Winning streaks — illustrious and quirky — defined professional golf for the best male and female players in 2024. They came amid pressure on the business models of both the men’s and women’s professional tours.

The PGA Tour continues to struggle with how it’s going to make its tournaments more attractive to sponsors (who are asked to pay more in prize money) and fans who have been tuning out the weekly tournaments. It’s been over two years since its first star players joined LIV Golf and a year since the PGA Tour and its commissioner, Jay Monahan, announced a tentative agreement with LIV to coexist, and the PGA Tour still hasn’t worked out a way to unify the men’s game.

For the L.P.G.A. Tour, prize money has continued to rise, but the tour itself continues to struggle to get attention for its roster of top-flight players.

Nelly Korda, the No. 1 ranked women’s golfer, began the year by winning five straight tournaments. She tied the L.P.G.A. record, held by Annika Sorenstam and Nancy Lopez.

“If I’m being honest, I have not thought about it at all,” Korda said in a press conference after the fifth consecutive victory.

Her streak was broken the next month when she lost to Rose Zhang, a young star player. But Korda went out the next week and added her sixth victory in eight starts. (She added one more tournament win at The Annika at the end of the season.)

The season’s other highlight was Lydia Ko extending one streak and snapping another that had been full of frustration. At the Olympic Games in Paris, she added a gold medal to the silver and bronze medals she had won at the two previous Olympics. That win gave her the 27 points she needed to enter the L.P.G.A. Hall of Fame, a needed win that had been eluding her for a year.

On the men’s side, the PGA Tour rolled out a new structure at the start of the year, which created events with smaller field sizes. The eight tournaments were called the Signature Events and limited to from 70 to 80 players, or roughly half the size of a regular PGA Tour tournament.

Getting more of the top players to compete against each other outside of the four major championships was part of a strategy to increase fan excitement while giving the top players, who are independent contractors, reason to all play in the same events more often.

The PGA Tour season got off to a less-than-exciting start in January. The first event, the Sentry at Kapalua in Maui, Hawaii, was won by Chris Kirk, who has a feel-good comeback story, though he is not a household name. The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the second Signature tournament, was shortened to three days by severe weather, with the winner being notified on Sunday when the final round was canceled.

But then in March, the No. 1 player in the world, Scottie Scheffler, notched an impressive series of wins that jolted the golf world back into relevance. Scheffler won four of the remaining five Signature events. He also won the Masters Tournament and the Players Championship, each for the second time, and the season-ending Tour Championship.

At the Paris Olympics, Scheffler came from behind in the final round to shoot a 9-under par 62 to win the gold medal. After the medal ceremony, he said, “I’m just out here competing and trying to stay present, and working as hard as I can and trying to get the most out of myself.”

Yet the most talked-about round of Scheffler’s year was the second round at the P.G.A. Championship at Valhalla in Louisville, Ky. He shot a five-under 66 to put himself in the top five heading into the weekend.

That round came after he was arrested on his way to the golf course. A security guard had been killed in a traffic incident earlier in the morning, and in the confusion of the traffic jam into the club, a police officer said Scheffler disobeyed his commands. While the charges against Scheffler were eventually dropped, he said that he started stretching for his round in his jail cell and only made his tee time because the start of the second round had been pushed back.

“At the time, I couldn’t even remember what my original tee time was,” he said after the second round. “I was just trying to do my best to stay calm.”

Scheffler finished the season as the first player since Tiger Woods in 2007 to win more than seven times in a season on the PGA Tour.

He didn’t win the P.G.A. Championship. That title went to Xander Schauffele, who had won seven previous tournaments, but had yet to win a major until this year. He beat Bryson DeChambeau by one shot, with a clutch putt on the final hole.

Schauffele followed up his first major at Valhalla with a second major victory in the British Open at Royal Troon in Scotland. That vaulted him up the golf rankings to No. 2, behind Scheffler.

“It’s a dream come true to win two majors in one year,” Schauffele said right after winning the Open. “It took me forever just to win one, and to have two now is something else.”

Sandwiched between his two major victories was the U.S. Open, played at Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina. It terms of excitement it may have ranked the highest of the four.

The final round pitted Rory McIlroy against DeChambeau, who had moved to LIV in 2022. McIlroy is a four-time major champion, but has not won one in a decade. DeChambeau had won the tournament in 2020.

Overlaying the battle on the course was the role the two golfers had played in the PGA Tour versus LIV rivalry. McIlroy had been one of the most vocal supporters of the PGA Tour and critics of players who had gone to LIV, until he took a step back this year for personal reasons. DeChambeau, on the other hand, stood out as one of the few LIV players to continue to play well in majors.

On the final day, the two players faltered and rebounded on the back nine. Both missed crucial putts and hit wild shots under pressure. In the end, DeChambeau hit a bunker shot on the 18th hole to set up a putt to win the Open. He rolled it in, and later, with the trophy in hand, ran around the 18th hole so fans could touch it.

It was an uncharacteristic move for a major champion, but one befitting DeChambeau who this year morphed from an eccentric, overly technical golfer to a showman and social media star.

His YouTube content, which featured two unlikely and quirky series, has made him a sports star to young fans who might not otherwise watch golf.

In his first series, he teamed up with top athletes from golf and other sports, as well as other celebrities, including the seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady and then-candidate Donald J. Trump, to try to break 50 — or shoot 23 under par — in a scramble format.

Toward the end of the year, DeChambeau began a second series in which he tried to make a hole in one by hitting a ball over his house and onto the putting green in his backyard. He got one ball for each day. After 134 attempts, he made it on day 16, by which point he had inspired legions of imitators.

The lift DeChambeau got from YouTube focused more attention on the PGA Tour’s declining ratings. From 2023 to 2024, the Sunday telecast of the final round of the PGA’s tournaments dropped almost 20 percent, to 2.2 million viewers from 2.7 million.

The bright spot of the year? The star players on both tours and the major tournaments, which drew and held fan attention.