GOLF RAFTERS & RECORDS — SOURCES AND VERIFICATION NOTES

Compiled 19 October 2026 for the 8StarSports foundation pack (golf-rafters-majors.md, golf-records-leaders.md). House discipline: every figure two-source corroborated, disagreements printed rather than resolved silently, anything not verifiable marked UNVERIFIED or omitted. The house golf shelf (~/workspace/sonny/golf/, Volumes 1–2, ~85,500 words) supplied the starting spine; everything carried into this pack was re-checked against the sources below.

Method

The nine winner rolls were extracted from the compiled championship lists (which are themselves maintained from the championships' official records) and then corroborated three ways:

1. Edition counts against official numbering. Masters 90 played editions (the 2026 Masters was the 90th), PGA Championship 108 (2026 = 108th), U.S. Open 126 (2026 = 126th), The Open 154 (the 2026 Open at Royal Birkdale was the 154th — the edition number is printed in The Open's own records and matches the roll exactly). U.S. Women's Open 81, Women's PGA 72, Chevron 55 total / 44 as a major, Women's Open 51 total / 26 as a major, Evian 13 as a major.
2. Aggregate reconciliation. Career major totals computed from the extracted rolls were reconciled line-by-line against independently published career tables (men: NBC Sports' major-winners ledger, also carried in the house record-book study; women: the LPGA major-championship winners table with per-event breakdowns). Every player's total matched under each accounting (men's modern four; women's era accounting and modern-five subtotals alike — e.g., Wright 13 era / 8 modern-five, Berg 15 era / 1 modern-five, Sörenstam 10/10, Webb 7/6, Bradley 6/3). A roll with a wrong winner anywhere in it would have broken this reconciliation.
3. Spot adjudication of anomalous rows against championship sources (1955 Women's PGA and 1946 U.S. Women's Open, below).

Source pairs by dataset

Adjudicated anomalies (printed in the pack, logged here)

• 1955 Women's PGA "4 & 3". The compiled list carries the inaugural LPGA Championship with a match score, which looks like a data error. It is not: the championship's official history (KPMG Women's PGA) confirms the one-off format — 54 holes of stroke play (Hanson led at 220, −5), then a 36-hole match-play final, Hanson over Louise Suggs 4 & 3. Printed that way, with both figures.
• 1946 U.S. Women's Open. The only match-play edition; Berg beat Jameson 5 & 4 in the final at Spokane. Printed as a match result, not a stroke total.
• PGA Championship, 1919. The house majors study relayed a PGA web page as listing 1919 among the missed years; the PGA's champions records and the match record (Barnes beat Fred McLeod 6 & 5 at Engineers CC) show the championship WAS played in 1919. The pack prints Barnes, 1919, and the missed years as 1917, 1918 and 1943 only.
• Masters / U.S. Open / PGA "not held" rows are printed inside the rolls (1943–45; 1917–18 and 1942–45; 1917–18 and 1943 respectively). The Open's cancelled years (1871, 1915–19, 1940–45, 2020) are summarized in a block under its roll rather than as year rows; the reason is given for 1871 (no trophy) and 2020 (COVID-19).
• Evian 2013 and 2017 were 54-hole championships (weather); totals of 203 and 204 are complete winning scores, not truncations.

Disputes — printed, not resolved

1. Walter Hagen's PGA Tour wins: 45 vs 44. The PGA Tour's published career list (and every list derived from it, including the house shelf's) credits 45, tied with Mickelson. An independently compiled list credits 44. Printed: 45, with the variant footnoted on the board itself. The difference is one early-career event whose official status the two accountings judge differently — the same species of judgment call as the Snead recount.
2. Kurt Kitayama's final round at the 2026 PGA Championship: 62 or 63? The Golf News Net's record summary (as carried in the house golf study) calls it a 62, which would make nine men's major 62s. Today's Golfer's table of the 62s (8 rounds) omits him, and Golf Today's complete list files the Aronimink round among the 63s (−7). Printed: with the 63s, conflict flagged on the board. If the PGA of America's media guide settles it, the board should be corrected to match — flagged for the next revision pass.
3. Counting the PGA Tour's sub-60 rounds: 15 or 16? BirdieStats calls Michael Kim's 2026 3M Open round "the 15th sub-60 round in PGA Tour history." The compiled record lists fifteen rounds of 59 INCLUDING Kim's, plus Furyk's 58 — sixteen sub-60 rounds. The pack prints 16 (one 58, fifteen 59s) and shows the reconciliation.
4. Rory McIlroy's PGA Tour wins: 30 vs 26. The compiled list, current through 2026, credits 30 (including his 2025–26 wins: the Masters twice among them). The PGA Tour–derived list reproduced by Druids predates those seasons and shows 26. Printed: 30, the fresher figure; the older list is the reason for the gap, not a contradiction of substance.
5. Snead's 82 itself is an official figure produced by a judgment process (the Tour's 1988 Beman recount) whose methods were criticized at the time — carried in the house record-book study as informed dissent (Australian Golf Digest, with PGA Tour historian Laury Livsey). The pack prints the official accounting and says plainly that it is one.

Deliberately excluded / UNVERIFIED

• Patty Sheehan's 63 at the 1984 Women's PGA Championship (Jack Nicklaus Sports Center) appears in one record list (National Club Golfer's combined "63 in a major" list) but could not be corroborated in a second source for this pack. It is NOT printed in the women's lowest-rounds table (which is complete at the 60/61/62 tiers) and is logged here as single-source — UNVERIFIED for pack purposes, not asserted to be false.
• Senior-major and amateur-major low rounds (e.g., the U.S. Senior Open record) are outside Jason's four categories and are not in this pack.
• Sub-60 rounds on developmental/regional tours beyond the labelled "other tours" table (Alps Tour, Sunshine Tour, Asian Tour, KLPGA and others documented in the compiled record) are excluded by scope; the line drawn is stated on the board.
• Early Open Championship scores (1860–91) predate standardized par; to-par is shown as — rather than reconstructed. The same applies to the 1895–97 U.S. Opens (36-hole championships).
• Women's Open venues before 1979 and assorted early LPGA-championship course names follow the compiled lists; where a venue name in a compiled list is a modern renaming of the same course, the current name is printed.

Coverage statement

• Rolls: 9 of 9 championships complete for every year played, 1860–2026, with all cancellations printed. Two-source coverage: 100% at the level of edition counts, career-total reconciliation, and adjudicated anomalies; individual year rows rest on the compiled official-record lists corroborated as described in the Method section.
• Leaderboards: 100% two-source for every printed figure except where a dispute is explicitly flagged (Hagen; Kitayama; Kim count), in which case BOTH figures and both sources are printed.
• Lowest rounds: 100% two-source at every tier printed. One single-source item (Sheehan 63) was excluded and logged above rather than printed.