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Recite once in the morning and again at night: The Players Championship is not a major; the Players Championship is not a major.
Your confusion is understandable. After all, there was Johnny Miller in the NBC broadcast booth, in coat and tie all through the sweltering weekend, talking about the rock-hard greens that were turning brown before our eyes. He could have been at Southern Hills or Oakmont. And there was Tiger in a Saturday-night interview, smelling napalm and victory in the humid North Florida air and declaring, "This is like our fifth major." Somewhere, Tim Finchem was doing a jig.
The whole five-major thing would fit nicely with our own duffing lives, right? The season is April through September, until football comes on TV and life as we otherwise know it grinds to a halt. For the spring and summer, the gents go one biggie per month for six straight months:
The Masters (April). The Players (May). The U.S. Open (June). The British Open (July). The PGA Championship (August). The Ryder Cup (even-year Septembers).
Everything else — your World Golf Championships, your FedEx Cup playoffs, your Fall Series tournaments —gets you from one place to the next, and sometimes not even that. You need those events, of course. You can't have a Big Man on Campus without a whole worshipful student population to prop him up, right? Still, we know which ones count. Winning a Fall Series event doesn't even get you a free trip to Augusta. But losing in the final of the U.S. Amateur does.
That's where the major confusion begins, with the Masters, a tournament started as a little golfing get-together by Bobby Jones, the great amateur. The Masters became a major ... when, exactly? You can't put a date on it. Jones's victories in the 1930 U.S. and British Opens and the U.S. and British Amateurs became the Grand Slam after he completed them. Yet Jack Nicklaus's career major total is, these days, always said to be 18, with his two U.S. Amateurs lopped off but his six Masters and five PGAs counting. Things change.
And none of this really means anything to Kevin Na, who was born in South Korea 25 years ago, skipped his senior year of high school to turn pro at 17 and finished in a tie for third last week at the Players, five shots behind the winner, Sweden's Henrik Stenson. Na said, "I've shown I can compete in a major." The fifth major. Hal Sutton never won the Masters, but he won the 2000 Players and once said he got more goose bumps driving down PGA Tour Boulevard than he did Magnolia Lane.
You'd think it's an American thing, this whole fifth major business, but really it's not. Ian Poulter of England, who finished in second place last week, said, "Everybody talks about this as the fifth major. And I think with the field, with the World Ranking points and the winners on that trophy, you have to respect that. I think it is."
But can you have five majors? On the Champions tour five events are officially designated as majors, but even the players find those designations laughable. (Tom Watson likes to say, "You can't have a pro-am and be a major." Three of the five senior majors have pro-ams.) You don't have five majors in anything. Not in tennis (four there). Not in horse racing (three). Not in U.S. political parties (two).
Of course, it could be that the Players is some sort of hybrid, not a major but not a routine Tour stop, either. Jim Furyk said last week that the Players got a big upgrade when it moved from March to May three years ago and that now it is something else. "In my heart it's the fifth biggest event," said Furyk, the 2003 U.S. Open winner. "And that's why I call it a championship."
The move to May means that TPC Sawgrass plays much firmer and faster than it did in March, much more like — this will sound like heresy to some —a British Open course. And yet the Pete Dye design, built out of a drained swamp, is nothing like any British Open course, with its many ponds and coarse bermuda rough and the par-3 17th played to an island green. (Number 17: gimmick hole or genius? Both!) The Stadium course is the quintessential American target golf course: hit something high in the air (and Stenson hits it as high as anyone since Nicklaus) and get it to stop, first on a fairway, later on a green.
