Adam Scott will arrive at Shinnecock Hills next month for the 126th US Open and tee it up in his hundredth consecutive major championship. The number became official this week when the latest world ranking confirmed him inside the top sixty, the threshold the US Open uses to settle the exempt portion of its field. Scott sits at forty-nine. The T4 at the Cadillac Championship at Doral in March had effectively done the work. The confirmation, on the Monday after a major he did not play his way into the conversation at, was the bureaucratic full stop on a streak that began in the summer of 2001 and has now run uninterrupted for a quarter of a century.
The shape of the number
Ninety-nine majors in a row is the kind of number that does not quite read as a sporting achievement on first viewing. It reads as an administrative one. A spreadsheet. A counting exercise. The number Jack Nicklaus produced, the only player to have stretched further, sat at a hundred and forty-six and ran from the 1962 Masters to the 1998 US Open. The next number on the list, behind Scott’s, belongs to Sergio García at seventy-eight. Phil Mickelson’s streak ended in the nineties, depending on how the LIV-era majors are counted. Tiger Woods, whose career has produced almost every other record worth holding in the sport, never managed a streak of this length. The injuries got in the way. The 2008 reconstructive knee surgery. The car accident. The back operations. The streak is not the kind of number a peak career produces. It is the kind a career of unbroken availability produces, played at a level high enough to keep the exemption letters arriving.
The thing Scott has done, in the period since 2001, is to never be hurt at the wrong moment, never be out of the top fifty for long enough to miss a qualifying door, and never be at the bottom of a stretch of form bad enough to drop him out of the various ways into the four championships. The Open Championship gave him his entry in July of 2001 at Royal Lytham, when he was still inside his first year on the European Tour. He has not missed one since.
The one close call
The streak has one footnote that the player tells in interviews more than he tells anything else about the number. In 2008, the week before the US Open at Torrey Pines, Scott broke a bone in his right hand. He played anyway. He was drawn alongside Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson for the opening two rounds, the marquee pairing of the championship, and he finished the seventy-two holes at T26. That same US Open is the one Woods won on one leg in the eighteen-hole Monday playoff against Rocco Mediate. Scott’s hand healed. The streak survived. The week became the story he tells on the days the streak becomes the question. Every long streak has one of these. The Nicklaus streak had its own collection. The number does not extend without them.
What the streak tells you about Scott
The number, for the Australian who turns forty-six in July, is a kind of biographical summary that the record book does not normally accommodate. He won the Masters in 2013. He has eight green coats around the world. He spent twelve weeks at world number one in 2014. He has been, across the last two decades, the player whose place inside the top thirty has been the most stable line on the broadcast. He has finished inside the top fifteen on the FedEx Cup six times. He has, in the modern era of golf in which a major-less career is the default for most of the top fifty, won one.
But the streak is the line that places him in the more particular company. The list of players who have made every major they were eligible for over a twenty-five year stretch is a list of two, and the other name on it is Nicklaus. The player who walked off Royal Lytham at twenty-one in 2001 and the player who will walk to the first tee at Shinnecock at forty-five next month are, on the basic measure of availability and competitive fitness, the same player. The body has not given out. The form has not collapsed. The exemption letters have not stopped arriving.
Shinnecock and the hundred
The course will produce the hundredth start in the kind of setting the streak deserves. Shinnecock, on its sixth US Open since the modern revival of the championship’s relationship with the place, will play firm and fast on the duneland the rain rarely soaks. The 2018 version of the championship there produced the highest winning score of the modern era. Brooks Koepka, who won that week at one over, was the only player in red figures for any meaningful portion of the seventy-two holes. The 2026 setup is, on the USGA’s pre-championship comments, expected to play marginally softer.
Scott has played Shinnecock in both of its previous US Open visits in his career. He finished T18 in 2004, the year Retief Goosen putted his way to the trophy and the rest of the field were still arguing about the watering of the seventh green. He finished T39 in 2018. The course’s emphasis on the long iron approach and the bunkered green complexes is the kind of test the Scott swing, with its long-iron repeatability that has been the steadiest portion of his bag through his thirties, has always handled well. The chance, on the third week of June, is real.
The number, once the first tee shot is struck on Thursday morning, will tick to a hundred. Whether the week produces a final-day weekend tee time or a missed cut, the streak will, on the broadcast’s lower-third graphic, be the line the camera lingers on. The line is real. The hundred is the hundred. The next streak, the one only Jack Nicklaus has ever ended, will keep running.