Best golf events in 2021: Phil Mickelson's PGA Championship triumph headlines top five tournaments this year

There are three majors on the list, but Lefty's win at Kiawah stands well above the rest

As the year winds down, it's an opportunity to reflect on what was a truly spectacular golf season. Better major finishes than normal unfold, and better major champions than can reasonably be expected emerge. And a whole slew of ridiculous tournaments, endings and outcomes that were completely beyond belie headline. 

Today is an attempt to sort out the five best tournaments of 2021. We've already looked at the five best and most important golfers, but now it's time to take a gander at the tournaments and -- unlike the players, which were not listed in any particular order -- rank them from 1-5. The easy (and perhaps lazy?) move here is to just throw the four majors and an additional tournament (the Players Championship, a playoff event or the Olympics) down and call it a day. But I think there's an opportunity to go a little beyond the importance of the four biggest events of the year.

To do this, we have to grade on a scale. The Masters is always going to be more important than, say, the Travelers Championship, but given the stakes, the field and the finish, the Travelers might actually be a better event relative to other Travelers events over the past several decades. So tournaments in here will mostly be held against their past iterations as we try and figure out what the five best of 2021 were. As for No. 1? Well, it's not even close.