The BMW PGA Championship is an annual men's professional

golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping wi ...

tournament on the

European Tour The European Tour (currently known as the DP World Tour for sponsorship reasons), legally the PGA European Tour is the leading men's professional golf tour in Europe. The organisation also operates the European Senior Tour (for players aged fift ...

. It was founded in 1955 by the Professional Golfers' Association, and originally called the British PGA Championship.

History

The BMW PGA Championship has usually been played each May, on the weekend of the UK's

Spring Bank Holiday A bank holiday is a national public holiday in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and the Crown Dependencies. The term refers to all public holidays in the United Kingdom, be they set out in statute, declared by royal proclamation or held ...

, over the West Course at the

Wentworth Club Wentworth Club is a privately owned golf club and country club in Virginia Water, Surrey, on the south western fringes of London, not far from Windsor Castle. The club was founded in 1922. Beijing-based Reignwood Group bought the club in Septem ...

Surrey Surrey () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South East England, bordering Greater London to the south west. Surrey has a large rural area, and several significant urban areas which form part of the Greater London Built-up Area. ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. The PGA European Tour has its headquarters at the club and as the tour's home tournament, the BMW PGA Championship is often regarded as the flagship event on the European Tour. The tournament switched to September in 2019 as part of a revamp of the golfing calendar in which the US

PGA Championship The PGA Championship (often referred to as the US PGA Championship or USPGA outside the United States) is an annual golf tournament conducted by the Professional Golfers' Association of America. It is one of the four men's major championships ...

moved to May. It has usually had the highest prize money of any event which the tour organises, but this changed in 2009 with the introduction of the Race to Dubai, and the $10 million

Dubai World Championship The DP World Tour Championship is a golf tournament on the European Tour and is the climax of the DP World Tour Rankings. It is contested on the Greg Norman-designed Earth course at the Jumeirah Golf Estates in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The tit ...

at the end of the season. There are other more lucrative events than the BMW PGA Championship which are part of the European Tour schedule, such as the

majors Jonathan Michael Majors (born September 7, 1989)Majors in is an American actor. He rose to prominence after starring in the independent feature film ''The Last Black Man in San Francisco'' (2019). In 2020, he garnered wider notice for portraying ...

and the

World Golf Championship The World Golf Championships (WGC) are a group of annual professional golf tournaments created by the International Federation of PGA Tours as a means of gathering the best players in the world together more frequently than the pre-existing four ...

events, but these are organised by other bodies. It is also the European Tour's designated "Premier event" for the purposes of the

Official World Golf Rankings The Official World Golf Ranking is a system for rating the performance level of professional golfers. It was started in 1986. The rankings are based on a player's position in individual tournaments (i.e. not pairs or team events) over a "rolli ...

, with a minimum of 64 ranking points available to the winner. The winner of the tournament is given an exemption into that season's U.S. Open and the next three Open Championships. In 2000,

Colin Montgomerie Colin Stuart Montgomerie, Order of the British Empire, OBE (born 23 June 1963) is a Scotland, Scottish professional golfer. He has won a record eight European Tour PGA European Tour#Order of Merit winners, Order of Merit titles, including a stre ...

became the only player to win three years in a row. In 2021,

Billy Horschel William John Horschel (born December 7, 1986) is an American professional golfer who currently plays on the PGA Tour. Early years and amateur career Horschel was born and raised in Grant, Florida. He attended Bayside High School in neighborin ...

became only the second American to win the event, the first since

Arnold Palmer Arnold Daniel Palmer (September 10, 1929 – September 25, 2016) was an American professional golfer who is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most charismatic players in the sport's history. Dating back to 1955, he won numerous ev ...

in 1975.

Winners

Multiple winners

Only nine men have won the event more than once up to and including 2019. *4 wins: **Nick Faldo – 1978, 1980, 1981, 1989 *3 wins: **Peter Alliss – 1957, 1962, 1965 **Bernhard Langer – 1987, 1993, 1995 **Colin Montgomerie – 1998, 1999, 2000 *2 wins: **Tony Jacklin – 1972, 1982 **Seve Ballesteros – 1983, 1991 **Ian Woosnam – 1988, 1997 **Anders Hansen – 2002, 2007 **Luke Donald – 2011, 2012

Media coverage

Currently in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

, all four rounds of the BMW PGA Championship are shown live by

Sky Sports Sky Sports is a group of British subscription sports channels operated by the satellite pay television company Sky Group (a division of Comcast), and is the dominant subscription television sports brand in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It ...

with highlights being shown by the

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Notes

References

External links

Coverage on European Tour official site
– official BMW golf site {{Use dmy dates, date=June 2017 European Tour events Golf tournaments in England Sport in Surrey BMW Recurring sporting events established in 1955 1955 establishments in England