VIRGINIA WATER, ENGLAND | In professional golf in Europe, there have been tournaments that predated Britain’s PGA Championship. For example, the British PGA Matchplay began in 1903, the French Open in 1906, the Belgian Open in 1910, the German Open in 1911 and the Spanish Open in 1912. There is some history there.
But on today’s helter-skelter European Tour, which began in Hong Kong last November and ends in Dubai this November, there are few events that are historic, can boast so many distinguished winners and have been held at such a storied venue as the BMW PGA Championship.
The BMW PGA was first held in 1955 and has been staged at the Wentworth Club on the borders of Surrey and Berkshire, and less than an hour’s drive from London, for more than 30 years. If it is no ordinary event, then Wentworth is no ordinary venue, not exactly the sort of golf club where the public rooms might look as though they could do with a lick of paint and any items left in the changing rooms one year are still there the next. It has tennis and squash courts, a gym and a swimming pool, and numerous golf courses but is renowned throughout golf for its West course, the so-called Burma Road, the site of so many famous events down the years.
Rory McIlroy used to watch golf at Wentworth long before he started playing there. “I came a few times as a kid,” McIlroy said. “It was a bit later in the year. It was October and the leaves were changing. It was always a great atmosphere and always felt like the weather was actually decent.”
The club is known for its crenelated clubhouse, for a series of winding, rhododendron-lined roads linking the extensive properties that are often hidden behind electric gates, hedges or fences and for having had a tempestuous past few years. In 2015, a Chinese investment and property group bought the club for £135m and wanted to reduce the number of members and increase the annual subscription – and this after requiring prospective members to pay a hefty debenture. It is fair to say such proposals were not greeted with universal acclaim by those affected.
There is a Chinese proverb that says: “It never rains on your neighbours without you getting your feet wet.” That certainly applied to Reignwood, Wentworth’s owners.
Perhaps Wentworth’s greatest claim to fame is that it was the course at which the famous World Match Play Championship, a brainchild of the late Mark McCormack, was first held. Remember the World Match Play, the event in which a small number of the best players in the world were put up in five-star hotels in London and driven to and from the course in Rolls-Royces before facing up to one another over 36 holes? That began in 1964 and was won by Arnold Palmer or Gary Player for each of the first five years and by Jack Nicklaus (beaten in the final in 1966 by Player) in 1970. Remember the Big Three? It was an impossibly exotic event, an autumn spectacular, played when the leaves were turning gold and falling and the afternoon play took place in fading daylight.
Rory McIlroy used to watch golf at Wentworth long before he started playing there. “I came a few times as a kid,” McIlroy said. “It was a bit later in the year. It was October and the leaves were changing. It was always a great atmosphere and always felt like the weather was actually decent.”
Paul Casey and Justin Rose played there when they were growing up and so did Luke Donald. It seems as though almost everyone in golf has a Wentworth connection. For them Wentworth is an evocative place, a temple of golf, a temple of British, but particularly bearing in mind its locality, English, golf. For nearly 50 years, it has been the site of the headquarters of the European Tour.
Remember the 1953 Ryder Cup where a strong US team might have been beaten by GB&I, as was the case then? Well, actually, you might not but that biennial event was held at this venue.
Remember the World Cup of Golf now sponsored by ISPS Handa? Two Americans named Ben Hogan and Sam Snead won it when it was played at Wentworth in 1956 with Hogan winning the individual title.
After moving around famous golf courses in England and Wales – Royal St George’s, Royal Birkdale, Little Aston, Llandudno (Maesdu) and occasionally at Wentworth – the BMW PGA Championship settled for good at Wentworth in 1984. Its champions are a who’s who of European professional golf, many of them major champions. It is fair to say that if the quality of its winners – Palmer, McIlroy, Francesco Molinari and José María Olazábal once, Seve Ballesteros, Bernhard Langer, Tony Jacklin and Ian Woosnam twice, Colin Montgomerie three times and Nick Faldo four times – is anything to go by then this event is a blue riband one on the European Tour.
The PGA, whether sponsored as it has been by Colgate, Schweppes, Viyella, Penfold, Sun Alliance, Whyte & Mackay and Volvo and now BMW, was always known as the European Tour’s flagship event until Keith Pelley, then only recently installed as chief executive of the European Tour, disapproved of that title. How could it be, he asked, when the event opposite it in the US had a significantly higher purse?
Under Pelley’s ceaseless drive to raise purses, that anomaly has been remedied. The BMW PGA is now part of the Rolex Series, eight events that each have a minimum prize money of $7 million, roughly two or three times the average European Tour purse, and offer increased Race to Dubai points. These events are clearly aimed at attracting as strong a field as is possible and luring as many players back from the US as possible. In that it has succeeded. This year’s event has 10 of the 12 members of the victorious 2018 Ryder Cup team as well as Thomas Bjørn, the captain, and Pádraig Harrington, a vice-captain in Paris, and Europe’s captain at Whistling Straits next September, as well as Robert Karlsson, like Harrington a vice-captain in Paris, and named by Harrington on Wednesday as the first of five vice-captains for 2020. Thirty-five of the world’s top 100 players are competing at Wentworth, as are 20 of the top 50, significantly better than previous years.
Several other layers of interest have been added to the event this year. It marks the start of the Ryder Cup qualifying points and the same event next year will mark the end of the qualifying period for the biennial event. Also, it’s the first time the BMW PGA has been played on this venue at this time of the year and the players like both the course and the condition it is in after recent further modifications by Ernie Els. For years it was held in May.
“They’ve got SubAir here,” McIlroy said. “They have got the best strain of grass that money can buy so they can really get the course to play whatever way they want at whatever time of year. I felt like the greens were getting pretty firm yesterday. I think that the improvements they have made to the course have been wonderful over the past few years.”
Pelley’s background is in entertainment. It is a word he uses again and again. “Golf is entertainment” is just one of his mantras. “Golf has to widen its appeal to survive” is another.
“The BMW PGA Championship is not only a sporting event but a festival of golf and entertainment,” Pelley said. “There is so much for everyone to enjoy this week, from the star-studded celebrity pro-am on Wednesday to the live music acts at the weekend such as Rudimental and Anne-Marie.”
This is the 38th of the 48 European Tour tournaments on its 2019 schedule. In terms of importance you are not just talking Premier League here but the very top of the Premier League. It is, in fact, the crème de la crème – the cat’s whiskers. And this year’s may be the best yet.