Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through how I tackled a little project: figuring out which golfers have snagged all four major championships. It’s a classic golf trivia question, right?
First off, I started by just firing up Google. I mean, where else do you begin, right? I punched in “golfers who have won all 4 majors” and started sifting through the results. There were a bunch of articles listing the names, but I wanted to do more than just copy and paste. I wanted to see the data.
So, I grabbed a couple of those articles and started pulling the names of the golfers. I threw them into a simple text file, one name per line. Think of it like building a really basic, really messy database.
Next up, I wanted to confirm this information. I went to the official websites for each of the four majors: The Masters, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open, and The Open Championship (British Open for some folks). Painstakingly, I checked each golfer’s profile on those sites to make absolutely sure they’d actually won each tournament. Tedious? You bet. But accuracy is key!
As I verified, I noticed some discrepancies between articles. Some articles included players who only won the career Grand Slam retroactively (after The Masters was considered a major). I decided I wanted to stick to golfers who won all four during their time. I marked the retroactive ones separately.
Now, to get a little fancier. I opened up a spreadsheet and started organizing my findings. I had columns for the golfer’s name, and then a column for each of the majors. I put a “Yes” or “No” in each cell to show whether they’d won that major. It wasn’t pretty, but it was functional.
To top it off, just for my own curiosity, I added another column to show the year they completed the Grand Slam. Just a little extra info to put things in context.
In the end, I had a solid, verified list of golfers who’d achieved this amazing feat. I also learned a bit about the history of the Grand Slam itself. It was a fun little project and a good way to spend an afternoon geeking out on golf history.
The Final List (Without Retroactive Winners):
- Gene Sarazen
- Ben Hogan
- Gary Player
- Jack Nicklaus
- Tiger Woods
I know there are other ways to do this, maybe with some fancy Python scripts or database queries, but sometimes the simple way is the best way. Plus, I got to brush up on my golf history, which is always a win in my book.
