The Best Weekend in Golf — A Love Letter to the PNC Championship

The Best Weekend in Golf — A Love Letter to the PNC Championship There is a moment that happened on the fourth hole of the final round of the 2024 PNC Championship that does not belong in a sports highlight reel. It belongs somewhere else — in the category of things that remind you, without warning and without asking permission, what actually matters. What is actually worth paying attention to. What the game of golf, at its most human and most honest, is actually capable of producing.

Charlie Woods, fifteen years old, standing on the tee of a 178-yard par-3 at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club in Orlando, Florida, hit a 7-iron with a little cut in it. He did not see it go in. He called for it to cut as it tracked toward the flag and it did, and it pitched about six feet short of the cup and released forward and disappeared, and Charlie Woods did not know what happened until the roar came — the specific, unmistakable roar of a gallery that has just witnessed something it did not expect and cannot quite believe. He stood there for a moment, uncomprehending, his body language asking the question his mouth had not yet formed. Did that really just happen?

And then his father came.

Tiger Woods had stepped away for a moment and missed the shot entirely. He came back to the sound of the crowd and found his son standing at the tee with a gallery going completely undone around him, and Tiger understood immediately what had happened, and the smile that crossed his face — not the fist-pump smile, not the Sunday red closing-in-on-a-major smile, but the specific, unguarded, completely private smile of a father watching his child experience something wonderful for the first time — that smile was the whole tournament in a single expression. He gave Charlie a bear hug. He gave him a playful shove. Sam Woods, Tiger's daughter, was on the bag and had a front row seat to her little brother's first career hole-in-one.

The whole family was there. That is what this tournament is about. That is what this tournament has always been about.

Tiger said it himself after the round, in words that cut through every year of majors and trophies and world rankings and surgical comebacks and everything else his career has contained: "That was the thrill of a lifetime to be able to have that moment with Charlie, make his first hole-in-one, Sam on the bag, just our family and friends. That's what this event is about. It's about bonding and family."

The thrill of a lifetime. Not Augusta in 1997. Not the putt on 18 at Torrey Pines in 2008 on a broken leg. Not the comeback at Augusta in 2019 that made the world feel, briefly and completely, that anything was still possible. The thrill of a lifetime was his fifteen-year-old son making his first hole-in-one with his daughter on the bag and his family around him on a Sunday morning in December in Orlando, Florida.

If you do not understand why a person who loves golf would cry watching that, this article is for you.

What the Tournament Actually Is The PNC Championship began in 1995 as the Father-Son Challenge — a simple and beautiful idea created by the International Management Group to give major champions the opportunity to compete alongside their children. The eligibility requirement has never been complicated: win a major championship or the Players Championship, and you earn an invitation to bring your family to Orlando in December and play two rounds of scramble golf against the other families who earned the same right.

The scramble format is deliberate and important. Both players hit from every position and choose the best shot to play from next. The professional's game and the child's game are woven together on every hole — the father's experience and the child's energy, the parent's course management and the kid's fearlessness, the decades of accumulated knowledge meeting the unfiltered joy of someone who has not yet learned to be afraid of a golf course. The combination produces golf that looks nothing like a regular Tour event and feels nothing like one either. It feels like what it is: a family playing a game they love, with something on the line, in front of people who came to watch not because they need to see perfection but because they need to see this.

The tournament has evolved since 1995. Daughters joined the field. Fathers of professionals joined. Grandchildren joined. Grandfathers joined. Annika Sorenstam played alongside her father in 2019 — the first female major champion in the field, walking onto a course that had been built for father-son pairs and making it immediately larger. The name changed to the PNC Championship in 2020 to reflect what it had become: not a father-son event but a family event, the most inclusive and the most genuinely joyful two days on the entire professional golf calendar.

The Willie Park Trophy, awarded to the winners, is a red leather belt with sterling silver embellishments — modeled after the prize given at the very first Open Championship in 1860, won by Willie Park Sr., whose son Willie Park Jr. later won the same title. Father and son. The belt was designed for exactly this purpose, before this tournament existed, by a game that has always understood that the passing of something from one generation to the next is one of the most sacred things it produces.

The Families That Made It What It Is Bernhard Langer has won the PNC Championship six times. Six. With three different family members — his sons Stefan and Jason, and his daughter Christina. The first win with Jason came in 2014 when Jason was fourteen years old, a child competing alongside one of the most decorated players in the history of Champions Tour golf, and they won by two strokes. The most recent came in 2024 when Bernhard made an eagle putt on the first playoff hole to beat Tiger and Charlie Woods, and he raised his arms in celebration and then immediately said about the Woods: "I'm convinced they are going to win this thing in the next few years. They are just too good." A competitor, in his own moment of victory, stopping to celebrate the family he had just beaten. That is not sportsmanship as performance. That is the PNC Championship producing the thing it was designed to produce.

John Daly and John Daly II won the 2021 PNC Championship with a final round 59, finishing two shots ahead of Tiger and Charlie. John Daly II — a senior at Arkansas and the Southern Amateur champion — had his father's swing and his father's fearlessness and none of his father's reservations about using either. The younger Daly hit drives that made the galleries lean forward the way galleries lean forward for exactly one reason. The father who had spent thirty years showing the world what grip it and rip it looked like had produced a son who had learned the lesson completely. That week in Orlando, with everything that John Daly's career contained and everything his son's career was beginning to contain, was the most Daly possible way for that chapter of the story to go. They won on a Sunday in December and it was exactly right.

Justin Thomas and his father Mike — a longtime Kentucky club professional and the only coach Justin Thomas has ever had — won the 2020 PNC Championship, and Justin said afterward that it was one hundred percent the most enjoyable tournament he had ever played. A man with a major championship and thirteen PGA Tour wins at the time said that a scramble tournament in December with his father was the most enjoyable event of his career. That is not false modesty. That is what the PNC Championship is and what it does to the people who play it.

Matt Kuchar and his son Cameron won in 2024 in a record-smashing performance — an eighteen-under 54, seven shots clear of the field — in the year that Matt's father had passed away in February. He gave Cameron the final tap-in. He wiped away tears afterward. He said he didn't know if you believe in karma or fate or whatever you believe in, but something magical exists. Something that brought his son to that course in that year to win that trophy in the specific way they won it. The PNC Championship held that for him. Golf held that for him. The game that waits held that for him.

The Moment That Made You a Different Kind of Fan You do not have to be a golfer to feel what happened on the fourth hole at Orlando in December 2024. You do not have to know what a 7-iron is or understand the scramble format or have any investment in who wins the Willie Park Trophy. You just have to know what it looks like when a parent watches their child experience something wonderful for the first time and cannot contain the joy of it. You just have to know what a family looks like when the world outside disappears for two days and what remains is this — a course, a game, each other, the morning.

Tiger Woods spent fifteen years building the most decorated career in the history of professional golf and another decade fighting his body to keep playing at all. He has won 82 PGA Tour events. He has fifteen majors. He has reconstructed his swing multiple times and reconstructed his body even more times and come back from things that should have ended careers and come back from things that should have ended more than careers. He has been the most scrutinized, most analyzed, most documented golfer in the history of the game.

And the thrill of a lifetime was Charlie's first hole-in-one.

Sam on the bag. Charlie at the tee. Tiger coming back to the sound of the crowd and finding his son surrounded by people who had just watched something they will never forget. The bear hug. The playful shove. The smile that was not for the cameras or the broadcast or the history books. The smile that was for Charlie and for the morning and for the specific, irreplaceable feeling of being a father on a golf course with your children when everything goes exactly right.

That is a feeling that does not require a major championship to access. It does not require a world ranking or a tour card or a trophy. It requires a golf course and a family and a willingness to show up together and let the game do what the game always does — strip away everything that is not essential and leave you standing in the fairway with the people you love most, on a morning that will not come again, on a course that will never be exactly this course again, with everything you have and everything you are.

The PNC Championship gives that to twenty families every December. It gives it to the people watching. It gives it — if you let it — to every golfer who has ever played this game alongside someone they love, who has ever stood on a tee box and looked down the fairway and felt the weight of what the moment actually contains, which is not the score or the handicap or the outcome. Which is the person standing next to you.

What Is Coming Charlie Woods is fifteen years old and hits drives that travel over three hundred yards with a clubhead speed that matches the PGA Tour average. His first eagle and his first hole-in-one came in consecutive holes at the 2024 PNC Championship, on a national stage, in the final round, while competing for a championship. He club-twirls after good drives — a gesture so precisely his father's that the broadcast shows them side by side, Tiger at fifteen and Charlie at fifteen, the same motion, the same follow-through, the same unhurried confidence in the hands that produced the shot.

Bernhard Langer told Tiger and Charlie, directly and without flattery, that they are going to win this tournament several times in the near future. That they are just too good. He said it as a competitor who had just beaten them. He said it because it is true and because this tournament is the kind of place where the truth travels easily between competitors, because the competition here is in service of something larger than the leaderboard.

Justin Thomas and Mike Thomas will come back. Davis Love III and his son Dru will come back. John Daly and John Daly II, whose combined swagger and combined swing length represents something completely unique in the history of this event, will come back. The Langers, who have now made winning the Willie Park Trophy a family tradition across multiple children, will come back. And Tiger and Charlie will come back — in matching Sunday red, with Sam on the bag, with the specific competitive fire that runs in both of them and that the PNC Championship channels into something that has nothing to do with the world ranking and everything to do with December mornings in Orlando when the game belongs to families and the families belong to each other.

For Every Dad Who Has Ever Handed a Club to a Kid As a new father, there is a specific and private version of the PNC Championship that exists in your imagination long before it exists on any golf course. It is the version where the child in your arms right now is standing on a tee box one day with a club in their hands, and you are standing next to them, and the morning is as wide open as a fairway in December, and whatever happens next happens together. The score does not matter. The handicap does not matter. The outcome does not matter.

What matters is the child's face when the ball leaves the club and goes where it was supposed to go. What matters is the specific joy of watching someone you love discover what this game feels like from the inside — the pure, uncomplicated, completely available joy of a shot struck well on a beautiful piece of land on a morning that belongs entirely to the two of you.

The PNC Championship is the professional version of that feeling. It is twenty families on a golf course in December, competing for a trophy, playing the game they love in front of the people they love most. It is Tiger Woods coming back to the sound of a crowd and finding Charlie's first hole-in-one waiting for him. It is Matt Kuchar wiping tears and giving his son the final tap-in in the year his own father passed. It is John Daly and John Daly II shooting 59 together in a way that could only have been produced by those two specific people with those two specific swings carrying all that shared DNA.

It is the best weekend in golf. Not because of the scores or the trophies or the names in the field, though all of those things are extraordinary. Because of what the game gives back when you play it with your family, on a morning in December, with nothing between you and the shot but everything you are and everyone you love.

Golf has been waiting to give you that morning. It will wait as long as it takes.

Go play it with your kid.

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