5 ways the PGA Championship could be improved
It’s that time of the year again, whether it is May or August, when we debate what is wrong with the PGA Championship. It is significantly more exciting than pretty much any other week on tour, whisper it gently bar The Players, but where it will always fall short is that it is a distant fourth of the four.
The Masters can’t be touched for its spring-time charm and beauty, the US Open is generally a brute at some of the greatest layouts on the planet and then we have The Open, the oldest and for many of us the best week of the year – links golf in July, what could be better?
So let’s look at how things might change and what seems to be set in stone.
The courses
We get why we go to these PGA favourites but so few really get the juices flowing. Below is where this Major will be heading in the future and where those courses are ranked on the Top 100 Courses website. Not one is inside the top 25 courses in the country and yet it expects the watching world to get overly excited about the best players in the world tackling its showpiece event.
Courses are pretty much everything, look at when the US Open sparkles and how The Open is consistently outstanding, but the PGA is often very forgettable and samey to all the other weeks.
Aronimink –
PGA Frisco –
Olympic Club 73
Baltusrol 44
Congressional 91
Kiawah Island 45
Southern Hills 53
Bethpage Black 28
The American dominance
We are forever hearing about how heavily led this Championship is, in terms of the field, venues and also the winners. We have to go back to 2015 and Jason Day for the last time a non-American prevailed here. Before that it was a very international winners’ board but recent times has been a succession of US thoroughbreds.
The real thriller came in 2021 when Phil Mickelson was victorious at Kiawah at nearly 51 years of ago. A great champion on a great course, more of that would help.
The Tiger effect (or lack of it)
This really should have helped to elevate it to new levels but there remains a lack of identity. Woods won the PGA four times, perfect for the PGA to lean into but most watchers couldn’t name the years or venues like his other Majors.
Sergio Garcia got plenty of headlines for his efforts at Medianh in 1999 but then it all gets a bit blurred with Bob May, Shaun Micheel and Woody Austin being his nearest challengers in the others. The May win at Valhalla was spectacular but imagine how well we’d remember every last drop of it if it was at Augusta. All a bit simplistic but you get my drift.
Just take it overseas
We know where we’re going every year up to 2035 and none of them are called Royal Melbourne. This is such a lovely notion and so much more appealing than anywhere else in the world – the fans would get behind it, we’d see the perfect stage and ideally it would be just the start of moving it around the sand-belt courses.
Let’s say this does happen, somehow (it won’t). Do we extend the Major season to November? That would bridge the ludicrous gap between the Open in July and April at Augusta but there’s generally not a lot of golf played in the States in October that isn’t relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of things. We’re generally readying ourselves for the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas and some pairs action, not gearing up for ‘Glory’s Last Shot’.
Don’t get me wrong, many of us would be very up for a complete re-jig of things but it’s almost unthinkable to picture a Major rotating around the globe.
A change of format
Likewise moving it back to a matchplay style is nonsensical. There is a rose-tinted feel about the WGC Match Play but even that didn’t last. In such busy calendars where are the matchplay events? Nowhere. In short, it doesn’t work for TV with too much left to chance.
If we had the traditional 64 players and a Wednesday start, is that nearly enough? Surely we’d need to reward 128 players and that would mean getting things going on Tuesday and then how do you rank the players?
Again, it’s a lovely thought but it’s just that. As things stand 20 PGA pros get an invite, which always makes it almost impossible to compare it to the other three Majors, so how you would shoehorn them into a knockout format is anybody’s guess.
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