the 1951 Ryder Cup, back when the matches were so much an exhibition that players were given Saturday off to attend a college football game.
And then it was 48 years later before it entered the U.S. Open landscape in a major way. Not only is this the fourth time the United States Golf Association has staged its biggest annual event there in the past 25 years, four more U.S. Opens already are booked for the course through 2047.
“I always loved No. 2. It’s a tree-lined course without a tree in play,” Nicklaus said.
Nicklaus played the first U.S. Open at Pinehurst at age 59, though he had plenty of experience there, having won the famed North & South Amateur in 1959 and a PGA Tour event (Hall of Fame Classic) in 1975.
“Donald Ross liked repelling golf — that’s quite obvious — because everything there, if you miss it, off it goes,” Nicklaus said, a reference mainly to the turtleback greens, a Ross signature.
It can be frustrating, and John Daly would be among the first called as an expert witness. It was in 1999 when Daly became so frustrated at putts rolling off edges or coming back to him off the green that he whacked a ball that was still rolling on No. 8 and made an 11.
The big change was restoring No. 2 to its sand dunes and native plants; “sandscapes” is the term at Pinehurst. Rough is replaced by sprawling dunes with wiregrass bushes, and they have grown in since 2014. What hasn’t changed is the test, still among the toughest in golf.
AP photo by Ashley Landis / Ludvig Aberg hits from the bunker on the 18th hole at Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club during the final round of the Masters on April 14.“It’s tough, it’s long,” said Ludvig Aberg, the 24-year-old Swede who will make his U.S. Open debut and played the course before going to the Memorial Tournament. “You’ve got turtleback greens where everything is running away from you. And I would expect it to be quite firm and fast.”
Aberg, a runner-up at the Masters in his major championship debut in April, will be among the candidates looking to end the American run in the majors.
Rory McIlroy gets another crack at ending his decade-long drought in the majors; the 35-year-old from Northern Ireland has been seeking his fifth since winning the 2014 PGA Championship at Valhalla.
Spain’s Jon Rahm, the 2021 U.S. Open winner and the 2023 Masters champion, also will get plenty of attention, though for other reasons.
By now it should be clear that players from the Saudi-funded LIV Golf League, who compete in 54-hole tournaments with no cut and shotgun start, and a schedule much lighter than the PGA Tour in terms of total events, are no less capable in the majors. Koepka won the PGA Championship last year, and Bryson DeChambeau was a runner-up last month at Valhalla.
Rahm, however, comes into this U.S. Open having not won a tournament since the 2023 Masters, a 14-month drought that is the longest since he first won as a pro. He never contended at Augusta in April. And then he missed the cut for the first time in five years in a major at the PGA Championship.
Maybe some history is on his side. That great American streak from 40 years ago began right after Seve Ballesteros won the 1983 Masters and ended when the Spanish star with the magnificent short game won the 1984 British Open.