Ranking The Best PGA Championship Competitors Of All-Time

The PGA Championship is now more than a century old. First contested in 1916, it will be conducted for the 104th time later this month at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

For each of the preceding 10 decades, which players produced the most consistently dominant PGA Championship records?

It’s an interesting question because so many of the greats of the past century have a PGA Championship pedigree. Jack Nicklaus and Walter Hagen both won the event five times. Tiger Woods is a four-time winner, Gene Sarazen and Sam Snead both won three times.

Ranking the most dominant PGA Championship winners of all-time

Here’s the system used to determine the best players of each period, beginning with 1916 through 1929 and continuing through 2010 to 2021.

*Players will be considered if they played four rounds in at least half of the PGA competitions played during the decade in question. That’s six tournaments between 1916 and 1929, five in all other decades except six for the period from 2010 through 2021.

*The yardstick will be the standard deviation of the player’s performance in each PGA. Standard deviation, which is a measure of relative exceptionality, is preferred because – unlike a raw score – it normalizes for season-to-season variations in course setup, equipment, weather, and numerous other factors.

*Keep in mind that because golf is a game where less is more, a lower standard deviation is preferable to a higher one. A decade-average standard deviation of -1.0 or lower would be of contending caliber.