While the headlines this week have belonged to Cameron Young’s runaway lead at Doral and the spring squeeze of signature events, one of the most quietly remarkable streaks in modern golf is creeping toward an iconic round number — and almost no one is talking about it.
Adam Scott has now teed it up in 98 consecutive major championships. The 45-year-old Australian, the 2013 Masters champion, has not missed a major since The Open Championship in 2001 — a stretch that spans four U.S. presidents, the entire careers of Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy, and an era during which the world No. 1 ranking has changed hands more than 30 times. If Scott qualifies for this year’s PGA Championship at Aronimink and the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, he’ll join a club that contains exactly one other member: Jack Nicklaus.
A Streak You Don’t Notice Until You Count It
The numbers around Scott’s streak only get more absurd the longer you stare at them. He has played in every Masters, U.S. Open, Open Championship, and PGA Championship since the spring of 2002. He has done it through wrist surgeries, putter changes, the long-putter ban, the broomstick era, the rise and fall of the anchored stroke, and a global pandemic that wiped out The Open in 2020 (the only year that doesn’t count against him because the tournament wasn’t played).
Only Nicklaus, who teed it up in 146 consecutive majors between the 1962 Masters and the 1998 U.S. Open, has done anything comparable. Tiger Woods, often the benchmark for modern longevity, never approached this number — knee surgeries and back fusions saw to that. Phil Mickelson, who won majors in his 50s, still trails far behind. Scott is, in a very literal sense, the most reliable major-championship player of the past quarter-century.
What’s Happening At Aronimink — And Why The PGA Is The Easy Part
Major No. 99 is a near-formality. Scott is comfortably inside the top 100 of the Official World Golf Ranking and has been a fixture of the PGA Championship field for two decades. He’ll travel to Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, the week of May 11–17 with the same routine he has carried into every one of his 98 previous majors: caddie Steve Williams (back on the bag full-time since 2024), a long warm-up, and that famously unhurried tempo. Aronimink, hosting its first PGA in more than a decade, sets up well for a player whose career has been defined by old-school iron play and disciplined par-saving.
The harder challenge — and the one his streak actually hangs on — is six weeks later. The 2026 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills accepts the world’s top 60 after the PGA Championship. Scott entered the Cadillac Championship at No. 54 in the OWGR and has been drifting in the wrong direction. A missed cut at Aronimink would push him out of the automatic exemption, and Shinnecock’s 36-hole final qualifier on June 8 — a single, brutally selective day — has historically been a gauntlet even for established tour pros.
Why The Streak Matters More Than Most Wins
It’s tempting to dismiss a longevity record as filler — the kind of stat that gets a polite mention from a TV announcer mid-commercial-break. But streaks like Scott’s are doing something genuinely rare in modern golf: they’re proving that consistency, not peak power, is still the most underrated skill in the sport.
Consider what it actually requires. To make 100 consecutive majors, a player has to qualify, every year, in eight separate cycles — four major exemptions, repeated 25 times. That means avoiding the kind of mid-summer slumps that bounce most pros out of the world’s top 50. It means staying healthy enough to play four-day tournaments on the most demanding setups in golf. It means traveling, in Scott’s case, from the Gold Coast to Augusta to St Andrews to Brookline, year after year, without the body or the swing falling apart. Scott has won just 14 PGA Tour events and one major in his career — but the bar he’s clearing is one of attendance, durability, and reinvention, and it’s arguably harder to clear than any individual trophy.
It also reframes what we think a “great career” looks like. Jim Furyk, the freshly named 2027 U.S. Ryder Cup captain, has often been described in the same terms — a player whose total impact on the game far outstrips his single major. Scott is in that lineage, and his streak is the cleanest data point we have for it.
The Tempo Question — And What Amateurs Can Steal From It
Ask any tour pro why Adam Scott has lasted this long, and you’ll get a version of the same answer: tempo. Scott’s swing has been described, accurately, as the most aesthetically perfect motion in golf since Sam Snead’s. His takeaway is slow. His transition is slower. The downforce only arrives at the very last moment, which is why his ball speed has held up into his mid-40s while flashier swings have ground their owners into surgery suites.
For a club golfer, the lesson isn’t to copy the swing — it’s to copy the rhythm. Scott’s pre-shot routine is a particularly useful model: it’s identical on every shot, fast or slow, big or small, and it ends at exactly the same count. If you’ve been struggling with first-tee jitters or end-of-round fatigue, our guide to building a repeatable pre-shot routine draws directly on the kind of metronomic discipline Scott has built his streak on.
The other transferable skill is the calm. Scott has been in the final group of three majors (2012 Open, 2013 Masters, 2020 Memorial — a non-major but a useful proxy) and his heart rate, by his own admission, barely climbs. That’s not a personality trait, it’s a practiced habit. We’ve broken down the mental side of that in our deeper read on building confidence on the golf course, and the principles map almost one-to-one onto what Scott does every Thursday at a major.
The Realistic Path To 100
Here’s what has to happen. Scott needs to play the PGA at Aronimink — done, barring a withdrawal. He then needs to lock down a U.S. Open spot, either by climbing back into the world’s top 60 (a top-10 at Aronimink would do it) or by surviving final qualifying. If both fall, he’d presumably try for The Open via the OWGR top-50 freeze later in the summer — but that would push his 100th to 2027, breaking the consecutive part of the streak.
It’s tighter than it looks for a player who has been an OWGR fixture for 25 years. Scott has missed only two cuts in his 98 majors and finished top-25 in 41 of them. But the cliff edge has crept closer in 2026: he sits 87th in this season’s FedExCup standings, hasn’t recorded a top-10 on tour since the Masters, and is debuting a new iron set this year as part of an equipment shift that, like other recent mid-season changes, has cost him a couple of strokes per round in adjustment time.
What This Means For You
Most of us aren’t chasing a Nicklaus record. But Scott’s streak is a quiet, powerful argument for the value of showing up — for the cumulative weight of a swing, a routine, and a fitness regimen built to last. The PGA Tour celebrates winners, but a player who has teed it up at Augusta, Pebble, St Andrews, and Pinehurst every spring, summer, and second weekend in April for 25 straight years has done something the leaderboard can’t fully measure.
If you’re a club golfer, the takeaways are unglamorous and highly transferable. Build a routine you can repeat in your sleep. Protect your body so you can play the same game in your 40s that you played in your 20s. And — Scott’s most underrated trait — be willing to keep adapting. The Australian has changed putters, putter lengths, equipment companies, and caddies multiple times across this streak, but he has never stopped being recognizable as Adam Scott. Continuity over perfection. It’s the single most underrated lesson in golf.
Aronimink begins on May 14. If Scott makes it through the cut, the math gets simpler — and a streak that has run quietly in the background for 25 years gets one giant step closer to the only number that lives in the same column as Jack Nicklaus.
