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Here’s How Rare It Is to Repeat at the PGA Championship

Scottie Scheffler will chase a second straight PGA Championship this week, but if history is an indicator, it won’t be easy.
Jeff Ritter|
Walter Hagen (left) and Joe Kirkwood lead their gallery to the tee during the 1929 PGA Championship at Hillcrest CC in Los Angeles. Hagen won five PGA’s but Leo Diegel would win in ‘29 for his second straight title.
Walter Hagen (left) and Joe Kirkwood lead their gallery to the tee during the 1929 PGA Championship at Hillcrest CC in Los Angeles. Hagen won five PGA’s but Leo Diegel would win in ‘29 for his second straight title. | George Rinhart/Getty Images

Scottie Scheffler enters this PGA Championship at Aronimink as the top-ranked player in the world at at the height of his powers. He’s also the defending champion at this event, and with that comes a shot at history.

Repeat winners don’t come along often at the PGA, perhaps because it changes venues each year. Or perhaps because the field is so deep. And maybe also because it’s just extremely tough to win majors, much less the same major two years in a row.

In modern history, only two players have won back-to-back PGA Championships: the most recent was Brooks Koepka in 2018 at Whistling Straits and 2019 at Bethpage Black. Tiger Woods also won repeat PGA titles, achieving the feat in 1999 and 2000 and then again in 2006 and 2007.

For repeat PGA winners in the modern era, that’s it. Koepka and Woods are the entire list.

It gets lost a bit in history, but for several decades the PGA Championship was a match-play event. Back in that era, it produced a handful of back-to-back winners. They are:

Denny Shute: 1936, 1937

Leo Diegel: 1928, 1929

Walter Hagen: 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927 (A record four wins in a row.)

Gene Sarazen: 1922, 1923

Jim Barnes: 1916, 1919 (there was no event in 1917-18)

While repeating at the PGA is difficult, there have been more players who have won multiple PGAs in their career, a list led by Jack Nicklaus’s five PGA Championship titles, in 1963, 1971, 1973, 1975 and 1980. Walter Hagen, mentioned above, also finished with five titles during the match-play era.

So, it may seem like the odds are against Scheffler this week, but the World No. 1 will be ready to take a run at another Wanamaker, and at history.

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Jeff Ritter
JEFF RITTER

Jeff Ritter is the managing director of SI Golf. He has more than 20 years of sports media experience, and previously was the general manager at the Morning Read, where he led that business’s growth and joined SI as part of an acquisition in 2022. Earlier in his career he spent more than a decade at SI and Golf Magazine, and his journalism awards include a MIN Magazine Award and an Edward R. Murrow Award for sports reporting. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

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