In the run-up to this week’s PGA Championship at Quail Hollow Club, words such as familiarity and big were repeated frequently in reference to the Charlotte, North Carolina, club. That's probably because the club is used to operating at a top-tier level.
“Even our ‘normal’ [PGA] Tour stop [at Quail Hollow] feels like a big tournament,” said Xander Schauffele, who won the 2024 PGA at Valhalla in Kentucky. “The venue and the way the tournament is run, and everything about that area just feels very big — the practice facilities, just how big everything is, it has that championship feel.”
Quail Hollow holds a unique position among professional golf tournaments. It’s held a spring PGA Tour event most every year since 2003, and the summertime Kemper Open before that (1969-79). The exceptions to the current streak would be because Quail Hollow hosted the PGA Championship in 2017 and the Presidents Cup in 2022.
The biggest difference this week is the course setup. For the previous PGA and Presidents Cup, the dates were in August and September, respectively, when Quail Hollow’s grass was all bermudagrass with more than 2 inches of thick, gnarly rough, according to the Golf Course Superintendents Association. This week’s PGA will more closely resemble the playing surface for the traditional May Truist Championship. That means a ryegrass overseed that is a richer green color and will measure 2.75 inches deep in the rough.
“I thought it was going to feel different just because it was a major championship, and I got out on the golf course [Tuesday], and it felt no different than last year at the Wells Fargo,” said Rory McIlroy, who has won four times at Quail Hollow’s PGA Tour event. “The rough is maybe a little juicier. But fairways are still the same cut lines and same visuals. It doesn't feel that much different.”
It’s a rarity for a course to host a PGA Tour event and a major in the same season. Torrey Pines Golf Course, Riviera Country Club and Pebble Beach Golf Links are the most recent to have pulled off the rare double.
Keith Wood, director of green and grounds at Quail Hollow, has overseen maintenance work and tournament preparation at the club for a decade, so he is accustomed to adapting for the event at hand. This week, for example, Wood will oversee a much larger maintenance team — 90 workers, with 22 being former Quail Hollow employees and 55 being volunteers from previous tournaments. Forty percent of this week’s staff serve as superintendents at other courses. His assistant superintendents will focus on construction (tents and a record number of double-decker buildings, generators, staircases, restrooms, contractors and post-PGA removal), staffing (shuttles, food service, hours, safety training, orientation) and playability (grass maintenance, course setup and how it plays). Construction of the temporary tents and grandstands began in early February and Quail Hollow won’t be completely cleared out until at least July.
“During the PGA Tour events, things are pretty much on cruise control for us,” said Wood on a recent EW Turf Talk podcast. “They’re not too needy. Major championships and events like the Presidents Cup, they’re pretty needy. Particularly, they ask for [maintenance] course detail between groups.
“What we learned from the 2017 PGA is you can’t have just eight people ready for on-call duty with multiple holes. You have to have a person for every hole, wearing a backpack and waiting to get a call on the radio to address something immediately about that particular hole.”
Instead of a PGA Tour-oriented setup team for the course, the PGA has its own operations staff and Kerry Haigh, the PGA’s chief championship officer, leads the way. That includes interaction with ESPN and CBS via multiple site visits in the months prior. CBS’ coverage will feature multiple drones, fly-cams, a rail camera, bunker cameras, augmented reality capability, shot tracer on all holes and 125 total cameras — much more than the usual allotment for the PGA Tour event. Wood realizes that the international exposure via television and a 10-acre broadcast compound (vs. 3 acres in 2017) are well worth the extra preparation necessary.
“Obviously, with majors it’s more robust,” said Sellers Shy, CBS’s coordinating producer. “And while we feel like we know Quail Hollow as well as anyone involved, having covered it since 2003, knowing that it’s a major championship allows us to add cameras, add equipment to certain places where you normally can’t.
“... That’s why I think it will look slightly different in a good way. We’ll be able to give the fan angles that they’ve never seen.”
Attendance for each of the four rounds is expected to be at least 50,000, a substantial uptick from the average of nearly 35,000 who attend the PGA Tour event.
Aside from the golf and entertainment venues, a lot of emphasis is placed on merchandising for the PGA Championship. Pre-tournament merchandise sales began at a nearby mall on Friday, May 9, and an off-site pop-up shop was unveiled during PGA Championship week — two features not offered with the regular Tour event. The on-site merchandise facility is larger than a football field, manned by 600 volunteers with 1,200 logoed items and an average of 20 hats sold per minute. The regular Tour event has had a pro shop of approximately 5,000 square feet — about one-tenth the size of the PGA’s large merchandise venue.
There will be approximately 3,200 volunteers for the PGA compared to 2,100 for the Truist. The personnel will manage more than 625,000 square feet of flooring put in place for 250-plus tents on the grounds, approximately twice as much as the PGA Tour event.
Wood indicated the preparation and larger infrastructure numbers for a major only helps in the annual planning of the PGA Tour event.
“Next year, the Truist is now an elevated event, which is big on the PGA Tour,” Wood said. “Some sales records we’ll see with this one, the PGA, are likely to affect another big-time event next year. I would not be surprised at all to see this type of work pay off with another major championship event in at least eight years from now.”
But this isn’t anything new for Quail Hollow and its leader, Johnny Harris. A prominent real-estate developer in Charlotte, Harris, 77, has been instrumental in bringing college basketball’s Final Four to Charlotte in 1994 and returning professional golf to the Queen City.
As a friend of Arnold Palmer and a prominent member of the Augusta National Golf Club, Harris views Quail Hollow as being both his baby and right up there with golf’s prominent venues. If a year goes by without some type of major construction on the golf course, in concert with golf course architect Tom Fazio, it’s a surprise.
Bigness also isn’t a stranger in these parts. When the Wachovia Championship debuted at Quail Hollow in 2003, the perks offered to players were unique. Each player received a high-end Mercedes courtesy vehicle (instead of the typical Buick sedan) and on-site car washers manned the player parking lot. There was a personal concierge for dining and shopping options, a Mother’s Day gift for each wife, a special phone number to call for a police escort in case players were caught in traffic before a tee time and there was a barber and free dry-cleaning services offered in the locker room. Additionally, the caddies were offered valet parking.
So even though a major is in town and it’s different this week, Quail Hollow has always had a major plan.
