First off, please be advised that this edition of Grant Me This has been officially designated a "Major Column." The final decision to render it so, like all the preliminary adjudications, came down to a number of key and complex determinants, which can be summarily described thusly: "Cuz I said so."

I took my lead from some of golf's governing bodies, who at various points through the years have stamped such labels on this tournament or that with the same meticulous consideration Harry and Lloyd used to keep track of how much money they'd borrowed out of Mary's briefcase. Tours are standing outside the Hotel Danbury in their ski goggles and furry boots gratuitously papering a parade of tournament directors with "Major" status, "There you go. There you go. There you go."

I'm not sure which is Dumb and which is Dumber: that a tour would suddenly prop up a particular tournament as a major championship or that they'd expect us as golf fans to treat those events with any semblance of gravitas. Just since the turn of the century, both the Champions and LPGA Tours have attempted to turn tournaments -- the Senior British Open presented by Aberdeen Asset Management and the Ricoh Women's British Open -- into majors, simply by issuing a press release to that effect. It's worked in name only.

You can't just run off copies of major championships and expect them to count like the original. Even if your title sponsor is Ricoh.

August alone is lousy with majors, some lousier than others. The PGA Championship, which begins Thursday at Oakland Hills outside Detroit, is one of two putatively prestigious events this week -- the other is the Champions Tour's JELD-WEN Tradition -- and one of four (along with the U.S. Senior and Women's British Opens) to conclude in a span of seven days. But it's the only one with the chops to handle that handle, as the truckers say. The PGA turns 90 this week, which is eight years older than the other three combined. Got your ears on, tour commissioners?

The LPGA has called no less than seven tournaments "Majors" through the years. Its current lineup consists of the Kraft Nabisco Championship (nee Dinah Shore), McDonald's LPGA Championship, U.S. Women's Open, and the aforementioned Women's British, an event previously sponsored by Weetabix. Nothing connotes significance quite like breakfast cereal. ("It's a major! No, it's breakfast! You're both wrong. It's a major championship and a breakfast cereal!") In 2001, with the old du Maurier in Canada increasingly wobbly in its sponsorship and finances, the LPGA yanked its "Major" label and slapped it on the Women's British. Makes perfect sense. After all, the men's Open Championship is a major. Except that one predates the American Civil War. The women's version barely predates the Carter Administration. It's not the specific tournament the LPGA chose that's the problem; it's the fact that they would think simply calling a championship a major actually makes it one.

The Champions Tour is worse. For one thing, they have five "Majors." That's more than one-sixth of the tournaments on the schedule. Some need to be stripped of that ranking, beginning with the three which have presenting or title sponsors. Generally speaking, the shorter the name of the tournament, the more prestigious it is. For example, the Masters. That's it. Not the Masters presented by Krispy Kreme. The two most important events for players age 50 and over are the Senior PGA Championship (founded in 1937) and the U.S. Senior Open (1980). You can call them majors. I'm giving the others an honorable discharge.

The reason the PGA Championship has earned its stripes -- like its pureblood Grand Slam siblings Masters, U.S. Open, and Open Championship -- is precisely because it didn't self-congratulate itself. There was no press conference by golf's grand poobahs announcing those four events would carry special significance. Those championships earned "Major" status using the same equation that this week made the 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card the most expensive cardboard rectangle on the planet:

Time + Media Buzz + How Badly Someone Wants It + Stick of Gum

Okay, it's a little different. But chew on this: the value of anything is often proportionate to the lengths to which someone will go to attain it. Arkansas card collector John Rogers was willing to go as far as $1.62 million for the Honus Wagner card. (John, I'll take half that for my misspelled "Fernand" Valenzuela and a 1973 Willie Mays complete with a series of random hole punches so my brother Wade could never claim it's his. I await your reply.)

Bobby Jones valued the U.S. and British Opens and Amateurs -- the oldest events in golf, even then -- above all other championships and set out to win all four in the same year, which he did in 1930. That pursuit and achievement were awe-inspiring enough, but the legend grew because O.B. Keeler so eloquently dubbed Jones' feat as "having stormed the impregnable quadrilateral." Of course, most people didn't have Keeler's I.Q. so his moniker of those same initials didn't really stick. But the idea of winning four big events in the same year did.

Which is why Arnold Palmer -- whose first "Major" victory was at Jones' Masters in 1958 -- is reputed to have said sometime around 1960 that the modern I.Q. should be the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA Championship. By then, time had allowed those events to calcify in their significance. In 1960, the British Open turned 100. The U.S. Open began in 1895; the PGA in 1916; and even the baby of the group, the Masters, had been around a quarter century. (Plus Palmer must have given special dispensation to the Augusta "tunamint" seeing as how its co-creator Jones, via Keeler, immortalized the notion of trying to win four big events in a single season.)

At that point, it was far more reasonable, not to mention easier to say and spell, for a baseball-crazed nation to latch on to "Grand Slam," a term from Wagner's world, the Major Leagues. But those guys got it right. They borrowed the term because it fit the number of major events -- four runs score on a grand slam, four major tournaments -- as opposed to adopting the idea, then scrounging up four tournaments you think will fit the bill.

So as you watch the PGA Championship this week, what say we all tap the brakes when it comes to what our Commander-in-Chief might call the majorification of tournament golf? As brake pads salesman Tommy Boy Callahan told the parts dealer, what's on the label doesn't really matter. "A guy puts a fancy guarantee on a box 'cause he wants you to feel all warm and toasty inside. You figure you put that little box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come down and leave you a quarter. The point is, how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn't a crazy glue sniffer? 'Building model airplanes' says the little fairy. Well, we're not buying it."

Atta Boy, Tommy. Neither are we.