If a loving parent cares equally for each of his or her children, the same cannot be said for Mother Golf and each of her majors.

The ugly stepchild, the Shamrock Meats Classic of the Grand Slam brood, the PGA Championship, starts today at Oakland Hills Country Club in Michigan, and will suffer further from the absence of golf's biggest star: You-Know-Who, out for the season after knee surgery following his victory at the U.S. Open.

Remember that?

Now there's a proud-and-proper major, the American national championship, the toughest test in golf. She fits nicely tucked in alongside that little ditty put on annually in April down at Augusta National: The Masters. And then, there's the Open, the one administered by the R&A, the oldest major of them all, first played in 1860.

That leaves us with what we've got here and now: the PGA Championship, the straggler of the bunch, or, as the PGA of America likes to call her: "Glory's Last Shot."

That sounds too desperate.

Like a motorist heading into Death Valley.

Last chance for gas, next right.

You'd think desperation would add to her legacy.

First played in 1916, the PGA Championship sports many of the elements that add up to a grand presence:

It's been played and played and played and played again on some of the great tracks in all of golf. That list includes this year's venue Oakland Hills, the revered course that Ben Hogan dubbed "the Monster." The championship has also been held at Southern Hills, Medinah, Baltusrol, Hazeltine National, Valhalla, Winged Foot, Cherry Hills, Oakmont, Pebble Beach, and Pinehurst, among others.

It's hatched great champions, from all different eras in golf, including Tiger Woods (four wins), Jack Nicklaus (five wins), Hogan, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, Phil Mickelson, Walter Hagen, Payne Stewart, Gene Sarazen, Raymond Floyd, Vijay Singh, and Lee Trevino.

Its prize money for the winner blasted past $1 million a long time ago, and the tournament is known to do things up right and to treat competitors ridiculously well.

It offers its winner a fine bit of hardware: the Wanamaker Trophy, which may not be the Stanley Cup, but it has a rich history of its own, including being partied with and then lost by Hagen, and finally found a few years later. Rich Beem, the 2002 champ, once said he intended to utilize his replica version of the trophy as a receptacle for his ashes, as "the biggest urn you have ever seen."

But there remains a kind of second-tier shroud, a humid melancholy that hangs over and around the championship. Maybe it's because the thing is played in August, after all the storm of the other majors has already sounded its thunder. Maybe it's because football is in everybody's sights, and the thrill of watching big-time golf has lost its allure. Maybe it's because the event has no strong identity with the public, always being thought of as the last of the majors, an image that seems just a club length ahead of so many of the weekly tournaments.

How do the pros view the PGA Championship in the hierarchy of the Biggies?

"[It's] the other one," Geoff Ogilvy says. "It's hard to stand out against those. That's some pretty good competition. But it doesn't make it any less."

Adds Steve Stricker: "It's a major, and it's one I'd love to win. It's always gotten a bad rap, but I still perceive it as one that's very important."

Nonetheless, when Golf.com recently listed six of the best shots in PGA Championship history, I could recall only one of them: Bob Tway's preposterous bunker shot on No. 18 at Inverness on the final day in 1986, a shot that won him the tournament and moved him to repeatedly hop up and down in the sand, like a 5-year-old with a Tonka truck in his hand.

I do recall that John Daly blew everybody away with his victory at Crooked Stick in 1991.

After that, it's mostly a blur.

And, short of a true anomaly now, it's hard to imagine that anything truly timeless will occur this week at the 90th PGA Championship. Especially since the two-time defending champ, the best player in the world, What's-His-Face, will be absent.

But we can always hope that Hogan's Monster will yield us something spectacular, something, anything, worth remembering in this year's Last Shot at golfing Glory, such as it is.

GORDON MONSON hosts "The Big Show" weekdays from 2-6 p.m. on 1280 AM The Zone. He can be reached at gmonson@sltrib.com.

PGA Championship

TV Schedule

Today: 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., TNT

Friday: 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., TNT

Saturday: 9-11 a.m., TNT; noon-5 p.m., Ch. 2

Sunday: 9-11 a.m., TNT; noon-5 p.m., Ch. 2