US PGA CHAMPIONSHIP
Mid May · A Different Course Each Year · Four Days · Since 1916
The PGA Championship is the second of golf’s four majors each year: four days in the middle of May, on a different American course each time.
It belongs to the club professionals. The PGA of America, which runs it, is the association of the men and women who teach the game and keep the pro shops, and twenty of them play in it every year beside the best players in the world.
The Department Store
Rodman Wanamaker, heir to a Philadelphia department store, brought the professional golfers of the day together in New York in 1916. Out of that meeting came the PGA of America, and that October the first championship, at Siwanoy in Bronxville, won by Jim Barnes.
Wanamaker put up two and a half thousand dollars for the prizes, and a silver cup that still carries his name.
It was played at match play until 1957. Television wanted a crowd of known names on the last day, and stroke play gave it one.
In 2019 it moved from August to May, and became the second major of the year rather than the last.
Walter Hagen and Jack Nicklaus won it five times each. In 2026, at Aronimink, Aaron Rai became the first Englishman to win it since Jim Barnes in 1919.
The Taxi
The Wanamaker Trophy is twenty-eight inches tall and weighs twenty-seven pounds.
Walter Hagen won it four years running, from 1924 to 1927, and saw no reason to give it back. Celebrating in Chicago after 1925, he got out of a taxi to follow friends into a nightclub and left the trophy behind.
When he lost the title in 1928, he could not produce it. It turned up in Detroit in 1930. The one the winner lifts now is a copy.
What to Know
Thursday and Friday are the days to walk with a single group. The weekend belongs to the leaders and the crowds.
Daily tickets and hospitality are sold by the PGA of America.
Smart casual, and shoes for walking several miles of rough.
The Masters comes five weeks before, and the US Open follows in June.
The mistake is to stand at one green all day. Follow a group for nine holes early in the week, when the course is quiet, and take a grandstand seat at the last on Sunday.
The Court
The US PGA Championship is not the Court’s own. Hospitality at the course, and grandstand places for the weekend, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay near a course that changes every year, and the table afterward.
How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.
Set down September MMXXVI