PGA Championship

PGA Championship, one of the world’s four major golf tournaments (along with the Masters Tournament, the U.S. Open, and the British Open [officially the Open Championship]). Run by the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA of America), it is a major media event played on a different American course each year and routinely features the best players in the world. It has been held, with some exceptions, each year since 1916. In addition to sizable prize money, the winner of the tournament receives a lifetime invitation to participate in all future PGA Championships, five-year allowances for participation in the three other major tournaments, and points toward the PGA Player of the Year Award and toward the next Ryder Cup team. (Read Britannica’s biography of Padraig Harrington, author of this entry.)

(For past winners, see our table.)

History and notable moments

The PGA Championship was the brainchild of merchandising magnate Rodman Wanamaker. At a luncheon at the Taplow Club in New York City on January 17, 1916, before 35 enthusiasts including legendary golfers Walter Hagen and Francis Ouimet along with golf course designer A.W. Tillinghast, Wanamaker aired his vision of what golfing could be. The following month the PGA of America was formed.

The new association, believing that it needed a signature annual event, launched the PGA Championship later the same year. The first event was not the 72-hole stroke-play competition that the PGA Championship is today but instead a 36-hole elimination match-play tournament. Held at Siwanoy Country Club in Bronxville, New York, the inaugural event featured an Englishman, James Barnes, and a Scot, Jock Hutchison, battling it out in the final round. For his victory, Barnes won $500, the Wanamaker Trophy (given to all subsequent winners of the tournament), and a diamond-studded medal contributed by Wanamaker, who was also a master jeweler, collector, and designer. The nascent tournament was then postponed for two years as a result of World War I, whereupon Barnes returned as reigning champion and won the tournament again in 1919.

Several tournament records were set in the 1920s. In 1922, 20-year-old Gene Sarazen became the youngest golfer to win the championship, and his defense of his title the following year, in which he defeated Hagen in a play-off on the 38th hole, is considered one of the classic matches in tournament history. When Sarazen played in the 1972 PGA Championship, he also became the oldest golfer ever to play the tournament. Hagen’s play in the 1920s, however, eclipsed all others and included four straight championships from 1924 through 1927.

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The PGA Championship shifted from being a fall event to being a summer one in the 1930s and then adopted the 72-hole stroke-play format in 1958. In the 1960s Arnold Palmer established himself as the finest golfer never to win this coveted tournament, the only one of the four majors to elude him. Jack Nicklaus, on the other hand, won the tournament five times between 1963 and 1980 and finished in the top five a record 14 times. Tiger Woods’s series of PGA championships began in 1999, when he, then 23 years old, became the fifth youngest champion in history. He repeated as champion in 2000 and again amassed back-to-back championships in 2006 and 2007.