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The Golfer Who’s Earned $30 Million—Without Ever Winning
Tommy Fleetwood has been one of the world’s best players for nearly a decade. But he has somehow never won a single PGA Tour-sanctioned tournament.
There aren’t many golfers at Royal Portrush better suited to finish this week by hoisting the Claret Jug than Tommy Fleetwood.
He’s one of the top players in the world. He grew up honing his game on links courses around the U.K. And the last time the British Open came to this course in Northern Ireland, Fleetwood finished in second.
But in one respect, Fleetwood ending up on top of the leaderboard would count as a truly flabbergasting outcome. That’s because, despite being one of the game’s best players for nearly a decade, Fleetwood has somehow never won a single PGA Tour-sanctioned event.
He will rarely get a better opportunity to break that drought than at the British Open. Fleetwood has three top-10 finishes in his last five tries at this tournament, including that runner-up finish behind Irishman Shane Lowry at Royal Portrush in 2019. Whereas other golfers can drive themselves mad trying to master these windswept, seaside courses, he looks perfectly at home.
Yet until the 34-year-old actually wins, he’s an outlier unlike anyone else in the sport. And not in a way everyone dreams about. Fleetwood has earned far more prize money than anyone else without a victory, and there isn’t a player anywhere near as good as him who hasn’t won.
At No. 5 in Data Golf’s world rankings, he is the only player in the top-25 without a PGA Tour win.
With 160 starts, Fleetwood is now intimately familiar with coming awfully close—and not quite ending up on top.
“Search goes on, I guess,” Fleetwood said after losing the Travelers Championship on the final hole last month. “When it happens it will be very, very sweet.”
For most of Fleetwood’s career, winning was no problem. He racked up amateur titles, turned pro at 19 years old and quickly played his way onto the European Tour, where he won tournaments everywhere from Scotland to Abu Dhabi.
Once Fleetwood began playing across the Atlantic on the PGA Tour more regularly in 2017, though, that same success didn’t follow.
He was far from a failure, and actually played quite well. At the 2018 U.S. Open, he shot a 63 in the final round, one of the best showings in the tournament’s history, only to fall one stroke short of Brooks Koepka.
That soon became a theme for a player whose long, flowing hair earned him the nickname “Fairway Jesus.” Fleetwood could often get excruciatingly close before falling just short.
At this point, he has experienced defeat in all sorts of ways. At the 2023 Canadian Open, Fleetwood lost on the fourth playoff hole when his opponent rolled in an epic 72-foot putt for eagle. At last year’s Olympics, Fleetwood held the lead late on, until Scottie Scheffler carded six birdies on the back nine to beat him by a stroke.
The most painstaking of all those near misses might have been at last month’s Travelers. That’s when Fleetwood blew a late lead, capped by a three-putt for bogey on the 18th hole, where Keegan Bradley nailed a birdie to win it.
Fleetwood has earned $31.2 million in PGA Tour events, mostly thanks to 42 top-10 finishes.
What makes his difficulties particularly bizarre is that Fleetwood doesn’t have a reputation as someone who struggles to come through in the clutch. In fact, he has often shone brightest on golf’s biggest stages.
In three Ryder Cup appearances, Fleetwood has seven wins, three losses and two ties. That includes winning all four of his pairs matches in his 2018 debut, three of which came against Tiger Woods. He also secured the point that won the event for Team Europe in 2023.
“I’m quite relieved, I must say,” he said afterward.
But relief has proved stubbornly elusive on the PGA Tour, with his most recent win coming at the European Tour’s Dubai Invitational last January.
All those shortfalls haven’t stopped Fleetwood from profiting off his skills. He has earned $31.2 million in PGA Tour events, mostly thanks to 42 top-10 finishes. That also puts him in a league of his own: No player without a PGA Tour title is within $10 million of his earnings.
Fleetwood’s consistent level of play means plenty of people believe the British Open could be the place where he finally gets off the schneid. Only Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau and Xander Schauffele have shorter odds.
His inclusion in that group also underlines what an anomaly Fleetwood has become. Those five players have each won at least two majors and have combined for 74 wins on Tour.
Fleetwood, meanwhile, is still searching for his first.
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
