The Ghosts in Golf’s Greatest Hall: What the Game’s Greatest Runners-Up Really Tell Us

After 35 years covering this tour, I’ve learned that victory in professional golf tells you a lot about a player. But you know what tells you even more? How they handle defeat. And this list of major championship near-misses—the players who came so tantalizingly close but never quite got over the line—that’s a different kind of masterclass.

Reading through these five names, I’m struck by something that casual fans might miss: this isn’t just a catalog of heartbreak. It’s a window into the brutal, unforgiving nature of major championship golf. And it raises a question worth asking: what separates the players who break through from those who don’t?

The Cruel Mathematics of Almost

Let me be candid. In my years caddying for Tom Lehman, I watched him fall short in majors too, before finally winning the Open at Royal Lytham in 1996. What I noticed wasn’t some magical quality Tom had that others lacked—it was partly luck, partly timing, and partly an ability to compartmentalize disappointment without letting it calcify into self-doubt. That last part is harder than it sounds.

Take Doug Sanders at the 1970 Open. The image of him nervously brushing debris from the green before missing that three-footer at St Andrews—I can still see it. Having covered 15 Masters and countless other majors, I’ve learned that those microseconds, those tiny moments of hesitation, they matter more than any swing technique.

"At the 1970 Open in St Andrews he only needed a par at the short par-4 final hole to be triumphant – and he was only 75 yards from the pin after his drive. Three blows later he had 3-feet to win the Claret Jug."

Sanders went to an 18-hole playoff against Jack Nicklaus and lost. That’s not unlucky. That’s the sound of opportunity closing.

The American Curse

What strikes me most about Colin Montgomerie’s absence from major championship winners’ circles is how deeply the American golf establishment’s mockery cut into his psyche. Monty was an eight-time European Tour Order of Merit winner. An absolute titan in Ryder Cup play—never beaten in singles. A champion on multiple continents.

And yet, the narrative became: "He can’t win in America." So when majors rolled around, especially on American soil, that voice had to be screaming in his head.

"He finished second in the US Open three times, including 2006 when a par at the last would have won it and a bogey would have earned a play-off. He made double bogey after hitting the fairway with his drive."

That 2006 US Open haunts him still, I’d wager. Not because he played poorly—but because he played conservatively with a fairway in play and still found catastrophe. In my experience, that’s the moment players’ confidence in the fundamentals starts to erode.

Lee Westwood: The Road Not Taken

If Montgomerie is golf’s great American tragedy, then Lee Westwood represents something more complex. This was a world-class player who could win anywhere—Europe, America, Asia, Africa, Australia. He topped the world rankings. He proved his mettle against the best competition the game could muster.

"Between 2008 and 2013 he was particularly close to glory, collecting eight top three finishes in just 21 starts."

What’s remarkable about that stretch is the consistency of it. Eight top-three finishes in 21 majors? That’s not a run of good luck. That’s elite-level golf. The fact that none of them converted is statistically unusual—and psychologically devastating in ways that are hard to quantify.

In my experience covering the tour, I’ve noticed something: the players who struggle most with this aren’t the ones who fall back into the pack. They’re the ones who keep knocking on the door. Each near-miss is a small death. By the time you’re on your fourth or fifth or eighth top-three finish without a win, something shifts in how you approach these tournaments.

The Forgotten Giants

What fascinates me about Harry Cooper and Macdonald Smith isn’t their statistical accomplishment—though 30 PGA Tour wins for Cooper and 25 for Smith are nothing to dismiss. It’s how completely they’ve vanished from the modern golf conversation.

Cooper finished top five in majors 11 times but never won one. Smith had a peer in Ben Hogan who admired him greatly. And yet when golf historians make their lists, these names barely register. The major championships have this peculiar power in golf: they define legacy in a way no other accomplishment quite can, no matter how impressive the supporting resume.

What This Really Means

Here’s what I think matters here: major championships in golf serve a unique function. They’re not just tournaments—they’re narratives. They’re how we construct a player’s place in history. And the tragedy of Westwood, Montgomerie, Sanders, and the others is that their legacies are forever incomplete, no matter how talented they were.

But—and I want to emphasize this—their near-misses aren’t evidence of a fatal flaw. They’re evidence of how fiercely competitive the majors are. They’re evidence that in elite golf, the margins between winning and finishing second are measured in millimeters and milliseconds.

That’s not a condemnation of these players. That’s a testament to the brutal selectivity of major championship golf.

The real lesson? Sometimes being great isn’t enough. Sometimes being one of the five best golfers in the world competing that week isn’t enough. And sometimes, that’s the most honest thing professional golf has to tell us.