Sunday's victory has lifted him to third place, behind Tiger Woods, whose pre-eminence is unchallengeable, and Phil Mickelson, who will not easily be overhauled for second place.
But it is getting harder to convince his colleagues of that and the same goes for someone like Nicklaus, whose pre-eminence in the sport was once all but unrivaled.
In many ways Lawrence Dallaglio and co had to work even harder for their reward than in the previous Sunday's Heineken Cup final in a rugged game of basic instincts which proved two things: that Wasps are every bit as tough to beat as the great Leicester teams whose pre-eminence they now threaten and that Bath need a dash more subtlety before they can regain their old "best in show" status.
Thus, at the start of the Peloponnesian War, Athens found itself in the awkward position of entrusting its future to a leader whose pre-eminence had just been seriously shaken for the first time in over a decade.
Adam Gillen is the prodigiously talented but charmless Mozart whose arrival threatens the pre-eminence of court composer Salieri (a compelling Lucian Msamati).
The pre-eminence of sound systems, at the expense of steel bands - whose involvement peaks at the Panorama competition two nights before Carnival begins - is a symptom of this event's sometimes painful evolution from home-spun fête to international post-modern extravaganza.
These are names forever linked in the history of the game, the little masters whose towering presence was never more apparent than in Sunday's epic restatement of Spain's international pre-eminence.
Al Davis, the irascible owner of the Oakland Raiders whose feuds with the National Football League reshaped professional football over the last half century and helped spur its rise to pre-eminence in the landscape of American sports, died Saturday morning.
Now on the fringes of Barcelona's first team, Thiago brings vital freshness to a side whose stars have played with barely a summer break for three years because of Spain's world pre-eminence.
Of Knopf's pre-eminence in this rarefied world, the poet Edward Hirsch, who began his publishing life with Knopf in 1981 and whose awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, said: "It's the overall quality of the house, and it's the quality of the list itself.
Their pre-eminence has faded.
