By PGA Tour standards, Shaun Micheel was not a particularly good golfer. After turning professional in 1992, aged 23, the American battled just to stay on the tour for more than a decade, keeping his career afloat with wins at obscure events in Asia and on the development circuit.
Micheel was barely known when he teed it up on the first hole at Oak Hill Country Club for the 2003 PGA Championship, playing in only his third major. To most observers he was just another name on the start list. That name is now forever etched in the 18th fairway, on a plaque which commemorates his trophy-winning shot on the 72nd hole, a seven-iron from 175 yards which finished two inches from the hole.
“I got to the green, marked my ball and knew I was going to win,” Micheel later said. “I told my caddy that I couldn’t believe I’d just won a Tour event. He replied: ‘This isn’t a Tour event, it’s a major’.”
Micheel never won again on the PGA Tour despite years of trying, retiring in 2012 with health issues. As a past winner he is still invited to play the PGA Championship each summer, but hasn’t made the cut since 2011.
In many ways Micheel’s career is the antipode of Tommy Fleetwood’s. Micheel won once, a major championship no less; Fleetwood holds the unwanted record for the most top-10 finishes without winning a PGA Tour event, now up to 42 after his gut-wrenching collapse at the Travelers Championship on Sunday in the latest example of why golf hurts.
Fleetwood took a three-shot lead into the final round and said on Saturday night that he hoped “this was my time”. He led by two shots with three holes to play but made bogey at 16 and again on 18, missing a par putt from six feet which would have at least salvaged a play-off. US Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley saw the door ajar and stepped through it with a nerveless birdie to steal the trophy.
Fleetwood could barely watch. Golf has a uniquely cruel habit of tormenting the mind, and the irony is that for all their very different successes in the game, both Micheel and Fleetwood are haunted by what they haven’t achieved.
Micheel later admitted that the rest of his career was dogged by a desperation to prove he was worthy of his major-champion status, which had been widely characterised as a freak event, a lightning strike. “I always wanted to validate my name on the trophy and my name amongst those hall-of-famers with another win,” he said. “Each shot I hit was life and death. The trophy hung over my head and followed me everywhere.”
Fleetwood was visibly shocked on Sunday and it will linger in the mind a little longer than some of his other top-10 finishes which never threatened to be anything more. “I’m upset now, I’m angry,” he said afterwards. “When it calms down I will look at the things I did well and look at the things I can learn from. I did plenty of things well enough this week to win, but I didn’t do that and it hurts.”
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He is undoubtedly one of the best ball-strikers of his generation and the zero in his win column increasingly feels like an aberration. The other players on the list of most top-10 finishes without a trophy are mostly unheralded journeymen (American player Brett Quigley is next on the list with 34), few of whom can claim to have Fleetwood’s craft with a mid-iron in his hand.
The numbers underline his quality: 159 events played; 135 cuts made; 85 finishes in the top 25; 42 in the top 10; 27 in the top five; 11 in the top three; six times a runner-up.
Among them there have been some agonising near misses, like the 2018 US Open when Fleetwood had an 8ft putt for a record round of 62 and a play-off, but it slid by the hole and Brooks Koepka won by a stroke. Or the 2023 Canadian Open, when Nick Taylor sank a miracle 72ft putt for eagle on the fourth play-off hole, to the raucous delight of his home crowd. Yet rarely had Fleetwood earned such an indisputable chance as Sunday’s final round in Connecticut, and it had to sting.
Afterwards he gave an insight into his mindset, in which he tells himself he is already a serial winner on tour.
“I haven’t really been in a position where I’ve been in contention to worry about when my win might come [recently], but today was one of those days,” he said. “I led [through] 71 holes and it didn’t happen. But in my mind I’ve won loads of PGA Tour events, I just haven’t done it in reality, and I’m sure that time will come if I keep working.”
There has undoubtedly been some bad luck along the way – what can you do when a guy holes a play-off-winning putt from another time zone? – but Fleetwood could be accused of white line fever, of seeing the finish and bottling it. Can there be any other explanation when you finish in the top five 27 times and don’t actually win?
And yet there is a sackful of evidence to the contrary. Fleetwood has seven wins on the European Tour, notably holding off Rory McIlroy to win the Dubai Invitational last year. Two of those seven tournaments were won via play-offs and another four by one stroke, proving he has the stomach for a tense finale.
This reporter was in Rome when Fleetwood struck “the shot of my life”, a pure three-wood to effectively win the Ryder Cup for Team Europe two years ago, with a ball that pierced the air before landing in the middle of the green to send already half-cut fans into giddy delirium. It came with the enormous pressure of delivering for his European teammates, and he delivered.
The shot of Micheel’s life brought him a major trophy and a litany of unforeseen consequences, as he embarked on a years-long “quest for perfection” that manifested in mental health struggles. “When you win a major as your first Tour victory, you’re at a loss,” he said. “Especially the way I finished, how could I upstage that? I had my walk-off moment.”
It can be a devastating game. Fleetwood will be sore, replaying moments in his head and wishing he could change them. But he has the talent and the mentality to create another opportunity like this one. Crucially, he has the ability to find perspective, and to hold on to the belief that one day his time will come. “I would have loved to have done it today, but the search goes on, I guess. When it happens, it will be very, very sweet.”
