PGA Championship to go ahead without fans

FILE – Brooks Koepka plays a shot on the ninth hole during the first round of The PLAYERS at the TPC Stadium course on March 12, 2020 in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Sam Greenwood/Getty Images/AFP

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 shut down 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 shut down 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 canceled 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.