What’s Truly Important

It’s the money shot of every Sunday golf telecast: the winner posing with his trophy. But in an era when the men’s pro game is being swarmed by warring factions marking their territories in cold, hard cash, one can’t help but wonder if silver and crystal are like dowries and duchesses, relics of a bygone age. In a golf world of runaway zeroes, do shiny things still matter? Or do they matter even more? Perhaps it’s simple economics: An increased supply of capital makes each dollar a little less precious, while the weekly number of polished keepsakes remains limited to one.

Xander Schauffele agrees. Ahead of the 50th Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, he met with reporters and echoed the sentiments of the event’s inaugural winner, Jack Nicklaus, whose $50,000 first-place prize in 1974, even adjusted for inflation, was paltry compared to the $4.5 million winner’s check that Schauffele and the others in the 144-man field were chasing.

“What would make me feel good,” Schauffele said, “is to raise this trophy on Sunday.”

Excellence and success are abstract notions, difficult to quantify and represent. Bank accounts can’t do it (someone always has more), but trophies still serve that purpose, transforming a grand concept—greatness—into something one can touch, lift or sip from. The decorative hardware that knights and noblemen competed for in the Middle Ages continues to carry a heft far greater than its physical weight.

Shane Lowry, the 2019 Open Championship winner from Ireland, said, “You can’t put a value on the trophies, especially the claret jug. If you ask me what the first-place check was for winning the Open, I wouldn’t be able to tell you off the top of my head. But I’ll always remember the look on the faces of people, their expressions, when I was showing them the claret jug and they were able to hold it in their hands.”

It’s hard to imagine an oversize cardboard check commanding the same awe. The way a sterling-silver symbol of success can make people feel when they see it or touch it is the most satisfying aspect of ownership for Lowry’s compatriot Pádraig Harrington.

Harrington, who counts two Open Championships among his three major titles, displays his two claret jugs like bookends on the breakfast counter. Never mind that he has had to build out multiple trophy rooms for the 100-plus prizes, plus mementos, he has collected during his decades-long pro career. Every time a visitor walks into the kitchen, the heart of the house, and spies the claret jugs, the expression on their face fills Harrington with the same ineffable joy he felt after his final rounds at Carnoustie in 2007 and Royal Birkdale in 2008. “When their face lights up, that’s the beauty for me,” he said. “Their reaction is the payoff every single time.”

Harrington has found more utilitarian purposes for other prizes, such as the silver bowl he won in 2008 as the first European to be voted PGA Tour Player of the Year. It sits in the foyer, where it serves as a receptacle for keys.

In the same way that new cars depreciate in value as soon as they are driven off the lot, trophies tend to shrink once winners leave the tournament grounds. The replica trophies that they take home—or, more typically, get shipped to them—are usually miniature versions of the ones they are presented with during the award ceremonies.

The Open champion is allowed to keep the claret jug for the year of his reign before returning it. Collin Morikawa won in 2021 and carried it on his commercial flight back to the States after sending it through one of those TSA X-ray cylinders, which coughed it out alongside wrinkled articles of clothing, pillows, purses and electronics.

The jug definitely gets around. In 2007, after the first of his back-to-back Open victories, Harrington pub-crawled with friends in San Francisco—accompanied, of course, by the  jug—right up until it was time for him to head to the airport. He slipped the trophy into its steel traveling case and poured himself into a cab. The taxi driver glanced over his shoulder, noted the cologne de booze emanating from Harrington’s pores and then settled his gaze on the case, which Harrington, following the cabbie’s eyes, realized was leaking whiskey.

“What’s in the box?” the driver asked. Harrington quickly reviewed his options: Did he tell the truth to a person who, he suddenly noticed, was wearing golf gloves on both the hands that gripped the steering wheel, likely inviting a conversation that wouldn’t end until the ride did?

“I told the man I was transporting a donor organ,” Harrington said. The rest of the journey to SFO was conducted in silence.

On occasion, taking home regular tournament trophies on one’s own can require more ingenuity and nerve than winning them did, as Harrington discovered when he departed Morocco in 2007 with a bejeweled gold dagger after winning the Hassan Trophy at Royal Golf Dar Es Salam. In the aftermath of 9/11, when a found box cutter could cause a plane to be emptied of its passengers and trigger an international incident, it crossed his mind, he said, that traveling from Africa to Europe with a sizable blade could pose a problem if it were misidentified by a fellow passenger or flagged by the security X-ray station at his European point of entry.

“You’re worried about the questions,” he said. “I kept my head down going through customs.”

Joel Dahmen was bummed that he didn’t have any transportation-related issues. His first PGA Tour victory, with his childhood friend Geno Bonnalie on his bag, came in the Dominican Republic in 2021 in his 111th career start. It set off not one, not two, but three celebrations over the next month, including a kegger in the backyard of his Arizona home and a more intimate gathering of mostly family members at Carbone inside Las Vegas’ Aria Resort, during which a signature cocktail of tequila, lime juice and soda, “The Joel Blanco,” was unveiled in his honor.

More than one reveler expressed disappointment that the Joel Blanco could not be consumed from the winner’s crystal chalice. The trophy was shipped by tournament organizers and arrived long after Dahmen’s victory hangover had worn off.

For Daniel Berger, his four PGA Tour trophies provided therapy of sorts when he was sidelined from competition for 19 months in 2022 and 2023, first due to a bad back but followed by a torn labrum in his right shoulder. Two of his victories came at the Pebble Beach and Fort Worth, Texas, stops, both of which boast rich histories.

On the days when his back discomfort was tolerable, Berger would sit in his office and study the names of the winners on those trophies—the likes of Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Billy Casper and Lee Trevino from the Fort Worth event and Jack Burke Jr., Byron Nelson, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods from Pebble Beach. To brush his fingers over the list of winners and see his name next to his predecessors’ served as a reminder that he was once—and could be again—one of the best players in the world.

Berger also would replay his victories in his mind. “I would…just think back and try to visualize the moments of the shots that I hit coming down the stretch, and knowing that as far away as you feel from that, you’re not as far as you think you are,” he said. “That was kind of just a small little victory and [a reminder] to be patient and know that eventually you’ll be OK.”

So, trophies aren’t just prizes. They’re memories. And wherever they’re placed, that room becomes more than a personal museum—it is a workshop where a long-lasting footprint is forged out of silver and crystal and wood and gold. Since golfers have started to command the kind of money normally associated with an NFL quarterback or an MLB starting ace, trophies have come to symbolize a choice: legacy or lucre.

Rory McIlroy has given considerable thought to how he wants to be remembered. At a press conference ahead of the 2021 Masters, he recalled a recent visit to see Tiger Woods. McIlroy was surprised that only Woods’ major championship trophies were on display in a cabinet in the family room. Woods has won 82 PGA Tour events. Where were all the others?

“He said, ‘I don’t know,’” McIlroy said. “I go, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah, my mom has some, and a few are in the office, and a few are wherever.’”

McIlroy has done his utmost to peak for the majors ever since that conversation, modeling Woods’ mindset but choosing not to follow his lead on his trophies. All of McIlroy’s are displayed in his baronial entertainment room in what he described as “a bit of a mishmash, a random collection.”

“That would look a little sad, just having four up there,” McIlroy added, referring to his number of major titles.

In 2013, McIlroy won the Australian Open. First contested in 1904, the tournament was revered by Nicklaus, who won it six times and described it as “the fifth major” because of its pedigree. Twenty years before McIlroy’s victory Down Under, Brad Faxon had captured the title.

During the award ceremony, Faxon stared in wonder at the sterling-silver Stonehaven Cup, which reminded him of the NHL’s Stanley Cup in its size and grandeur. As he perused the names of some of the previous winners—Nicklaus, Gary Player (seven times), Greg Norman (five times), David Graham, Tom Watson, Peter Thomson—he grew giddy at the thought of taking the trophy home.

Imagine his surprise when he was handed an Australian gold coin instead. If he wanted a replica of the trophy, he was told, he’d have to pay for one. As he remembers it, the cost was roughly $3,500 (in American dollars). Faxon, who’d earned $153,000 for the victory, didn’t hesitate to fork over the money. “I valued it so much,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, of course I’m going to pay for it.’”

At the beginning of 2024, Faxon entrusted the replica Stonehaven Cup, which had grown tarnished with age, to a trophy-shop owner. The man, Jon Clay, restored the piece to its original splendor and went one step further: He brought it up to date by engraving the names of all the winners since 1993, including the 2023 champion, Joaquín Niemann.

Faxon was thrilled when he got the cup back and saw Clay’s handiwork. It delighted him to show it off to friends who stopped by his house. “You can’t do that with your first-place check,” Faxon said.

Seeing all the names of the winners who’d come before and after him gave Faxon a gift of perspective that no amount of money could buy. He was a link on a remarkable chain. The trophy was his proof.