Some great golfers are born knowing how to win majors. Some acquire the ability to win them. Some have majors thrust upon them. And some never catch the break their talent seems to warrant and remain majorless.
Classifying golfers thusly can be tricky. For example, does Nick Faldo go into Category 2 (“Acquire”) or Category 3 (“Thrust”)? Paul Azinger, Scott Hoch, Ray Floyd, John Cook and Greg Norman might suggest the latter – Faldo had an uncanny knack of benefitting from the aberrations of his closest competitors. But some classifications are more obvious: Tiger Woods is, or at least was, a Category 1. Phil Mickelson is definitely a Category 2. And Colin Montgomerie is the clearest Category 4 there’s ever been.
At this year’s PGA Championship, Jason Day moved firmly into Category 2. Day clearly has the talent to win multiple majors: his nine Top 10 finishes in the previous 20 majors before Whistling Straits is clear evidence of that. But talent alone doesn’t guarantee anything, and the more different ways you find of losing majors, the higher the mental barriers to success seem to loom. Some, like Mickelson, eventually rise high enough to overcome them; others, like Monty, can’t help but crash into them.
Day may yet become the rare Category 2/4 hybrid who wins some majors while still finding extravagant ways of losing more of them – I call this “The Norman”, and Day’s career record so far is eerily similar to his Australian predecessor’s. (I mean, Greg Norman is to Bob Tway and Larry Mize as Day is to vertigo.) But if you’re a truly excellent golfer and not a Shaun Micheel-sized fluke, once you’re over the hump you usually stay over it if you really want to, and Day is talented enough to build a truly exciting three-way rivalry with Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy if he keeps pushing himself to build upon his PGA success.
Which brings us to Dustin Johnson. Johnson leads the PGA Tour in tournaments for which experts say about him, “This course is just perfect for his game,” and when he led after 36 holes at St. Andrews in July, the natural response was of course Johnson is leading: his gargantuan length, silky touch and redneck ease make him a more talented version of John Daly, and Daly won an Old Course Open 20 years ago. But being Dustin Johnson, he then shot 75-75 and finished so far behind his namesake Zach – tied for 49th place with, among others, David Duval – he needed binoculars to see the leaderboard. And on Sunday at Whistling Straits, another “made for Dustin” course, he opened with one of the worst quadruple bogeys you’ll ever see, taking six shots to hole out from behind the green.
Unfortunately, flattering to deceive is now Dustin’s specialty. He has at least one major Top 10 finish every year since 2009, but every time he reaches the cusp of greatness he detonates with unimaginable ferocity: whether he’s harshly penalized for grounding his club in a “bunker” (Whistling Straits again, 2010), fluffing multiple chips (Pebble Beach, 2010), gacking a 2-iron out of bounds (Royal St. George’s, 2011) or three-putting from 12 feet (Chambers Bay, 2015), something spectacular always seems to go wrong. The Monty Abyss yawns in front of Johnson now, and unless he gets over the hump soon, it’s increasingly likely the torch of “finest golfer of his generation to never win a major” has already been passed.