Nice guys finish last, according to former Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, but when it comes to golf's major championships this year, nothing could be further from the truth.

After Adam Scott's welcome victory in the US Masters, it was hard to imagine a more popular winner could be possible, a winner who had also shared the Australian's experience of the highs and lows of professional sport at the highest level. Yet just two months later, Scott's good friend and fellow 32-year-old Justin Rose – they were born 14 days apart – joined him as a first-time major champion with victory in the US Open at Merion.

Scott's lowest point had come just nine months before his success at Augusta when he had a four-shot lead with four holes to play in the Open Championship at Lytham, bogeyed them all and lost to Ernie Els' closing birdie.

Rose's lowest point had come 14 years earlier, when he turned professional the day after finishing fourth in the 1998 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale as a 17-year-old amateur – then missed the cut in his first 21 tournaments in the paid ranks.

Something of a child prodigy, Rose had broken 70 for the first time as an 11-year-old and got his handicap down to +3 by the age of 14, while he represented Great Britain & Ireland in the Walker Cup, aged 17.

A future in the game was seemingly inevitable, but events at Birkdale thrust Rose into the spotlight before he was ready. The world's press followed him from the Open to the Dutch Open and watched him shoot rounds of 77 and 65 to miss the first of those fateful cuts by just one shot.

"At times, it feels 25 years since Birkdale and other times it feels as if it was just yesterday," Rose said after his two-shot win at Merion. "My learning curve was steep from that point. I sort of announced myself on the golfing scene probably before I was ready to handle it, and golf can be a cruel game. I have had the ups and down, but I think that ultimately it's made me stronger.

"When I was missing 21 cuts in a row, I was just trying to not fade away. I just didn't want to be known as a one-hit wonder, a flash in the pan. I believed in myself inherently, deep down I always knew that I had a talent to play the game.

"I simply thought that if I put talent and hard work together, it would work out in the end. The other thing that I was able to do during that time was not beat myself further and further into the ground.If I missed a cut by five shots one week and I missed it by two the next week, I would tell myself that I was getting better."

Instead of bemoaning his fate, Rose knuckled down and after three visits to the European Tour's qualifying school – the last two of them successful – he began to find his feet. In 2002, he won his first event in his native Johannesburg and added the British Masters in June, but those highs were followed by another crushing low in September when his father Ken, a massive influence on his career, died following a long battle with leukaemia.

"I was 21 when he passed away and I always think about it as the time together we had was quality not quantity," Rose reflected. "I would rather have had 21 fantastic years with my dad than 40 years of a relationship that was so-so.

"I have very fond memories of the way I grew up. My dad and I were lucky enough to spend a lot of quality time together learning to play the game, after school on the driving range, so I can look back fondly on our life together."

Five years later, Rose was one shot behind eventual winner Zach Johnson in the final round of the US Masters only to double-bogey the 17th, but had the consolation of two wins in Europe, including the final event of the season in a play-off, to top the order of merit,

Another five years on came the most significant win of his career to that point, the WGC Cadillac Championship at Doral in March 2012, while later that year – 14 years after Birkdale – he secured his best finish in a major with a share of third in the US PGA Championship.

"Majors are a step up for me now," Rose said after his third round at Merion. "I've been lucky enough to win quality PGA Tour events and lucky enough to win a WGC event. So the trend for me is into the majors now."

How right he was, and how right his father was, too.

"My dad always believed that I was capable of this," he said. "He also did say when he was close to passing away, he told my mum, 'Don't worry, Justin will be okay. He'll know what to do.' He believed in me to be my own man and I took a lot of confidence from that."