Rickie Fowler is playing the best golf of his life but that doesn’t mean golf has a ‘Big 4’

With a Bearing Point blasted across his visor, and a Ford logo across his black shirt with the sleeves extending past the elbows, the 22-time PGA Tour winner Phil Mickelson is looking at a 20-foot putt to win his first major championship.

Phil had plenty of close calls at major championships at that point in his career, but wore the “Best Player to Never Win a Major” scarlet letter for what felt like the better part of a decade.

He shed the “Best Player to Never Win a Major” label yet he held that title for so long that our perception of him to this day is still littered with scar tissue from the narrative of yesteryear.

This rush to rank players’ places in history during the middle of their careers is not unique to the golf world.

Comparing players across generations and across eras is fun, but almost impossible to do fairly when a player is only a percentage of the way through his or her career.

But when Fowler won the Abu Dhabi Championship on Sunday, the inevitable “Big 4” conversation began as if the golf world was opening up a Request for Proposal for a new auditor (accounting jokes pair well with golf).

Fowler did rise to fourth in the Official World Golf Rankings, but it was conveniently ignored that he’s closer to the eighth-ranked player in the world than he is the third.

We’ve conveniently lumped these four players in a group together as “young,” yet Spieth was 14 years old when Day played his first season and Rickie played his first events on tour.

Fowler does not have the accolades yet of the three players ahead of him in the world rankings, but the great thing about golf careers is that they’re not defined when you’re 27, 37, or maybe even 47.

As much as I want to say that we should look at this from the “big picture” point of view, you cannot see the big picture before it exists.