‘The kind of thing you dream about:’ PGA Championship will return to Charlotte in 2025
Charlotte has landed the second golf major in the city’s history, as the PGA of America announced Thursday that Quail Hollow Club will host the 2025 PGA Championship.
Charlotte hosted the same tournament on the same course in 2017. Quail Hollow Club president Johnny Harris has been trying to get the PGA Championship to come back ever since.
“We’re really excited about this,” Harris, a longtime Charlotte real-estate developer, said in an interview with The Observer. “We need some positive news in the sports world. And for us, this is the kind of thing you dream about.”
The 2025 PGA Championship will be one of the largest sporting events that Charlotte has ever hosted. It is expected to draw close to a quarter-million fans over a week of tournament play and practice rounds, and those fans will inject millions into the local economy.
The PGA Championship ranks as one of golf’s four major championships. Its return to Charlotte — in mid-May 2025 — will be a welcome one for the city, as well as for the club that saw its annual pro tournament on this year’s golf calendar get wiped out due to COVID-19. The coronavirus canceled the 2020 Wells Fargo Championship, which had been scheduled at Quail Hollow for April 27-May 3.
“That was disappointing, but totally understandable,” Harris said. “There was no real way to consider moving or rescheduling the 2020 tournament. Just inopportune timing.”
The PGA Championship’s return to Charlotte means that Quail Hollow Club will host a top golf event in each of the next five years.
From Sept. 27-Oct. 3, 2021, the Charlotte club will host the Presidents Cup — an international match-play event that has never been played in the southeastern U.S. before. The Presidents Cup is held every other year and pits a team from the United States against a team of non-European international players.
In 2022-24, the club will host the Wells Fargo Championship in the late April/early May time frame as usual (the Wells Fargo Championship will be played in Washington, D.C., for 2021 only, to make room for the Presidents Cup).
And then, in 2025, the PGA Championship comes back to the Queen City. The championship traditionally boasts the strongest field in golf every year. While a Wells Fargo Championship field would consider itself fortunate to have 60 percent of the top 20 players in the world enter, the PGA Championship would likely get all 20 of those players. Top players hardly ever skip a major.
“The one thing that was obvious to us very quickly in 2017, the first time we hosted the PGA Championship, was that the PGA and its team does things on a different scale,” Harris said. “It’s just different. A lot more fans. A lot more media. A lot more everything. We will have made a lot of significant improvements to our facility between 2017 and 2025, so we’ll be ready.”
In 2017, the PGA Championship’s total estimated economic impact on the Charlotte region was around $100 million, according to the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority.
The 2017 PGA Championship in Charlotte was won by Justin Thomas, a 24-year-old American who held off the field by two shots to win his first major. The PGA Championship that year was played in August, but it has since been bumped up to May on the golf calendar. Harris said the 2025 tournament is tentatively scheduled for the third week of May, although the PGA did not announce a date.
The Carolinas are speckled with great golf courses, and two other majors are scheduled in North or South Carolina before the PGA Championship returns to Charlotte. The 2021 PGA Championship will be played in Kiawah Island, S.C., and the U.S. Open returns in 2024 to Pinehurst.
When the PGA Championship is played in 2025, Quail Hollow will become the first golf course in North Carolina to host multiple PGA Championships. Harris also revealed that the original contract for the 2017 PGA Championship contained some language that made the tournament very likely to return at some point as long as certain benchmarks were met.
“We’ve always wanted to have the type of golf course that could attract a major,” Harris said. “So to get the PGA back — we’re just so pleased about it, and it will be very good for the city of Charlotte, too.”
This story was originally published May 14, 2020 at 8:15 AM.
