It walks like a list and talks like a list and is formulated like one, too.
Carefully and painstakingly, award-winning sportswriter Michael Arkush created a points system to bring unique order to golf history with his new book: “The Golf 100: A Spirited Ranking of the Greatest Players of All Time.”
But that’s a disguise. His 16th book is really a tribute. A heartfelt celebration of golf’s greatest and of golf’s greatness – 100 captivating short biographies about the people who propelled the game to new heights.
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You’ll almost certainly learn something about every player on this list of winners: golfers who won tournaments and won fans’ hearts – even though, quite often, these golfers didn’t win as much as they set out to or might have been expected to.
That’s true even of the golfer Arkush ranks No. 2. (No spoilers, but it’s not Jack Nicklaus.)
“I realized how many players who have Hall of Fame careers on this list of mine still did not live up to their expectations,” Arkush said recently. “Maybe they won one major or two – a great accomplishment – but we had expectations that they would win many more, be the next Ben Hogan, the next Jack Nicklaus.
“We do that in all our sports, wind up putting too lofty of expectations … in golf we see it more clearly because of it being an individual sport, so it’s easier to measure accomplishments. So many good players have gone through slumps, and some of them don’t get out of those slumps.
“You don’t see that so much in other sports with batting averages or shooting percentages – the sustained slumps like golf has.”
It’s happened so much that even golfers who got stuck in a rut rank among the game’s best, historically. It’s a reminder that golf’s greatest lessons aren’t those you schedule and pay for.
For all the winning chronicled over these 366 pages, the losses can tell us just as much about the men and women (15 of them, led by Mickey Wright at No. 6 with her eight major championships) who made Arkush’s cut.
Take seven-time major winner Arnold Palmer, whose losses happen also to be also major part of his story. There was the time he gave up a 7-shot lead to Billy Casper on the back nine of the 1966 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, a defeat that resonates, Arkush writes, because it drove home how “Arnie’s Army loved him just as much for his flaws, if not more.”
Or Fred Couples – “the epitome of cool, 007 in spikes” – whose loss, 1 up, in singles the 1989 Ryder Cup at the Belfry in England cost the U.S. team the victory in what was a 14-14 tie. Couples brought up the loss in conversation with Arkush in 2024: “I felt,” he said, “like I had let down everybody.”
But then Couples proved something to everyone – his critics and his younger self, who’d been dreaming of winning the Masters Tournament since he was 8 – by winning at Augusta in 1992.
For Arkush, whose previous books include “My Greatest Shot,” “Fairways and Dreams,” and “60 Years of USC-UCLA Football” as well as “The Last Season: A Team In Search Of Its Soul” with Phil Jackson, this latest book was more than an ambitious argument-inviting arrangement.
It was more than an exercise in ascribing points to top-five performances at majors through the years, winners of non-majors, and other variables such as impact or contribution to the game. It was, at its heart, an opportunity to mine for perspective.
“To check in on players I got to know when I worked at Golf World magazine in the late 1990s,” Arkush writes. “Did they view their successes — and setbacks — any differently in their 70s and 80s than they did back then? Any regrets, on or off the course? Any deeper awareness of their fellow competitors and the times they lived in?”
And?
“From time to time,” he writes, “I detected, and I hope it wasn’t my imagination, a slight pause, a softer tone — something, anything, that suggested the losses that were painful in the past weren’t as painful anymore.”
As rankings go, there’s no debating: This one has soul.
“I used to read these obituaries about different golfers I knew, and they were always so brief,” Arkush said. “These obits are online for a day or two or three, and then they’re gone. I wanted to sort of bring these players to life, because … so often, I don’t think we have enough respect for those who paved the way. We know a name, but don’t know that much about it.”
Arkush has remedied that with an artful piece of reference material that chronicles the ups and the downs of the greatest golfers of all time.
Mirjam Swanson is a sports columnist for the Southern California News Group.