Los Angeles—The PGA Championship will be held in August but without fans, after California health officials on Monday gave the green light to the first major championship of 2020, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The tournament scheduled for August 6-9 in San Francisco had hoped to attract up to 40,000 fans a day at Harding Park golf course but that was before the USPGA Tour was shutdown because of the coronavirus outbreak.
The PGA Championship, which is run by the PGA of America, was originally scheduled to take place in May.
Harding Park last held a PGA event in 2015 and has never hosted a major championship. Construction on grandstands were already underway when the Tour was shutdown in March at the Players Championship.
Brooks Koepka will defend his title at Harding Park, where he’ll look to become the first player to win three straight PGA Championships since Walter Hagen won four in a row from 1924-27.
The PGA cancelled 11 tournaments and revised its remaining schedule, finally resuming last week with no spectators at the Charles Schwab Challenge.
Daniel Berger parred the first extra hole to beat Collin Morikawa in a playoff as the Tour made a muted return from the pandemic in Fort Worth, Texas. The next four events of the restart will also be played without spectators.
The first tournament to have fans will be The Memorial, July 16-19 in Dublin, Ohio. Officials are planning for up to 8,000 fans per day at Muirfield Village.
After the Charles Schwab, the PGA Tour will feature the RBC Heritage (June 18-21) in Hilton Head, South Carolina; the Travelers Championship (June 25-28) in Cromwell, Connecticut; and the Rocket Mortgage Classic (July 2-5) in Detroit, Michigan.
The US Open is rescheduled for September 17-20 in New York.
Meanwhile, LPGA Tour Commissioner Mike Whan said he felt “pretty sure” the Women’s British Open could go ahead in August despite France’s Evian Championship becoming the first women’s golf major to be lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The British Open at Troon in Scotland is due to be played from August 20-23, with players arriving in Britain for the Scottish Open, co-sanctioned with the Ladies European Tour, in North Berwick a week earlier.
The Evian Championship, one of five women’s majors, had already been rescheduled from July 23-26 to August 6-9.
