CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WLOS) — This week, the 107th PGA Championship returns to Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte for the second time in a decade, with a Presidents Cup sandwiched in between.
Quail Hollow is no stranger to hosting professional golf tournaments; it was home to the Kemper Open between 1969 and 1979, a regular stop on the PGA Tour.
However, after those 11 events, professional golf disappeared from the Queen City for over 20 years until Club President Johnny Harris called Tom Fazio.
“So, he calls me probably in ’96 or ’97 and said, ‘Tom, we’re going to have a golf tournament and we’re bringing the PGA Tour back to Charlotte. Why don’t you come on down here and tell us what to do with our golf course, what should we be doing?'” Fazio said.
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At that point, Fazio already had decades of experience as a golf course architect.
“I go by decades,” Fazio said. “I don’t like to talk about years because it sounds like too many of them and people think you’re old.”
It was six years after Fazio reconstructed Quail Hollow Club when the PGA Tour returned to Charlotte. The Truist Championship, as it’s called now, has been played at Quail Hollow 19 times since 2003.
“One of the most important things at Quail when we started the process with major, long-range plan was, ‘How do you operate a golf event here?'” Fazio said. “‘How do you move people? How do you have the venue to put gallery, corporate sponsorship tents?’ That was all taken into account. It was about how do we make it the best it can be, and it didn’t matter whether we had to move greens or tees or adjust fairways.”
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Fazio, who has more than 200 course designs across the country, told News 13 it “never” stops being cool that his work is hosting a major championship.
Fazio, now 80 years old, is still doing his homework while visiting the property this week. He said he will be watching how the gallery moves, always on the lookout for a new addition.
“This could be a textbook for golf and for evaluation of how a club can go from one point to the next and now we have the best players in the world showing up to be tested again at Quail Hollow,” he said.
Of those more than 200 courses, 18 are in North Carolina. Fazio and his wife, Sue, founded the Henderson County Boys and Girls club in 1993 and have been a part of Western North Carolina’s DNA for decades.
