The fourth ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic will be held next May 13-16 at The Dunes Golf and Beach Club.
It remains to be seen if the 2027 tournament will be the end of the PGA Tour’s run on the Grand Strand.
The four-year contract between the tour and co-title sponsors ONEflight International and the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce expires following the 2027 tournament and no extension or renewal has been signed.
The PGA Tour schedule beyond 2027 is in a state of flux as tour officials under the leadership of new CEO Brian Rolapp are reorganizing the structure of the schedule.
Rolapp, the former Chief Media and Business Officer with the NFL who was hired last June, indicated in March that the tour is looking to possibly double the number of Signature Events that currently have $20 million purses and expand their fields in 2028.
Based on Rolapp’s comments, the tour will seemingly eliminate the dual-field tournaments like the $4 million Myrtle Beach Classic that are held concurrently with a more lucrative Signature Event.
So the Myrtle Beach Classic would likely need to become a standalone event with a much larger purse that will require a significant increase in funding, if it can find a place on the tour schedule.
“There are not going to be any dual events starting in 2028, so our opportunity would be a standalone,” said Tracy Conner, executive chairman of the Myrtle Beach Classic. “. . . It’s big numbers because you’re making a four-year commitment.”
Willing participants
All of the sponsors and stakeholders of the event profess to wanting to make the tournament a standalone PGA Tour event.
ONEflight, a private aviation company headquartered in Denver, was added as a co-title sponsor following the initial event in 2024 and figures to be the lynchpin to the tournament’s possible existence in 2028 and beyond.
The other primary sponsors – the chamber, through its Visit Myrtle Beach marketing arm; the Golf Tourism Solutions marketing, technology and event operation agency that promotes the Myrtle Beach market, in partnership with the Myrtle Beach Area Golf Course Owners Association; and the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism – all have someone to answer to or appease.
In the case of the chamber and GTS it’s their members, and in the case of the PRT it’s the state legislature and taxpayers.
So ONEflight would likely have to put up the bulk of the money to get the purse up to the requisite amount, which for a standalone event is generally $9 million to $10 million under the tour’s current structure compared to the $4 million the Myrtle Beach Classic awards.
“I’m going to take it as far as I can go, 100 percent,” said ONEflight CEO and founder Ferren Rajput, who said he is committed to signing a new agreement with the Myrtle Beach tournament. “My objective is to have my own week. Hopefully the kind of attention we’re bringing to the Myrtle Beach Classic is able to give us our own week down the road. I believe the Myrtle Beach Classic will continue.”
But all of the primary sponsors would likely have to increase their contribution to an upgraded event, as well.
“Everybody’s committed to the future, it just all has to make sense financially and everything,” said Myrtle Beach Classic tournament director Darren Nelson of SportFive, the sports marketing company that operates the event.
Nelson believes the event has the necessary sponsors on board to extend it without having to seek an additional significant sponsor.
“We’re just trying to do the best we can here and just check all those boxes and impress the folks at the PGA Tour,” Nelson said. “We’re just trying to knock it out of the park and I think we did that [last] week. We’re still a baby as far as PGA Tour events go so we’re just trying to make it better every year.”
Conner said he will be involved in securing the necessary funding for the tournament. He said he, and likely other Myrtle Beach Classic stakeholders, will meet in November with John Norris, the executive vice president of PGA Tour Events, to discuss the possibilities.
“We will start talking in November about opportunities and options, but it will be the first quarter of next year at the earliest before we actually know what the future looks like for the ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic in 2028,” said Conner, who is also the executive director of the course owner association and former interim chamber president and CEO. “But we’re very optimistic.”
The Dunes Golf and Beach Club is worthy of hosting a larger event on tour, according to participating player accounts from the past three years.
“This is harder than many golf courses we play with 500-point [FedExCup] events,” said Beau Hossler, a 10-year PGA Tour veteran who tied for third Sunday with a 16-under 268. “The golf course is plenty good, plenty hard. I think you see plenty of golf tournaments in full-point events that [winning scores] are 18- to 25-under par. If we got even a little bit more wind, it would be two or three shots harder per round. It’s that style of course.”
Brandt Snedeker, who won by a shot Sunday with an 18-under 266 for his 10th PGA Tour victory, said he’s hoping he’ll be granted honorary membership at the club.
“I kind of hope part of this deal is I get to become a member down here at this golf course, because this golf course is phenomenal. I love it,” he said.
The tour’s new structure
The tour announced last August the creation of the Future Competition Committee, which has been tasked with laying out the future structure of the PGA Tour schedule and is chaired by Tiger Woods.
In addition to Woods, the nine-person committee also includes five other players and three business advisors. The other players are Patrick Cantlay, Adam Scott, Maverick McNealy, Camilo Villegas and Keith Mitchell.
The business advisors are John Henry, a longtime owner of professional sports teams and current principal owner of the Fenway Sports Group, which owns and operates multiple teams in multiple sports; Theo Epstein, a former Major League Baseball executive and current senior advisor to Fenway Sports Group; and Joe Gorder, Valero Energy Corporation’s executive chairman of the board who is also the chairman of two boards affiliated with the PGA Tour.
Rolapp gave an update on the committee’s progress during The Players Championship in March.
More clarity should come out of a tour press conference involving Rolapp during the Travelers Championship in Connecticut the week of June 22-28, which will follow a tour board meeting on June 22.
“We’re waiting to see, like everybody else, kind of the next round of updates [after] June 22nd,” Nelson said. “. . . We’ve had conversations with all the stakeholders about continuing beyond 2027 and once we get more information from the PGA Tour we’ll continue those conversations and see what happens.”
Based on Rolapp’s comments in March, the 2028 schedule will likely be condensed from its current 45 tournaments in 2026 that include an eight-event fall swing that helps determine player eligibility for the following season.
Though he emphasized nothing has been decided upon, Rolapp laid out some of the tour’s objectives with the new schedule beginning in 2028.
He said it wants the season to run from late January until early September, beginning with a marquee event at an iconic venue on the West Coast and ending with playoffs that will create more drama than they traditionally have, possibly through the integration of match play.
One of the tour’s goals moving forward is to have the best players face each other more regularly.
“The committee’s focus has been on the competitive model built on meritocracy . . . one where the best players compete against one another more frequently,” Rolapp said. “Our competitive model will be built around elevating those who prove themselves to be the best performers inside the ropes.”
Rolapp said the tour wants to have between 21 and 26 “first track” elevated events with higher purses that will include the four majors, FedExCup playoffs, The Players Championship, the Ryder Cup/Presidents Cup in alternating years, and approximately 18 Signature events.
The signature events would be expanded from no-cut fields of 70-80 to approximately 120 players with a cut, which would effectively eliminate the dual-field events like the Myrtle Beach Classic.
A second track of standalone tournaments during the regular-season schedule would “ladder up” to the elevated events, Rolapp said. In those, players would have an opportunity to earn “their way to the top, with every event having greater meaning.”
Rolapp said there may still be additional events in the fall, as well.
In a potential blow to Myrtle Beach’s bid for a tournament, Rolapp said the tour wants to evaluate major markets where it doesn’t have an annual event including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C. “That is an opportunity,” he said.
In March, Rolapp said there may be some implementation in 2027 of the Future Competition Committee’s suggestions that will be a preview of what’s to come in 2028 and beyond.
An apparent paring of the schedule has already been made for 2027, as the 2026 season-opening Sony Open in Hawaii in early January is not on the schedule for the first time in more than 60 years. The previous limited-field season-opening event, The Sentry in Hawaii, dropped off the schedule this year.
MB Classic now, in the future
Next year’s Myrtle Beach Classic dates are one week later on the calendar than the first three playings of the tournament on the first full weekend of May.
The tournament will again be played simultaneously with the Truist Championship in Charlotte, a Signature Event that carries a $20 million purse and generally features most of the top 70 to 75 players on tour.
The two tournaments immediately precede the season’s second major, the PGA Championship, which has been pushed back a week.
The date change moves the Myrtle Beach Classic off a final round on Mother’s Day, which should help attendance next year.
“It can’t hurt,” Nelson said.
The 2026 tournament included a two-night concert series that featured The Beach Boys, fan-centric areas on the course, numerous celebrities participating in the Wednesday pro-am, and added player incentives with $5,000 ONEflight flight credits to every player making the cut and a $250,000 flight credit to the winner.
Attendance at the Myrtle Beach Classic has been lower than at most PGA Tour events, but attracting more of the bigger names on the PGA Tour with a full-field, standalone event without a nearby competing event would presumably attract more spectators.
Myrtle Beach and the tournament have some attributes that should be attractive to the tour, including an oceanfront course that can provide beautiful aerial views during a television broadcast, and a market, though it’s small, that is significant in the world of golf.
“It’s on the ocean. People love it,” said Duane Parrish, director of the SCPRT. “That is the golden egg that we’ve laid, the beaches.”
Parrish said he and tournament organizers have suggested to the tour a three-week swing from late March into mid-April of the Myrtle Beach Classic, Masters Tournament in Augusta, and RBC Heritage in Hilton Head Island that would make sense geographically. The Valero Texas Open in San Antonio has immediately preceded the Masters in recent years.
Parrish is trying to leverage South Carolina’s relationship with the tour. Through the SCPRT, it is the only contiguous state that is an official marketing partner of the PGA Tour. It is in the fourth year of a five-year $2.5 million annual contract, Parrish said, and uses the PGA Tour to market to prospective recreational golfers.
The state PRT already invests a lot of money in pro golf tournaments. It has been a financial backer of the RBC Heritage for decades, and also annually supports the BMW Charity Pro-Am in the Greenville area on the Korn Ferry Tour.
Parrish said the SCPRT contributes $250,000 annually to the Myrtle Beach tournament, a slightly larger amount to the RBC Heritage, and $75,000 to the BMW.
“We will help elevate this to a standalone event,” Parrish said. “I have and will push (the tour) for Myrtle Beach to be a standalone event, and I think we can get there.”
Parrish believes televised events such as the Myrtle Beach Classic are important to the state’s golf tourism industry, including to a large degree the Myrtle Beach market. The ONEflight, which received eight hours of coverage on Golf Channel last week, would receive more televised hours and likely more exposure on either CBS or NBC as a standalone event.
“From our standpoint, it’s about getting the guy in Kansas who is watching on television, who sees Calibogue Sound (in Hilton Head), who sees the Army Ranger paratroopers dropping down on the beach, he sees that and goes, ‘I want to play golf there,’ ” Parrish said. “That’s what it’s all about for us. Television coverage at any tournament is big for us.”
Getting the ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic to exist beyond 2027 will require an increased investment and cooperation from the PGA Tour.
“It will take everybody stepping up,” Parrish said. “But to have the event to where it is on Golf Channel on Thursday and Friday and CBS on Saturday and Sunday . . . that would allow us to step up our dollar amount. How much, I don’t know. It would depend on what the legislature budgets for us for sports marketing. It would depend on what’s needed here and all those things.
“But I think this tournament and this destination has a great future ahead for golf.”
