Would the Next Australian Major Winner Please Stand Up?

This article was first published on The Big Tip website on January 9.

The early stages of many a calendar year are a time of hope. Hope that the New Years resolutions that you’ve recently made will stick. Hope that your football team(s) will climb the mountain to premiership glory. Hope that you’ll make a name for yourself as a sports guru by sweeping all before you in work tipping competitions and in fantasy sports/ ‘Dream Team’ contests against your less knowledgeable friends, who will in turn become your comedic fodder during the winter months. And if you’re a golf fan like me, the early part of the year would not be complete without clinging onto the hope that this will be the year that an Australian once again breaks through for a win in one of the majors.

The last of the aforementioned hopes does, unfortunately, have a distinct ‘don’t hold your breath’ undertone. Among the reasons that hope should not be confused with expectation on this front, the most compelling arguments are laid out below:

Third most compelling argument – no Australian has ever won the US Masters

In all, 15 majors have been won by Australians – nine British Opens, four US PGA Championships and two US Opens. The US Masters remains the elusive crown (or more to the point, elusive green jacket) for the Aussie contingent. Greg Norman registered six top-3 finishes at Augusta, and the notion that a bogey at the final hole in 1986 to miss a playoff with Jack Nicklaus was only his third most tragic Masters finish speaks for itself (still shaking my head sadly). Augusta National and Australian golfers have simply not mixed well over the years.

Second most compelling argument – Australian golfers at the majors have only had two ‘feast’ periods, with extended periods of ‘famine’ in the intervening years

Of the 15 majors won by Australians, six were won in the period from Peter Thomson’s first British Open win in 1953 through to his fifth win in that event in 1964, with Kel Nagle’s British Open win in 1960 being the other major victory during the first ‘feast’. Flash forward to 1986, where Greg Norman set the tone for the second ‘feast’ with his maiden major victory in the British Open. Wayne Grady, Ian-Baker Finch, Norman again and finally Steve Elkington at the 1995 US PGA Championship followed suit to complete the run of five Australian majors in the span of a decade.

Aside from these two periods, wins have been few and rather far between – Jim Ferrier in the 1947 US PGA Championship, David Graham in the 1979 US PGA Championship and 1981 US Open and most recently Geoff Ogilvy in the 2006 US Open, where both Phil Mickelson and Colin Montgomerie could have clinched the title with a par on the 18^th but instead stumbled to double bogies to leave Ogilvy the victor by one stroke.

Most compelling argument – the current crop of Australian golfers have not been putting themselves into contention at the majors frequently enough to suggest that a win is imminent

Let’s go back to Norman (only briefly, as I’m still shaking my head sadly) and add him to a list of the other players not named Tiger Woods to win multiple majors since the Tiger Era begun in 1997. In analysing how often they were in the thick of the Sunday afternoon action with how often they prevailed, some fairly consistent trends pop up.

Player (Major wins, Top-3s, Top-5s)

Greg Norman (2, 14, 20)

Phil Mickelson (4, 16, 20)

Ernie Els (3, 14, 21)

Vijay Singh (3, 5, 9)

Padraig Harrington (3, 3, 9)

Retief Goosen   (2, 6, 8)

Angel Cabrera  (2, 2, 3)

Mark O’Meara (2, 3, 5)

Total (21, 63, 95)

So if you’re an elite (read: multiple major-winning) golfer, for every four or five top-5 finishes and every three top-3 finishes, you should win a major. Seems pretty reasonable, right? The best golfers in the world put themselves into the high-pressured situations the most frequently, and thus do very slightly better than average when it comes to winning under those circumstances.

Now……. here are the records in the majors for Australia’s most prominent four golfers over the past decade:

Player (Wins, Top-3s, Top-5s, Top-10s, majors played since 2001)

Geoff Ogilvy (1, 1, 2, 6, 28)

Robert Allenby (0, 0, 0, 5, 38)

Stuart Appleby (0, 1, 1, 2, 40)

Adam Scott (0, 1, 1, 4, 38)

Total (1, 3, 4, 17, 144)

Oh dear. Armed with this information, one major victory in the past decade seems about right.

The combined result of 17 top-10 finishes in 144 starts becomes even less heartening when you consider that Martin Kaymer, Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson have a combined record of one win, four top-3 finishes and 11 top-10 finishes in the last six major tournaments alone (a combined 18 starts). As a head to head proposition, which of these groups would you back to win another major title first? I’d have the Aussie quartet as 5-2 ($3.50) outsiders in such a two-horse race.

Are there any glimmers of hope on the horizon? Well, Ogilvy’s record in the majors remains by far the most compelling of those with significant experience in the majors, and the performances of Jason Day during the 2010 US PGA season are cause for some optimism. They appear to be the two most likely to break through.

But at the end of the day, if someone were to offer you odds of 4-1 ($5) that any Australian wins any of the major titles in 2011, only patriotism and the unyielding hope that can be justified by the sheer uncertainty of sport should have you delving into your pocket. And if you do delve into your pocket, I sincerely hope that you get to collect some winnings somewhere between April and August. Australian golf would be all the better for it.

Thanks to Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images AsiaPac for use of the photo