The 58th PGA Professional Championship begins on Sunday at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, the first time the Oregon coast complex has hosted the most prestigious annual event for the men and women teaching and running golf inside the PGA of America. A field of 312 PGA Professionals from all 41 PGA Sections will play four rounds across the resort's two original Tom Doak and David McLay Kidd designs in pursuit of 21 spots in next month's PGA Championship at Aronimink.
The tournament runs from April 26 through April 29, with players splitting their first 36 holes between Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes before the field is cut to the low 90 scorers Monday night. A second cut on Tuesday trims the survivors to the top 70, who will play the final two rounds entirely on Bandon Dunes for a $850,000 purse. The champion picks up $75,600. More importantly, both the winner and the next 20 finishers earn entry into the 108th PGA Championship at Aronimink in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, from May 11 to 17, where they will compete inside the field as part of the Corebridge Financial Team.
The marquee returnee is defending champion Tyler Collet, the Mizner Country Club professional who lapped last year's championship by 10 shots with a 15-under-par 272, a margin-of-victory record for the event. Collet, taking his seventh start, has spent the build-up talking up a venue he says he has admired from a distance for years.
"It's always been a bucket list," Collet said. "It's going to be a special venue. Bandon Dunes is just such an iconic name."
Fourteen past champions are in the field, including Michael Block, who became a household name in 2023 when he played alongside Rory McIlroy in the final round of the PGA Championship at Oak Hill, plus Jesse Mueller and Ben Polland, the 2024 winner. Nine women are also competing, led by Sandra Changkija, the two-time Rolex Women's PGA Professional Player of the Year. Eight Pacific Northwest Section members are on the entry list, including a strong contingent based out of Oregon.
The PGA of America has paired the championship with a CBS Sports content series titled "The Road to Bandon," and Golf Channel will broadcast all four rounds in primetime. Officials at the PGA Professional Championship have framed Bandon as a deserved stage for the working golf professionals who run pro shops, run lessons and run the day-to-day life of the game across America.
Bandon Dunes itself has long been a destination on every dedicated golfer's wish list. The resort, opened on the windswept Oregon coast in 1999, now plays host to five full-length courses, the Sheep Ranch among them, and the Punchbowl putting course. Owner Mike Keiser has historically resisted the largest professional events in favour of preserving the resort's character, making this PGA Professional Championship one of the most significant tournaments the property has staged.
Course conditions are expected to be testing. Western-facing fairways, gorse-lined corridors and firm fescue greens have been baked by an unusually dry spring, and the forecast for the opening round calls for southwest winds of 25 kilometres per hour gusting higher into the afternoon. The pure links of Pacific Dunes, with its smaller greens, will be the bigger challenge, particularly for those professionals who play the bulk of their golf on parkland courses across the country.
Collet has been the tournament's marker since his runaway victory last year, but a 312-player field with 14 former champions and a roster of teaching pros who have spent winters working on their games rarely produces a one-horse race. Twenty-one names from this Sunday's grouping will line up at Aronimink in three weeks. The fight to be one of them tees off at Bandon at first light.