How Charlie Woods saved the PNC Championship

Gary Player, Lee Trevino and defending champion John Daly should thank Charlie Woods for saving their “major.”

This week marks the 25^th playing of the PNC Championship, but this 36-hole team event, which pairs 20 winners of prestigious titles alongside a family member in a scramble competition, had just about run its course until Charlie got the golf itch.

Don’t believe me? This event wasn’t played from 2009-2011 due to a lack of sponsorship and wasn’t revived until IMG and Arnold Palmer convinced the good people at Pittsburgh-based PNC to breathe new life into it. The King played with grandson Will Wears in 2012, but then he passed the torch to Jack Nicklaus. Seeing The Golden Bear, who was usually paired with Lee Trevino, play 36 was worth the price of admission and carried TV ratings. But as Nicklaus neared his 80^th birthday – he last played in 2018 with grandson G.T. – IMG’s Alastair Johnston sensed his “baby” had outgrown its britches. He’d seen the same thing happen to the Skins Game, another event he helped bring into prominence as the once-proud king of Silly Season events.

“Once Tiger’s appetite for doing that went away and the money became so big that people didn’t have to play in it to make money, it lost its appeal,” Johnston once explained of the demise of the Skins Game, which was last played in 2008.

Johnston remembers when the idea for the PNC Championship struck him. This was several years ago in the pre-cellphone days and he was at TPC Michigan, site of the 1994 Ford Senior Players Championship. There in the locker room were three major champions lined up at a bank of phones: Raymond Floyd, Dave Stockton and Nicklaus.

“They were all talking to their kids,” Johnston said. “It was far more important how their kids were playing than how they were doing and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could create a tournament where the fathers and sons could play together?’ ”

His brainchild has exceeded his wildest expectations.

“It’s the one event where nobody asks me about the prize money,” Johnston said. “The waiting list is perpetual. I could easily have 40 (teams) – without a doubt.”

“The biggest bonus no one talks about of winning a major is getting to play in the father-son,” two-time U.S. Open champion Lee Janzen said.

And yet the event was headed for a certain death as the tournament’s biggest draws began to age out. No offense, but Janzen and 2013 champ Stewart Cink and ageless wonder Bernhard Langer, a four-time champion, don’t make golf fans push off their holiday shopping for another week to crowd around the TV.

That’s when Johnston had his next bright idea. Over the years, he had stretched the rules so Palmer, whose four daughters didn’t play golf competitively, could play with grandsons Sam Saunders and then Wears, Fuzzy Zoeller could play with daughter Gretchen, and Aaron Stewart, whose father, Payne, died in a plane crash, could play with Janzen and Paul Azinger. In 2017, Johnston added a new wrinkle: sons playing with fathers as Justin Leonard, the 1997 British Open champion, broke new ground playing with his dad, Larry. Jim Furyk and Matt Kuchar did the same a year later, which gave way to Justin Thomas, who won with dad Mike in 2020, and this year’s rookie, Jordan Spieth, who is playing with dad, Shawn. (Someday soon, four-time major winner and current World No. 1 Rory McIlroy and his dad Gerry would make a fine pairing until daughter Poppy is old enough to play.)

But the real salvation was Tiger and Charlie, who finished second as a team a year ago and are scheduled to play together this weekend at Ritz-Carlton Golf Club in Orlando for the third time. It completed the hand-off from Arnold to Jack to Tiger as the top draw of the event. Some, including Padraig Harrington, would argue that Charlie is the bigger draw. As much as golf fans are desperate to see Tiger, who played just nine competitive rounds this year, it is watching the development of young Charlie’s game that is endlessly fascinating.

“This is the first tournament I’ve ever played in that Tiger Woods is playing in that he’s not the star of the show,” Harrington said.

And other than the four majors, it seems to be the one tournament circled on Tiger’s schedule – and it’s not just the golf cart that he can use since the event is played under the rules of PGA Tour Champions. Even last year where Tiger’s injuries from his car accident weren’t yet healed, he wouldn’t deprive Charlie of playing in the PNC. Plantar fasciitis this year? It kept Tiger out of the Hero World Challenge, the unofficial event before Thanksgiving he hosts, but it’s not going to prevent Tiger from enjoying what has become one of his favorite weeks of the year.

“Charlie will just hit all the shots and I’ll just get the putts out of the hole,” Tiger said at the Hero World Challenge.

Suddenly, the PNC has turned into must-see TV each December. Who could’ve seen this rebirth coming? Johnston, for one, always knew this day would come.

“You know what was the first thing I said to Tiger Woods when I saw him the week after he won the Masters in 1997?” Johnston said. “I told him, ‘The good news is you’ve now qualified for the Father-Son.’ ”