Only five men have ever won all four of golf’s Majors, but Rory McIlroy can make it a Grand Slam sextet, and become the first European member of the club, with a 5/1 win at this year’s US Masters.
We fancy him to do it, and take his place in the pantheon with the first completed Grand Slam for 15 years at Augusta National.
Rory McIlroy
Knowing what we know now makes McIlroy’s implosion during the last round of the 2011 Masters, when the then-21-year-old started Sunday four strokes clear and shot an 80, seem even more of a shame than it did at the time, as the County Down man may well have beaten every record possible.
The five former winners have averaged 5.4 more Majors in their careers after claiming the fourth leg of the Grand Slam. It’s 2/1 US masters odds with bwin that McIlroy manages between six and ten more in total.
Tiger Woods
The outstanding achiever in every metric bar total wins, having stormed to 14 at the tender age of 32 with a US Open victory at Torrey Pines back in 2008.
He’s odds-against at 13/10 to win another Major in his career, which indicates how far Tiger has fallen due to injury and personal upheaval.
The 39-year-old may not even turn up at Augusta, so 33/1 odds of a fifth Green Jacket hold little appeal
Jack Nicklaus
McIlroy has one chance to best ‘the Golden Bear’ with a win at Augusta, in these standings at least.
However, 18 majors is a long way off, as Woods has found out. Nicklaus was also the first golfer to repeat the feat of winning all four Majors, and is the only man to have done so three times.
McIlroy is 3/1 to win at least 14 more Majors.
Gary Player
‘The Black Night’ is the only non-American in history to have won the Grand Slam, doing so at the 1965 US Open courtesy of a play-off against Australia’s Kel Nagle, who had taken the prize five years earlier.
Only Nicklaus and Woods have managed as much at a younger age, and Player was the sole golfer to have won the Open Championship in three different decades during the last century, with 15 years between his first and last Claret Jug triumphs in 1959 and 1974.
Ben Hogan
Hogan took a little longer to get going than the others, winning his first Major at the USPGA Championship in 1946, 12 years after his debut appearance in the US Open, but the Texan’s career was interrupted by World War II, in which he served as utility pilot, plus a career-threatening car crash in 1949.
His greatest and most controversial achievement was taking the first two Majors of the 1953 campaign, before being forced to choose to play in the Open Championship (for the first time) or the USPGA, as they overlapped.
Hogan went to Carnoustie and won, completing the Grand Slam and what became known as the ‘Hogan Slam’ by claiming all three Majors he entered during the season.
Gene Sarazen
The New Yorker has the distinction of being the first man to complete the Grand Slam, and did so in double-quick time too, winning the second ever Masters in his first appearance at the Augusta spectacle in 1935.
Remarkably, Sarazen bagged an albatross on the 15th hole in the final round, making up the three shots he was behind the leader in one stroke, before going onto win a gruelling 36-hole playoff the next day.
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