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

April 11, 2004. 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. Jim Nantz has his script prepared, and viewers around the world prepared themselves for more Phil heartbreak.

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. Whether or not that label is useful or deserved can still be debated, but even Phil himself would tell you that the correlation of 22 wins yet no major could not be explained by coincidence.

As we know, the putt falls, Phil passes through the looking glass, and the floodgates opened up. He wins the PGA Championship the following summer, another green jacket in 2006, a third in 2010, and an unlikely Claret Jug in 2013. 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 thought process applies to the other end of the spectrum as well. Phil won all of his majors after he turned 33. What sane person would have said, in 2008, that a 33-year-old Tiger Woods would be stuck on 14 majors at the age of 40? He was certainly on pace to be the greatest player of all time, and had already been anointed by many as the GOAT. There isn’t a single person who hasn’t had their perception of Woods’ career changed by what has unfolded over the last seven years.

This rush to rank players’ places in history during the middle of their careers is not unique to the golf world. LeBron James was barely able to legally buy a beverage before it was determined that he would never equal Michael Jordan’s greatness. Even now people will argue with me that Kobe Bryant is still currently a greater player because he has five rings to LeBron’s two. 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.

Jason Day had not even lifted the Wanamaker trophy in August when we were introduced to the new “Big 3” in golf. This is usually something I would ridicule, but I actually thought it was fair. Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy and Day had separated themselves in the world ranking from the rest of the pack.

Now comes January, typically a month defined by ambitious workout plans, new diets and pine trees by the curb. In this three-week-old year, we’ve already been blessed with wins by Spieth, Fowler and Jason Dufner. 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.

Where do we draw the line, and why?. If Dustin Johnson or Brooks Koepka win a couple times before April, is it a Big 5 or a Big 6? Sure, he’s not one of the “young guns,” but what if (God forbid) Bubba wins a third Masters in five years? 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. In five years, will it be Spieth and a bunch of high school studs we haven’t heard of yet?

We’re just using an arbitrary cutoff of “in their 20s” so we have a clean and packaged narrative to over hype, yet Day is closer in age to 31-year-old DJ than he is 22-year-old Spieth. No matter where we set up the barrier, it’s arbitrary, and ready to be moved a week later.

Generalizing a group of players and separating them from the rest of the pack makes the least amount of sense in a sport like golf. It’s not like the NBA where we can look at the Warriors, Cavs and Spurs and clearly see that they are the main title contenders. The sport is too random and stacked with too much talent to create these distinct classes -- not to mention, that also dilutes what makes a single win (like say, in Abu Dhabi in the first month of the year) so extraordinary. Every week in golf, the fields are enormous, and when Mike Weir isn’t getting an undeserved sponsor’s exemption, loaded with talent from top to bottom.

We seem fixated on the decimal points at the very top of the Official World Golf Rankings. The mathematical intricacies of this system also come with a statistical formula that make it possible for a player to move up in the rankings without even playing, which sends everyone into an uproar over the broken system. We want them to be a power rankings, but they just aren’t. The rankings aren’t there for us to help separate No. 1 from No. 2, but are to be used as a guide to help identify the larger group of players that we consider to be the top set in the world. What it does not do is help us truly define whether one player is better than another. It’s fun to compare players. This mini rant is not going to stop a single argument over résumés and records across any sport. But for the sake of active players, can we at least make an effort to just enjoy the greatness while it’s right in front of us? What’s the point in comparing Spieth and Rory right now? Why try to label a group as a Big 3 or a Big 4? When it’s over, we’ll have plenty of time to look back at their careers, and at that point, analyzing the picture would be appropriate and worthwhile.

For Fowler, it’s safe to say his career has been defined by lofty expectations and a perception that his talent level and accomplishments do not match his marketing popularity and star power. We speculate in golf because it’s way more interesting and imaginative to talk about what might happen in the future than it is to talk about concrete things that have happened in the past. But high expectations can also cause us to lose our perspective and our minds when the major championship trophies aren’t lifted soon enough.

Instead of being driven by meaningless January debates, just watch the excellence and unexpected turns unfold. This year has already been awesome and should be incredibly compelling. It’s true that, unless you’re this writer, chances are your takes on a player at a particular moment in time are not going to be remembered. You can be as critical as you want of Fowler, and then start being quiet when he starts winning majors. You can label this the era of the Big 4 and then change your mind if Patrick Reed wins the Masters.

It’s myopic and all too convenient to define and label an era while we’re still in it. 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. And the only way to allow the big picture to develop is to give it time.