2020 PGA Championship could be played in May for Olympics

Jimmy Walker won the PGA Championship this year. (Getty Images)

This year’s PGA Championship was moved up several weeks from its typical August date to accommodate the sport’s return to the Olympic program.

What is usually the season’s final major appears set to be the second major of the year in 2020, when golf is again in the Olympic program in Tokyo.

Speaking at the PGA of America’s annual meeting in New York, CEO Pete Bevacqua said the organization is looking at a move that would put their championship in May and likely bump The Players Championship back to March, where it had been played for most of its existence prior to the May move in 2007.

“We are huge proponents of the Olympics. We are all about the Olympics, but we also have to protect the PGA Championship and we can’t just bounce the PGA Championship around every four years,” Bevacqua said, according to Golf Channel. “That’s something that, with our peer organizations in the game, with the PGA Tour, the USGA, the R&A, and the European Tour, everyone has to share in the burden of what the schedule is going to look like in an Olympic year.”

The 2020 PGA Championship will be played at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, which has a climate that gives the PGA of America a lot of flexibility in the dates the championship could be played.

However, from the sound of it, Bevacqua isn’t just talking about moving the PGA Championship for one year to May. In September at the Tour Championship, multiple reports suggested the PGA Tour could be considered a major schedule shake-up that would start with a new television deal. Those reports included floating the idea that the PGA Championship could move permanently to May, The Players would go back to March and the FedEx Cup playoffs would end on Labor Day weekend instead of at the end of September.

“To truly make it work, to make it succeed and to make sure golf is in the Olympics for the next century, the whole schedule needs to be adjusted,” he said.

While moving the PGA Championship has ramifications for which venues could host it in May, locking out a number of northern venues which might face dubious conditions in the event of a long winter, the change would cement more eyeballs on the tournament as the follow-on to the Masters, the most popular of the four majors in terms of TV viewers.

Ryan Ballengee is a Yahoo Sports contributor. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.

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