Every year around this time, we get to the PGA
Championship,
and lots of people wonder about the connection between the
PGA of America and the PGA Tour.
And in this video, we're happy to talk about that
and explain the difference between the two organizations.
To you, I'm Ryan Balanji with Golf News Deb.
As I mentioned, we get the PGA Championship every year
in May these days,
and a lot of people get confused,
particularly casual sports fans thinking that the PGA Tour and
the PGA of America,
which presents the PGA Championship,
are one of the same.
And they are not. However,
that isn't necessarily rooted A belief totally out of thin
air,
because for a long time that was the case.
For the better part of 1/2 century,
that was the case up until
1968. So before then, before
1968, the PGA of America ultimately formed a tournament committee
and their club pro members,
their membership association, their board
basically was in charge of creating and financing and putting
on tournaments for not only professional golfers but also golf
professionals.
And those are different things.
Golf professionals or your club pros,
your teaching professionals, people like that.
Pro golfers are players who play golf for a living,
and they used to put on tournaments that had some
exempt status,
but not much. And that was a really difficult situation
for a lot of professional golfers who would travel around
the country,
would have to pay their travel expenses,
pay their caddies, pay for accommodations,
and potentially not even qualify for events because they weren't
exempt and they would have to go through an 18
hole Monday qualifier and that may leave them deeply in
the hole for the week.
This all came to a head in the late
1960s, eventually leading to a change in
1968 after most of the best golfers in the world
at the time,
including Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and Billy Casper,
threatening to form and eventually forming A breakaway organization called
the APG Association of Professional Golfers.
Ultimately, they called the PG of America's Bluff,
who were not willing to give the players more power
and more say over what happens in their tournaments and
their livelihood.
Eventually, though, both sides came together,
largely thanks to the efforts of Arnold Palmer and some
other players as well,
including Jack Nicholas. And ultimately they hammered out a deal
which created two separate organizations within the PGA of America.
There would be the PGA of America and the Tournament
Players Division,
and that was what is now known as the PGA
Tour.
Ultimately, five years into it,
a guy named Dean Beeman became the commissioner of what
would then become the PGA Tour.
And that's why they still use the PGA nomenclature today
and what we call the PGA Tour because of that
connection to the PGA of America for so long representing
the brand as Professional Golf tour as opposed to separate
organization,
the PGA of America. Hopefully this clears everything up.
PGA of America still puts on tons of championships for
club professionals and PGA Championship also the only American half
in full of the Ryder Cup.
So they still do a lot of work to put
on great tournaments for people.
And they many of them are professional golfers,
most of them at the PGA Championship.
But they also put on a lot of events for
club pros whose livelihoods are engaged in growing the game
of golf.