PGA Tour’s Two-Track Future on Display in the Carolinas This Week

The PGA Tour will be pulling a doubleheader this week in the Carolinas that should provide an interesting case study for the circuit’s future.

The two golf tournaments—less than 200 miles apart—couldn’t be more different from each other, both on and off the course.

In Charlotte, 72 players will compete for a $20 million purse at the Truist Championship, one of eight signature events (with no 36-hole cut this week) during the PGA Tour’s 2026 season. Rory McIlroy headlines a field that includes seven of the top-10 ranked golfers in the world.

In South Carolina, 120 players will be fighting for their share of a $4 million purse at the OneFlight Myrtle Beach Classic, one of four “opposite-field” events this season that are played during the same weeks as more lucrative tournaments. Brooks Koepka is playing amid his lesser-status back on tour, but the field otherwise lacks major starpower.

With major PGA Tour schedule changes looming—some as early as next year but many not until 2028—each of this week’s events could serve as a model for their contemporaries moving forward.

Making the A-Team

PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp has spoken about ideas for a “first track” of elevated events with the best players competing for higher purses, and a “second track” of tournaments that will ladder up to those elevated events.

“Scarcity is about making every event we have matter,” Rolapp said at the Players Championship in March. “This is why we are evaluating the role of promotion and relegation between these two tracks within our competitive model.”

It’s not hard to see which tier each of this week’s tournaments would fit into.

“I think the Charlotte market is the model market for the future of the PGA Tour,” Truist Championship executive director Adam Sperling tells Front Office Sports.

Truist Financial, a Charlotte-based bank with more than $500 billion in assets, is in the second of a seven-year deal for naming rights to the PGA Tour event, which is estimated to cost more than $200 million over the life of the contract. Title sponsors typically fund the majority of a competition’s prize money and buy an allotted amount of media ads, among other commitments.

Crowds will be well over 100,000 this week at Quail Hollow Club, which has hosted PGA Tour events since 2003, as well as two PGA Championships and a Presidents Cup. The exclusive course and the Charlotte market figure to be a mainstay on the new-look PGA Tour, no matter what changes ensue.

Future in Progress

The Truist Championship is among a handful of tournaments operated directly by the PGA Tour, rather than a local nonprofit or event management firm like the Myrtle Beach Classic, which is run by the Sportfive agency. 

Organizers in Myrtle Beach are hoping to top the 40,000-person attendance high mark the relatively new tournament hit in its 2024 debut at Dunes Golf and Beach Club—and show it deserves a place on the PGA Tour after its initial four-year contract expires.

“The vision of everybody here is they want this event to continue beyond 2027,” tournament director Darren Nelson tells FOS.

Like Charlotte is doing for the PGA Tour’s biggest markets, continued success in Myrtle Beach could be an example for other smaller regions to follow. 

“If you look at some of the PGA tour events that started as a similar type of events as ours that went on to get standalone spots on the PGA Tour schedule, I think certainly this is a model that could be replicated in other markets,” Nelson says.

VIP hospitality sales in the first two years were stronger than initially anticipated, Nelson says. This year, the tournament sold out of its luxury suites on the 18th green and added more cabanas around the 17th hole. 

Mark Your Calendars

Some, if not many, PGA Tour tournaments could shift from their long-held dates on the calendar once a new-look schedule is implemented.

Quail Hollow has typically welcomed the tour in early May, a spot organizers would like to keep. “It’s spring in Charlotte,” Sperling says. “I think right now this is what everybody signed up for.”

Rolapp is expected to give an update in June on what the PGA Tour’s Tiger Woods-led Future Competition Committee has been exploring.