The Southern Hemisphere is a supporting character in a northern narrative. That needs to change. Fifth Major, please, Down Under.
“Antipodean” is derived from the Greek, antipodes,” which means feet opposite or, to contemporize, places on opposite sides of the Earth. When it’s winter in the northern climes, it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Time for golf!
Loneliness is an unusual and quiet companion.
It rarely announces with drama, and more often than not, slips like a fog across an early morning fairway. Soft, invisible, but all-consuming. You do not always know it’s there until the world around you seems a little more distant, a little less vibrant. And perhaps that’s why, after all these years spent chasing tee times and tracing arcs in the sky, I have come to find something deeply familiar in the solitude of golf. On that first tee with nothing but stillness between you and the horizon, the ball waits and asks only that you show up and try it again. Lonely, but not alone, is a metaphor here, I suspect.
Over time, I have come to believe that the most excellent round of golf we ever play might not unfold under Sunday flags or championship pressure but in the quieter corners of the course, and the bunker-esque walks between shots. The game, like writing, offers a sanctuary; a space to process and reflect. Much is made of golf’s four Majors, but I have long thought and wished that there is a fifth major. Perhaps that’s what the game gives us most of all. A place to stand quietly in our own company to confront our solitude with curiosity.
Not all victories are marked by trophies, and not all majors are won on scorecards. Some are quiet triumphs over doubt, over silence, and the ache of aloneness. Yet, even as golf offers this solitary grace, it remains a grand stage where greatness is also measured in the full glare of the sun, where champions rise against the fiercest competition the game can muster. Shall we get in touch with Rory for more on this?
In 2025, the four majors unfolded into compelling narratives of emotion, rivalry, redemption, and understated heroism. Each Major, much like the changing seasons, offered its own distinct mood and moral lessons and enriched the illustrious history of golf. The curtain riser at Augusta National, where azaleas bloom and dreams are both realized, witnessed a momentous event. Rory McIlroy, long hailed as a prince of the sport, yet denied his rightful coronation, finally ascended to the pinnacle of success.
Haunted by the ghosts of past failures often whispered in tones reminiscent of Macbeth’s tragic missteps, McIlroy stood resolute against formidable expectations. Despite encountering a setback with a double bogey at Amen Corner, a challenge that has thwarted many contenders, he demonstrated remarkable poise and determination to force a dramatic playoff. In doing so, he triumphed over the course, the moment, and most importantly, the specters of his history. It is undeniable that he had finally “come full circle” by completing the elusive Career Grand Slam, an achievement reserved for a select few. His iron play was melodious, as harp strings, and his putter, at long last, did not betray him.
Scottie Scheffler (photo courtesy Spectrum News)
From Georgia’s verdant vibrancy, the gaze of the golfing world shifted to Quail Hollow, where the PGA Championship summoned the field to contest. There is a strode Scottie Scheffler. Measured, imperious, and unshaken by the tremors of others’ ambitions. With a steady hand and discerning eye, he carved his path stroke by stroke until the rest were shadows in his wake. His margin of victory and course management were as precise as the clockwork (his short game) and the surgeon’s scalpel. Where others blustered and bent, he stood firm like Gibraltar.
However, if Augusta is a place of grace, and Quail Hollow a domain of discipline, then surely Oakmont hosts the U.S. The open is the golf’s own Golgotha. The course offered no quarters, and the fates had little mercy. In such bleak and testing climates, a lesser-known knight in J. J. Spaun emerged from the crucible. After carding a front-nine-forty, many deemed him to have already vanquished. However, Spaun, as if possessed by some unyielding muse, rallied with a valiant heart, birdied the final two holes, and held a putt of near-mythic length upon the eighteenth green to etch his name in marble.
Thus, the year’s final chapter turned itself onto the rugged and romantic links of the Royal Portrush. That most ancient and noble of contests, where the wind and earth bear scars of battles fought a hundredfold. Here again, strode Scheffler by carding four rounds in the 60s. A feat that bespeaks a rare blend of artistry and calculation. Two majors to his name in a single season, a cumulative score of thirty-two strokes under par across all four majors, and a margin of twenty-one strokes ahead of the next closest challenger.
Can it get any better for the Champion Golfer of the Year?
This year’s British Open offered a journey that truly resonated with those who had witnessed it—the crossing of tempests and quiet intervals between struggle and success, where many silent stories endured. The poignant image was of McIlroy in his Northern Ireland home, his eyes shining with tears long held in restraint.
They say, in the bunkers and greens of golf’s empire and scripture rest golf’s Four Majors: Augusta’s solemn spring awakening, the PGA’s exacting May trial, the U.S. Open’s June crucible, and the Open Championship’s lyrical July finale. Four cardinal tests were charted across the compass rose in the northern golfing calendar. However, between the fall of autumn’s leaves and the budding of March’s first blooms, there exists a silence too deep to play a game.
What then should be made of this solemn interregnum? This hollow season stretches from August to April’s trumpet. Golfers who sleep for tournaments do not continue, and trophies are lifted.
Yet, even as the echoes of the season’s final hymn fade into the mists of memory, one cannot help but feel inevitable incompleteness, though noble and near-whole remains unfinished. In July, the majestic crescendo is too long and still. The soul, once stirred by Augusta’s promise and Portrush’s poetry, finds itself adrift in an autumnal quietude and awaits the next verse that never comes.
Is it not curious, then, that a game so global in spirit should rest its crown on merely four pillars anchored in the North? Is there not yet room for a fifth star to light the firmament? This raises a question both bold and necessary. Might the game not find its completion in the sunlit lands of the South in the form of a Fifth Major born in the antipodean spring, both bridge this barren expanse and add a new color to golf’s eternal tapestry?
View of Royal Melbourne (photo courtesy Premier Golf)
For a long time, the Southern Hemisphere remained a supporting character in the northern narrative. Yet, who dares deny that the spirit of the game burns bright in the heart of Melbourne across the Sunbelt courses whose very names, Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath, Metropolitan, conjure awe? Indeed, one needs only to walk the fairways of Royal Melbourne in late spring to see a canvas worthy of major. The grasses whisper, as they did at St. Andrews, and the bunkers yawn as fiercely as those at Oakmont.
From a technical standpoint, the addition of a Southern Major stretches the skillset required for modern champions. This would challenge the bomb-and-gouge philosophies of American soil. No longer could players rely solely on length or repetition. They would need strategy, imagination, and adaptability to fly the ball low into the wind, land it soft on firm ground, and dance rather than bludgeon. Such a test placed strategically at the end of the year would offer a chance for a final reckoning after a long campaign. Moreover, timing was not significant. With the final Major currently falling in mid-July, the season ends with a trailing diminuendo. The FedEx Cup, the Ryder Cup, and the Presidents Cup, though stirring, come but occasionally.
If golf is truly a worldwide sport, then its most incredible honor must be contested on a global stage. Tennis holds its majors across four continents. Football hosts its grandest cup on a rotating world stage. Yet golf, for all its rhetoric of inclusion, binds its majors to the old North. What message does this send to youth in the Asia-Pacific? To the dreamers of Adelaide and Auckland, to children who first grasp a club in Perth, Manila, or Seoul?
To anchor a Major in Australia is to unfurl the sails of the golf’s grand saga and to invite the Southern Hemisphere to pen its chapter in this story. If approached with reverence for tradition and a heart set on excellence, this new Major could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its venerable kin.
Some may decry aspirations as heresy and insist that the four majors are sacred, immutable, and eternal. However, they overlook that the PGA Championship once emerged from obscurity, and the masters are not yet a century old. Golf’s history is as a river, ever flowing, and to enshrine four as untouchable is to ignore the present world and the one yet to unfold.
Let there be a Fifth Major held in Australia, where once might have seemed apostasy, where the earth is firm, air pristine, and the game is revered. Let it arrive in November, as the world slows, and we yearn for the last tale before the year’s curtain falls. Let it stand as a revelation, the final stanza in the golf’s eternal hymn.
