Are these golf’s most unbreakable records?

After Rory McIlroy admitted he’ll never reach Tiger Woods’ 82 PGA Tour wins, we decided to look at five other golf records that might just be unbreakable 

Tiger Woods tied Sam Snead’s record when he claimed the 82nd PGA Tour title of his career at last week’s ZOZO Championship, and it’s a record we’re unlikely ever to see matched again.

Woods is nine years younger than Snead was when he won his final title, and still has time to take the outright lead in this particular record, but it feels certain his will be the final benchmark of wins on this scale.

That becomes more apparent when you look down the list of career victories: Jack Nicklaus lies in third on 73, and you have to go six further places down the list to find Phil Mickelson, who is the closest active player with 44 career victories on the PGA Tour.

After Mickelson, the current players competing on the PGA Tour with the most wins to their name are Dustin Johnson (20), Jim Furyk (17) and Rory McIlroy (17), who said in an interview with Golf TV earlier in the week that Woods’ total will never be surpassed.

“I’ll never get there,” McIlroy said of Tiger’s record-equalling 82nd PGA Tour victory.

“I’m a realist and I know that 82 PGA Tour wins is something that in this day and age is probably not going to be surpassed.

“You look at how fast his career progression was. At 30 years old, he had won 50 PGA Tour events. I feel like I’ve had a decent PGA Tour career and I’ve had 17. The numbers are so different.”

But it’s not the only record unlikely ever to be beaten: Below, we examine five other golf records which we expect to last the test of time.

• 18 PGA Tour wins in one year

This record belongs to Byron Nelson, who totalled an astonishing 18 wins on Tour in 1945. He entered 30 events that year, meaning he won 60% of all tournaments he played in.

Sam Snead and Ben Hogan were the only other players to reach double-figures for wins in one year, and Hogan did it twice (in 1946 and 1948). Tiger Woods’ best was nine wins in 2000, although he also had eight wins in both 1999 and 2006.

• 11 PGA Tour wins in a row

A streak that seems unfathomable, but unsurprisingly this record belongs once again to Nelson – the same year he had his 18 victories. His run began at the team event Miami International Fourball, and ended with a four-stroke win at the Canadian Open. 

Tiger Woods, who lies second to Nelson, managed a best of seven titles in a row between 2006-2007, and also had years where he counted winning streaks of both five (1999-00) and six wins (2007-08) in a row. 

• 142 Consecutive Cuts made on Tour

Tiger Woods managed roughly seven years – between 1998 and 2005 – without missing a single cut on the PGA Tour.

Woods passed Nelson’s previous record of 113 at the 2003 Tour Championship, and added 29 more cuts before ending his run on May 13, 2005.

Tommy Fleetwood holds the current streak record on the PGA Tour with 30.

• 683 weeks at World No.1

Tiger Woods holds the record for consecutive weeks at World No.1 (283) between the 12th June 2005 and the 30th October, 2010, as well as the record for the most total weeks in his career. That number sits at 683, which equates to roughly 13 years at the top of the game.

Putting his accomplishment into perspective, the next highest streak of consecutive weeks was by Greg Norman (96), from the 18th June 1995 to the 19th April, 1997. He also holds the second best number of accumulative weeks at the top, with 305… less than half of Woods’ record.

Woods and Norman are the only two players in history to have reached over 100 weeks, with Rory McIlroy at 95 and Dustin Johnson at 91. Current World No.1 Brooks Koepka has amassed a total of 33 weeks, with his current streak of 24 weeks having begun on the 19th May, 2019.

• 18 Major titles

If Tiger Woods can’t catch Jack, we’re not sure anyone can.

Tiger Woods inched closer to Jack Nicklaus’ impressive 18-major title haul with his 15th major victory at the 2019 Masters, but he’s still going to have to win three more times to catch him. And while Woods did recently tied Sam Snead’s record of 82 PGA Tour wins, adding three more majors to his bursting trophy cabinet is a tough ask. 

Still, he’s the only one who could achieve it, unless a future young star has a sensation rise, or Brooks Koepka continues ticking off majors for fun. Below Tiger, Phil Mickelson is the next closest of current players on five, while Koepka and Rory McIlroy both hold four apiece, and Jordan Spieth has three.