Winning a major is a life changing event
Winning a major championship can change many things for a player. Everything is altered, from how they are viewed by peers to how they are announced on the tee, but most of all, it changes how they will be remembered.
By Jim Huber, Turner Sports Commentator
Stand at the gate, and listen to the pulse beating within. You can hear it, if you bend your ear just so. It is a sound unlike any other in all of golf. Stand at the gate, and sniff the air, feel the hairs on the back of your neck rustle a bit. It is the sense of a major, quite simply put.
And at the end of the week at hand, when all is said and done, it is why these men at this level play the game. For as long as there have been four designated major Championships, they have given whatever rests deep inside them for the honor eventually bestowed.
They come here, then, fulfilled. Not finished, mind you, but fulfilled. If they never accomplish anything else in their individual careers, they can settle in front of the fire one day, grandchildren at hand, and tell them of that fateful day they won their major.
Some obviously collect them, and imagine the furor that must burn in the weeks leading up to each. They cast aside all else in their preparation for those 16 or 17 exhausting, incredible days each year. Once they win one, they must have another, chips in a very shallow bag.
Others, just as obviously, find themselves in the shadows of a late Sunday afternoon with a green jacket over their shoulders or a piece of silver in their hands, astonished at what they have just accomplished, wondering when they will awaken, and find it all a wicked dream. And then wonder, just as wickedly, what they must do next to somehow top this one.
There seems to be an invisible pecking order among major Champions. If you win one or two or 10, you somehow are judged differently, at least in the historians' minds. But imagine the journey, all the goals and practice and setbacks and uncounted blisters, to finally have a major title precede your name -- "On the first tee, from Australia, the reigning U.S. Open champion, Geoff Ogilvy" -- you know you have finally made it. One, two, 10, 18, you have made it.
They come here to the PGA Grand Slam of Golf as the most elite members of a very special class of athlete. Of the millions who try to play the game every week around the world, only a few somehow are able to do it for a living, however modestly. Even fewer gain access to the professional tours, and what are the odds of winning one of the four major Championships from that pool of talent?
So, check out their gait this week. They will move with a different rhythm, without arrogance, with a new-found assurance of their place in this game. One or two might walk as though they were predestined, but another one or two might float as though lifted by the great hand of fate.
For they have stood at the gate and not merely sensed the major within?but seized it.
