As the final major of the 2009 LPGA season draws near, I thought I'd type a few hundred words about a phrase we hear and read many times during championship weeks of both gender's major golf tournaments.  That phrase generally gets worded like this:

 "a major championship is much more difficult to win than a regular tournament" 

Is that really true?  If so, why is it true?  I'm going to discuss this primarily from an LPGA perspective but will be throwing in the occasional PGA reference.  Feel free to beat down any of it in the comments.

I think my uncertainty with this tougher/more difficult notion is that the definition the user is utilizing isn't always clearly stated.  Are you saying "it's more difficult for a player to win a major" or "major championship courses are tougher so a player goes through a lot of adversity to win" or something else entirely?  I believe that most people are thinking of the former and they justify it due to the quality of fields at major championships.  To be exact - they assume that the quality of the field at a major is always stronger than any regular event and usually by a significant margin.  If that were true, then logic would dictate that winning a major IS more difficult and this discussion would be closed.  The evidence I've found doesn't support that assumption.  Generally speaking, the average field quality at a major does exceed the average field at regular events by a reasonable margin.  However, there are plenty of LPGA events where the field strength (as measured by my Field Score method) equals or exceeds one or more of the majors.  In 2009, the U.S. Women's Open scored 93 and the Kraft Nabisco scored 94.  Six non-major events this year have scored 94 or higher.  Part of that was created by the sparse schedule we have in 2009 which has concentrated more top players into each event but even last year we had three events with higher Field Scores than the LPGA Championship and six others within six points of it.  So if you want to say that winning a major championship is significantly tougher than winning the Corona Championship based on strength of field, I'll agree with you there.  But I'm not ready to say it was tougher to win the Kraft Nabisco than this year's Sybase or last year's Safeway International based on field strength.

Maybe people think majors are tougher to win because of the pressure.  I'm sure there's a lot of pressure to win those things but last time I checked, somebody always manages to overcome that.  I suppose there are players who already have some phobia of competing for a victory who would find that magnified in a major but wouldn't their lesser chance of winning decrease the toughness of winning that major for players who don't have the phobia?  All other things being equal, the pressure of a major can hurt either you or your opponent in varying degrees but it can't possibly make a victory less likely for everybody.

Some majors are considered "tough" because the scoring is generally higher than at regular events.  Again, there have been plenty of LPGA events with higher scoring averages than some majors.  Granted, the U.S. Open and Kraft Nabisco were two of the highest averages so far in 2009 but over the last 18 months, 11 events have exceeded 74 shots per rounds and only four of them were majors.  Sure, the majors are played on tough courses.  So are the MasterCard, Longs Drugs and SemGroup (when it was still around).  I'm sure you PGA guys can cite examples of courses just as tough as Augusta National.

Three of the eight majors - the Masters, Kraft Nabisco and the LPGA Championship - are played at the same course every year (although the latter moves periodically).  The British Opens rotate through the same general group of courses, most of which are links.  In those cases, we often hear how a particular player has an advantage going into the event - they've played well here before, the course favors their style or length or accuracy, etc.  And in the next breath I'm supposed to believe that it's harder for Tiger Woods to win the Masters or Se Ri Pak to win the LPGA Championship or for Padraig Harrington to win the men's British than for any of them to win a regular tournament?  To which worn-out analysis am I supposed to give more weight?

The more I look at this subject, the more I believe that the major championships are merely the older siblings of regular events and not their omnipotent overlords.  On average the field strength at majors is somewhat stronger but not so much that we should naturally regard its winner with awe.  "How could he possibly have beaten all of those great players on that tough course under all that pressure?!?"  Well dude, somebody had to.  The same principles of competition apply whether it's the U.S. Open or the Navistar Classic.  The extra emphasis piled on by the public and the media because "It's A Major!" reaches every player in equal amounts and for every player negatively affected by the pressure or the course difficulty, those effects are a positive to some extent for the rest of the field.  The Law of Competitive Balance is as certain as the Law of Gravity.