How Hard Is A PGA Tour Three-Peat? Scottie Scheffler Looks To Join Golfing Greats With Memorial Hat-Trick

Scottie Scheffler can join an exclusive club this week as a third consecutive victory at The Memorial Tournament would make him just the seventh man to achieve a modern-day PGA Tour three-peat.

Even taking into account the entire history of a sport as old as golf, only 19 men have won the same tournament three times in a row - with 27 instances of a three-peat.

The likes of Walter Hagen, Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen and Arnold Palmer achieved three-peats before the official formation of the PGA Tour in 1968.

Since then it's been achieved just 11 times by six different golfers - with Jack Nicklaus the first to do it and Tiger Woods accounting for six of those, including two tournaments he won four times in a row.

The last time we had a three-peat on the PGA Tour was Steve Stricker's three wins at the John Deere Classic between 2009-11.

Who has won same PGA Tour event three times running?

Going back through history, Young Tom Morris won four Open Championships on the spin, while Peter Thomson later won three in a row in the 1950s.

Walter Hagen won four straight PGA Championships after claiming three straight Matropolitan Opens, while Gene Sarazen won four Miami Open titles and three Miami Beach Opens in the same four-year span.

Arnold Palmer went back-to-back-to-back at both the Texas Open and Phoenix Open as did Billy Casper at the Portland Open in the early 1960s.

Jack Nicklaus claimed the first three-peat of the modern PGA Tour era at the Disney World Golf Classic - which given his dominance was surprisingly his only three-peat, showing how tough it has been.

Tough for anyone not named Tiger Woods though, as he won four times in a row at both the Arnold Palmer Invitational and Farmers Insurance Open, while adding four more three-peats.

Three of those came at WGC events - doing it twice at the event held at Firestone - while he also achieved it at Jack Nicklaus' Memorial Tournament.

How have recent three-peat bids gone?

Since Steve Stricker claimed his John Deere hat-trick in 2011 there's been 20 attempts to join the list of three-peat winners by 18 different players coming into a PGA Tour event as back-to-back champions.

Not many have come particularly close - only four attempts ended in a missed cut but only two tries saw players seriously challenge with one runner-up and one T3 finish the best of the bunch.

There were 12 top-25 finishes with seven top 10s made in pursuit of that elusive hat-trick - showing just how tough it is to achieve even in an event and on a course that they've tasted such success on.

Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay, Max Homa and Viktor Hovland have all tried and failed as back-to-back champions looking to add that third win on the spin.

Brooks Koepka has had two high-profile efforts in the Majors during his extraordinary period of dominance in golf's big four, with only Gary Woodland stopping him from claiming three straight US Opens in 2019 at Pebble Beach.

After a solo second there, Koepka incredibly had the chance of a hat-trick of PGA Championships a year later but finished T29 behind Collin Morikawa at TPC Harding Park.

Scottie Scheffler has tried, and failed, twice before his third attempt at The Memorial - coming T3 at the WM Phoenix Open in 2024 before last year attempting to do it at the most unlikely of venues at TPC Sawgrass.

Scheffler became the first man ever to win back-to-back Players Championship titles in 2023 and 2024 but came up short with a T20 finish in 2025 - still a valiant effort given the size of the task.

Full list of players to win same tournament 3+ years in a row