The 4 Golf Majors Explained (What Makes Each One)

Golf's four majors are the Masters, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open, and The Open Championship, and no other tournament on the calendar carries the same weight — not the Players Championship, not the FedEx Cup finale, nothing. Each one tests a different part of the game on purpose: Augusta punishes bad approach angles and worse putting, the U.S. Open punishes anything crooked, the PGA Championship just assembles the strongest field it can find, and The Open hands you a set of conditions no other tournament comes close to replicating. Winning one is a career achievement. Winning all four — the career Grand Slam — has happened exactly six times in the men's game.

Key Takeaways

• The four majors are the Masters (April, Augusta National), the PGA Championship (May, rotating), the U.S. Open (June, rotating), and The Open Championship (July, rotating links courses).
• The Masters is the only major played at the same course every year and has the smallest field of the four.
• The U.S. Open is built to be the hardest test in golf — narrow fairways, thick rough, and fast greens by design, run by the USGA.
• The PGA Championship fields the deepest lineup of the four because entry leans heavily on world ranking and recent form, with no amateur or past-champion invites diluting it.
• The Open Championship is the oldest major, dating to 1860, and the only one played on true links turf, where wind and ground conditions matter as much as swing mechanics.
• Only six men have completed the career Grand Slam: Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and Rory McIlroy, who finished it at the 2025 Masters.

What Makes the Masters Different?

Augusta National, every single year, no exceptions — that's the thing that separates the Masters from the other three. The PGA Championship, U.S. Open, and Open Championship all move around a rotation of courses; the Masters doesn't move at all, which means players build up decades of local knowledge about specific slopes on specific greens (Rae's Creek in front of 12, the false front on 5) that simply doesn't exist anywhere else in the sport. It's also an invitational, not an open entry, so the field sits around 90 players — smaller than any other major by a wide margin. There's technically no rough at Augusta, just a "second cut," which sounds softer than it is; the real defense is the green complexes, some of the fastest and most severely contoured putting surfaces in tournament golf. Miss on the wrong side of a pin and three-putting from 15 feet isn't a fluke, it's the design working as intended.

What Makes the U.S. Open the Hardest of the Four?

The USGA runs the U.S. Open, and its unofficial mission statement, credited to former USGA executive director Sandy Tatum, is roughly: we're not trying to humiliate the best players in the world, we're trying to identify them. In practice that means narrow fairways, rough that regularly runs four to five inches deep just off the short grass, and greens rolled fast enough that a three-foot par putt is never automatic. Recent setups have leaned into this hard — Oakmont's rough for the 2025 U.S. Open topped out around five inches with fairways pinched to under 30 yards in spots. Par is often treated as a genuinely good score for the week, which tells you everything about the philosophy. It's also the one major with real open qualifying: any golfer with a low enough handicap can enter local qualifying and, in theory, tee it up alongside the best players alive. Almost none do, but the door is technically open, which isn't true of the other three.

Why Does the PGA Championship Have the Strongest Field?

For decades the PGA Championship closed out the major season in August as the "fourth major," and it had a bit of an identity problem because of it — by August, a lot of the season's storylines had already been written. That changed in 2019, when the PGA of America moved it to May, making it the second major of the year instead of the last, partly to keep clear of the Olympics golf schedule and partly to get better spring weather options for host venues. What hasn't changed is the field: the PGA Championship is the only major that's entirely professional, with the deepest lineup of the four because qualification is built almost entirely around world ranking, PGA Tour standing, and recent major and Ryder Cup results rather than sentimental invites for amateurs or long-retired past champions. If you want to see the largest cluster of top-100 world-ranked players in one 72-hole event, this is usually it.

What Makes The Open Championship Unique?

Age and turf, mainly. The Open dates to 1860 at Prestwick Golf Club in Scotland, decades before any of the other three existed, and it's run by the R&A rather than an American governing body — the only major that isn't. It's also the only major played exclusively on links courses: firm, sandy, coastal ground with almost no trees, where wind isn't a variable, it's the main character. A links green can be approached with a putter from 40 yards off the front, and a hole that plays 420 yards downwind on Thursday can play 470 into a gale on Sunday. American players raised on soft, irrigated parkland turf often struggle the first few times they see it — the low, running shot that links golf demands isn't how most of them learned the game. Winning The Open takes a different skill set than winning the other three, and a good number of great American players have never quite solved it. For a deeper look at how that ground actually plays, see our breakdown of links vs. parkland golf courses and what a true links course actually requires.

Why Is Winning All Four So Rare?

Because the four majors are, on purpose, not the same test. A player built for Augusta's second-shot precision and lightning greens isn't automatically built for U.S. Open rough or Open Championship wind, and vice versa — the skills genuinely conflict at times. Low, punchy links shots and high, spinny Augusta approaches are close to opposite techniques. That's exactly why the career Grand Slam is such a short list: Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and, as of 2025, Rory McIlroy, who completed his career slam with a playoff win at the Masters. Six men, across more than a century of professional golf. Plenty of legendary players — Arnold Palmer, Phil Mickelson, Tom Watson among them — never finished the set, usually missing only the U.S. Open or The Open, the two hardest to bend to any one style. For the full list of who's actually won the green jacket and when, see every Masters champion since 1934.

Sources

• PGA Championship — Wikipedia
• Why the US Open is the toughest test in golf — Golfshake
• The Open Championship — The R&A
• The Open Championship — Wikipedia