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As long as I have been aware of major championship golf, fans and pundits alike have not quite known what to do with the PGA Championship. It comes and goes each year as the clear fourth-best of the four legs of the modern Grand Slam. Show me a rank-and-file golfer whose favorite major is the PGA and I'll show you a troll.
That's not to say the PGA hasn't supplied a healthy share of major championship drama over the years, but I don't always feel the same proxy-nerves from Thursday morning that I feel when watching the Masters, U.S. Open and Open Championship.
Each of those other majors has a distinct identity. The Masters has Augusta National and golf's most fully-realized pomp and circumstance. The Open Championship has the linksland and nearly 160 years of history. And the U.S. Open serves up, with rare exceptions, a brutal golf stress-test that keeps winning scores closer to even par than any other top-flight tournament.
The PGA has...winners dropping the Wanamaker Trophy's lid when hoisting it (Collin Morikawa, 2020; Scottie Scheffler, 2025).
Most years, the PGA Championship is either a junior-varsity U.S. Open or a slightly-souped-up regular tour event. Its host venues are a mixed bag of courses that could host (and sometimes have hosted) the U.S. Open or are more modern tests that have the infrastructure required for big crowds and hospitality buildouts but an uneven architectural pedigree.
The two most recent hosts have been a perfect example of this latter phenomenon. In 2024 Louisville's Valhalla Golf Club hosted the PGA Championship for the fourth and likely last time (The PGA of America sold it in 2022). Xander Schauffele's win at 21 under par bumped the course's average winning score down to a meek 16.5 under par across its 29-year tenure. Valhalla had some fun moments - e.g. Tiger's point-putt in 2000 - but seldom accounted for itself in the face of golf's best.
And while Quail Hollow Club's 2025 turn as host was beset by bad luck in the form of four inches of fairway-softening pre-tournament rains, its familiarity to fans and players as a stalwart member of the regular PGA Tour schedule made it largely indistinguishable as a major championship host this time around. From the outset on Thursday, when multiple poor shots around the course's watery closing stretch hung up in too-long rough rather than finding the drink, it was clear that the course setup did not have the teeth a major championship should bare until Sunday, when the greens firmed up and most of the final groups struggled.
In the end, Quail Hollow did a better job of testing the players than Valhalla did, but the course's PGA Tour status didn't help the 2025 PGA Championship feel as different as it should have.
Two dreadful shots by Koepka - dead pull off the tee on 14, dead pull from fairway on 16 - harmlessly stay out of the water.
— Tim Gavrich (@TimGavrich) May 15, 2025
Insufficient punishment for poor execution. Not a proper major championship test.
Although it still lacks consistency, the PGA Championship's slate of future sites offers some intrigue. It is a hodgepodge of Golden-Age classics like Aronimink (2026), Olympic Club (2028) Baltusrol (2029) and modern beasts like PGA Frisco (2027, 2034) and Kiawah Island's Ocean Course (2031). Importantly, none of the future venues are already main-line PGA Tour courses.
But there are still concerns. The tournament's May date makes Aronimink and Baltusrol vulnerable to spring cold snaps that could compromise their effectiveness as venues, as was the case with Oak Hill near Rochester, N.Y. in 2023 (rain and cold). These courses would have matched the PGA's former August date much better.
Given the PGA of America's new HQ north of Dallas, Frisco is as self-serving a venue choice as Valhalla used to be, but the Gil Hanse-designed Fields Ranch East course should be an interesting host (though the par-5 18th hole is one of the most awkward holes I have played in recent years).
A slight improvement in future venues does little to infuse the PGA Championship with a long-yearned-for sense of uniqueness, though. So here are three ideas that might punch it up.
Go international (sometimes)
This is far from a new suggestion, but it has gone nowhere despite the obvious merits of bringing major-championship golf somewhere other than the U.S. more than once a year. Golf-interested cities in Australia, Asia, Africa, South America and even continental Europe would turn out in big numbers to support such a venture. Even if the PGA roamed the world once every four or five years, it would generate massive goodwill.
Go public
The PGA of America loves to tout the thousands of professionals who comprise its membership. But there is a disconnect between the fact that the vast majority of golf courses are public and the fact that the vast majority of major hosts are private. What if the PGA Championship cultivated a rota entirely of publicly-accessible venues? Bethpage and TPC Harding Park mixed with big-time resorts like Kiawah would showcase the breadth of public golf from everyman munis to bucket-list destinations. The major schedule's private-heavy bent tacitly implies that public golf is inferior; guaranteeing that at least one of the three American majors would take place at a public course each year would make a strong statement for an organization that bangs the "Grow the Game" gong constantly.
Go back in time
From its 1916 inception until 1957, the PGA was a match-play event with a bracket resembling a tennis grand-slam event: in its later iteration, 128 players playing single-elimination matches, with everything past the fourth round being 36-hole bouts. The loss of match play from the PGA Tour schedule is an abomination, and the PGA of America's true crown-jewel event - the Ryder Cup - is great because it is a match-play event. I know that tournament organizers worry about lesser-knowns ending up at the finals, but there are ways to mitigate that potential randomness; giving better-ranked players a 1-up advantage to start a match, for example. Or take a leaf out of tennis' book and extend the PGA to a two-week extravaganza with rigorous stroke-play qualifying the first week followed by match play the second.
Comments (5)
I like the match play idea, that would make it very interesting! And I think if you couple that with the other two ideas, play on public only courses with every fourth or fifth year play in another country.
Move the PGA back to August so the heat is a factor. Put the Players back in May so we have majors from April (the Players is the fifth major, we all know that) through August. I want to see the Wanamaker winner holding the trophy handles wrapped in towels again! It's ridiculous that our major season is over in mid-July.
Greed.....when you return to a weak, mediocre layout that you own (no longer) like Valhalla four times in 30 or so years, then don't be surprised when you don't fool anyone with your 20-under result.
To me The Players Championship is more of a major than The PGA.
The PGA is by far the weakest of the 4 majors. They need to play some different courses, like ones that have never hosted a tournament let alone a major. The players are too familiar with so many of these courses. It makes it boring to watch cause they know exactly where to hit it on every shot and the PGA tends to be the least punishing of the majors. Don't allow practice rounds during the week. Thursday should be the first time the players ever set foot on the course. I want the players uncomfortable. That's what makes the US Open so much better.