In case you hadn’t noticed, last week it was revealed that four PGA Tour tournaments will be a part of the remodeled tour schedule in 2028, occupying coveted spots in what will be called the Championship Series where the biggest money and the biggest stars will commingle.
The Travelers Championship, the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the Sentry at Torrey Pines and a new event sponsored by Japanese insurer Sompo that’s likely ticketed for the great Northwest are the first four of the 15 or so events (outside the major championships and the Players Championship) to reveal their spots on the bingo card.
The only surprise is the Sompo tournament, which the new sponsor will stage as a full-field PGA Tour event next July in Napa, California, before it is elevated and relocated when the new tour model comes to life in ’28.
It’s easy to pick out most of the other events that figure to be part of Championship Series – the Memorial Tournament, the Genesis Invitational, the Truist Championship, the RBC Heritage, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Cadillac Championship are expected to be elevated from their signature status – leaving only a handful of spots in the tour’s top tier.
Enter the Wyndham Championship, which begins Thursday at charming Sedgefield Country Club, where the tournament formerly known as the Greater Greensboro Open was first played in 1938.
Not unlike the Travelers Championship, which resurrected itself and now thrives in a smaller market, the Wyndham Championship – still known to long-standing locals as the GGO – has been played 86 times with a list of champions that reads like a tour history lesson.
The tournament, which has turned a challenging August date into a success story, is likely to join the Championship Series in 2028, simultaneously redefining the event and potentially prompting its relocation on the tour calendar, a pleasant surprise within the speculation about which tournaments will land where.
There is still a title sponsorship agreement to be formally signed (Wyndham’s deal expires after this week’s event, and the tour has lined up a new sponsor) and slotting the tournament into the reimagined schedule is a piece of a bigger puzzle but Greensboro is on the verge of becoming more prominent than it has ever been two decades after its demise seemed imminent, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation.
Last week, the Triad Business Journal reported that the North Carolina General Assembly recently appropriated $10 million in its 2026-27 budget to secure the tournament next year as part of a $40 million commitment toward anchoring the event for the future, contingent on it being a Championship Series event.
Assuming all the pieces come together, there are many reasons why that matters but among the most important is the implied recognition of the grassroots tradition of the PGA Tour as the organization charges into its new reality.
Snead. Hogan. Nelson. Casper. Boros. Sanders. Player. Rodriguez. Weiskopf. Ballesteros. Floyd. Wadkins. Lyle. Love. O’Meara. Sutton. Stenson. García.
That history can’t be bought but it can and should be cultivated.
Sam Snead, shown lining up a putt in 1939, won the “GGO” eight times.
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While the tour is right to build its schedule around major markets, recognizing the value of an event like Greensboro would maintain another important thread in the overall fabric of the PGA Tour. There is a generational pride in the tournament, which made the wise move of returning to Sedgefield Country Club in 2008 after moving away for more than three decades.
There is understandable hang-wringing about what happens to longtime events that become part of the second-tier Challenger Series rather than the Championship Series. It will be strange if tournaments such as the Charles Schwab Challenge or the Valspar Championship don’t have access to the top 125 or so players on tour but a new day is fast approaching.
Twenty years ago, the Greensboro event was literally hours away from ending until Bobby Long, a local businessman and philanthropist, organized an effort to save it. Long, with the help of others including Mark Brazil, executive tournament director of the Wyndham Championship, have worked wonders.
As much as the PGA Tour would like to have 20 events like the Players Championship, insiders acknowledge the tour would also like to have 20 more leaders like Long, who prefers to deflect the attention and credit to others.
Playing a tour event in North Carolina in August has built-in challenges beyond being the final “regular-season” event on the tour schedule, when most of the top stars are taking time off before the FedEx Cup playoffs. It’s hot with thunderstorms often threatening play.
Television will beam images of the Wyndham beach adjacent to the 15th and 16th holes, there will be cocktails and music inside the Margaritaville pavilion not far from the first tee and the who’s-in and who’s-out playoff status of various players will be monitored like election results.
That’s no different from the playoff schedule that includes Memphis and Atlanta in August with other steamy destinations such as St. Louis (this year) and Baltimore as the middle stop in a swampy, three-week stretch that often feels like a sweat-soaked endurance test more than a big-bang finish.
The playoff structure and locations will change in 2028 and it’s conceivable Greensboro could return to a spring date, which it occupied until 2003 when it moved to the fall before landing in August in 2007.
Among the scheduling scenarios under consideration, Greensboro could fit into a run of spring events that also includes the Masters, the RBC Heritage and the Truist Championship leading into the PGA Championship. It’s an appealing possibility.
This week at Sedgefield, Cameron Young is the defending champion against a field that includes Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, Si Woo Kim, Brooks Koepka, Aaron Rai and Jackson Koivun among others.
And, two decades after wondering if there would be a next year, Greensboro can think optimistically about what could be next.
Top: Sedgefield Country Club first hosted the Greensboro PGA Tour event in 1938.
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