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.