Golf legend Jack Nicklaus believes a number of players will have an opportunity to win the year's final major when the USPGA Championship tees off at Oak Hill on Thursday.

The 18-time major winner added that he expects one of the established names to triumph, however, with the likes of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson his favourites to win where he won by seven shots in 1980.

Recent history seems to back up his claims as well.

Since Darren Clarke and Keegan Bradley won the Open and PGA Championship ranked 111 and 108 respectively, Ernie Els was the lowest-ranked player to win a major championship when he won the Open in 2012 as the world's 40th-best player.

All three major winners so far this year have been established players - Adam Scott won the Masters as world number seven, Justin Rose become US Open champion as the world number five. Phil Mickelson was also the world number five when he won the Open at Muirfield last month.

"The player has to suit his game to the golf course and the guys that can adapt to it are the guys that always have been the good players," Nicklaus said.

"I mean, Mickelson will adapt well to it. Tiger will adapt well to it. I think there's a lot of guys that will adapt well to it. You have so many good players today that I think will like Oak Hill, will enjoy playing the golf course and could have an opportunity to win. To try to pick one of them out of there is pretty difficult right now.

"The British Open, you can eliminate a lot of guys because of conditions. The US Open you have the same thing and the Masters the same thing. But I think more people, because of the summer conditions and the nature of what happened with the PGA Championship, it opens it up to more people having an opportunity to win.

So I think the PGA is a pretty open ball game right now.'

"Obviously Tiger has had a very, very good year,'' Nicklaus added.

"He's not finished off a couple majors he's had an opportunity to be involved in (but) you would be pretty hard pressed not to make him, if not the favourite, one of the favourites going into Oak Hill.''

Golf 365