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The PGA Championship, the last of the year’s four Majors, may be played outside the US within the next decade.
PGA Championship organisers have revealed that preliminary in-house discussions have been held about the idea, which has already been greeted enthusiastically overseas.
Australia has already thrown its hat into the ring as a possible venue, with PGA of Australia executive director Brian Thorburn selling his country’s assets – great courses and a proven track record of organising major sporting events.
“We’ve hosted big American events before, the Presidents Cup in 2011, the World Cup (of golf) this year, who’s to say we can’t host a major?” Thorburn told reporters at Perth International. “I’m meeting with Pete Bevacqua in six, seven weeks and I’ll certainly make him aware that we’d bust our guts to have a crack at hosting the PGA Championship if they went through with staging the event overseas.”
An August engagement is likely to rule out any interest from the Gulf States because of summer temperature issues, unless a more accommodating date for the event could be agreed.
PGA of America chief executive Pete Bevacqua told this week’s edition of Golf World: “This is an exercise we are going through, an analysis. It is far from an accomplished fact that we are going to take the PGA Championship international.
“When we sat down to map our strategic plan ... the question arose as to what impact it would have to take the PGA Championship to an international location once or twice a decade.
“It would be something we would only do if we had the cooperation of quite a few groups. We would want the international PGAs to be a part of this and share in this. Many pieces would have to fall in place.”
Existing contracts for the PGA Championship with television and venues are in place until 2019, leaving 2020 as the earliest possible year when the event could be held overseas.
The Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo in 2020, with golf among the sports to be contested.
Along with the Masters, US Open and British Open, the PGA Championship completes golf’s elite quartet of events but, with the game becoming increasingly global, it seems an anachronism that three of the four Majors are played in the same country.
Though the PGA Championship regularly has the strongest field of the year based on world rankings, it suffers widely from the perception of being the least significant major, partly because it is played in August, sometimes at mediocre venues.
