6 Biggest Chokes at Golf's Major Championships

It’s becoming a sad trend in golf. Front-runners at majors lately tend to wilt like a lawn in Scottsdale in summertime. Here's a rundown of some of the more shocking collapses in recent major championship history.

This one is still fresh on our minds: Adam Scott bogeys the final four holes at Royal Lytham to hand the Claret Jug to Ernie Els. By the time of his last putt, he was leaking more oil than the Deepwater Horizon.

Only in hindsight does Duf's collapse at the 2011 PGA — he bogeyed three of his final four holes to lose a five-shot lead, and then lost to Keegan Bradley in a playoff — become shocking, given how solidly Dufner has played since. To his credit, he's rebounded nicely, but major collapses don't come much more painful than this one.

Tiger Woods was the Mariano Rivera of majors. Give him a 54-hole lead, and it was Enter Sandman — until Y.E. Yang came along. In retrospect, this was the first sign of trouble for Tiger, as his final-round 75 allowed Yang to snatch away the 2009 PGA. A little more than three months later, Woods was crashing into a fire hydrant, and the unraveling had truly begun.

Two collapses for the price of one. Mickelson famously called himself an idiot after the most epic blunder of his star-crossed career — a triple bogey at the 72nd hole  at Winged Foot that denied him his first U.S. Open title. But at least Lefty had a couple majors in his pocket with which to console himself. Montgomerie had a 7-iron in his hands in the fairway on 18 needing only a par to win his first major, but chose that moment to hit one of the worst shots of his life, ultimately making double-bogey to lose by 1.

This Frenchman didn't surrender, but he sure shot himself in the foot. As the 1999 Open Championship drew to a close, Van de Velde's name was already being etched into the Claret Jug. But that engraver didn't know who he was dealing with. Van de Velde needed only a double-bogey on the 72nd hole at Carnoustie to clinch the British Open, but 10 minutes of mayhem produced a triple-bogey 7, leaving him in a four-hole playoff that he would lose to Paul Lawrie. Van de Velde would never sniff another major.

The grandaddy of them all. Norman held a six-shot lead over Nick Faldo entering the final round of the 1996 Masters, but a final-round 78 left him five shots behind Faldo, who shot 67. It was a day-long, slow-motion car crash, but we couldn't look away. This one's narrated in Japanese, which might help dull some of the pain. But the images remain.