Longevity is a strength that is often overlooked when evaluating the best to ever play the game.
Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer of all time and has reached the highest peak of anyone to have picked up a club. But he has not been able to break Sam Snead’s record for the most PGA Tour victories ever. The pair is tied at 82, a testament to Snead’s longevity.
Jack Nicklaus’ 18 major wins were also never beaten by Woods, even though he reached 14 in 2008 by winning the US Open. While Nicklaus and Snead’s records stood the test of time, Woods’ body broke down. Otherwise, he’d likely have all of the major golfing records to himself.
But there’s one man who can claim to have maintained his golfing prime for the longest. He made nearly 600 cuts on the PGA Tour during his career.
Jay Haas made the cut in more events than Jack Nicklaus played in
While Nicklaus and Snead may be viewed as the best examples of longevity in sport, Jay Haas made the cut in more events than either of them ever played in.
Haas made 592 cuts on the PGA Tour over the course of his career, which spanned from 1972 to 2022. He made the cut in 74% of the tournaments that he played on the tour.
For a player to break Haas’ record, they would have to average around 20 cuts made a year for the next three decades. That’s an unfathomable level of consistency for today’s golfers, even with all of their access to modern medicine.
| All-time rank | Player | PGA Tour cuts made |
| 1 | Jay Haas | 592 |
| 2 | Tom Kite | 590 |
| 3 | Raymond Floyd | 582 |
| 4 | Arnold Palmer | 574 |
| 5 | Davis Love III | 571 |
As the PGA Tour looks to cut down to 20 events per season, a rookie would have to make the cut in every event they played, every season, until 2056.
By making the cut at the 2022 Zurich Classic, Haas became the oldest-ever major winner in PGA Tour history, doing so at 68 years of age. And while he never won a major championship, he had top-five finishes at three of the four major championships in the 1990s.
And in those 592 cuts made, Haas won nine events. He’s by far the greatest example of a player who was able to maximise their performance every week, avoiding the blow-ups and disasters every tournament to take home a pay check.
The player who made 98% of his cuts on the PGA Tour
Ben Hogan, Gary Player’s hero, had a career interrupted by his service in the Second World War and by a near-fatal car accident, but he still achieved a remarkable level of consistency when he was able to play on the PGA Tour.
Player said Hogan was the best ball striker ever, and he used that to full effect when making 293 cuts from 300 starts on the tour. He made the cut in 98% of the events he played.
How long should an 18 hole round of golf take?
That’s incredibly impressive when you consider that Hogan had the majority of his success, in majors particularly, after his injury. He never allowed that to affect his play when competing at the highest level.
If Hogan’s career wasn’t interrupted so frequently, he could be the man in possession of Haas’ record.
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