Get Ready to Enjoy a Tournament Season for the Ages in the Chicago Area

First I want to tell you about my new home base. In November, we made a dramatic move, buying a home in PGA Village, a golf hotbed in Port St. Lucie, Fla. The move came after five winters spent in various parts of the Sunshine State.

PGA Village is a place all golf enthusiasts would enjoy. The focal point is PGA Golf Club, the much bigger of the two facilities owned and operated by the PGA of America. (The other PGA of America facility is Valhalla, the Louisville, Ky., club that has hosted both the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup.)

While Valhalla is great for spectator golf, PGA Golf Club is the winter home for the PGA’s 28,000 members worldwide, as well as people like us, who just want to play. There are some pro and college tournaments during the winter months, but a quality course is always available.

PGA Golf Club has two Tom Fazio designs—the Ryder and Wanamaker courses—that opened in 1996 and two others that opened shortly thereafter. There’s the Dye Course, a recently renovated Pete Dye layout, and St. Lucie Trail, a once-private club that was recently opened to the public.

The PGA Village community also encompasses The Legacy, a private club not connected to the PGA courses, and the PGA’s spacious Learning Center and six-hole short course. We’ve taken a limited membership at The Legacy and also played all the PGA Golf Club courses at least once.

Sound good? It is, and there are plenty of quality, affordably priced public courses nearby as well. In short, if you’re an avid golfer and want to play year round, it’s be hard to beat PGA Village.

That said, it’ll also be hard to beat the golf competitions coming to the Chicago area starting in May—and I certainly don’t intend to miss any of them. After nearly 50 years reporting and commenting on golf Chicago-style, it would be foolish for me to bypass what will be the area’s best golf tournament season in at least 20 years.

The last season that I recall being even comparable to the upcoming one was in 1997—a year highlighted by the first of Tiger Woods’ three rousing victories in the Western Open at Cog Hill in Lemont and also Matt Kuchar’s U.S. Amateur win at Cog Hill and Graham Marsh’s victory in the U.S. Senior Open at Olympia Fields.

There has been one U.S. Open (2003 at Olympia Fields), one Ryder Cup (2012 at Medinah) and two PGA Championships (1999 and 2006 at Medinah) in the Chicago area since ’97, but those monumental events were scattered among different years. There was no bunching up of tournaments like 2017 will bring.

Here’s what makes the 2017 Chicago tournament schedule so special:

For starters, the PGA Tour is back, with the John Deere Classic returning to its usual July dates at the not-so-far-away Quad Cities and the BMW Championship returning for a final shootout at Conway Farms in Lake Forest. The BMW, which won’t be back in the Chicago area again until Medinah hosts the event in 2019, takes place in September, and it’ll be the climax to a season filled with big events.

The LPGA is bringing its first major championship to the area since 2000 (the U.S. Women’s Open at Merit Club in Libertyville) when the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship tees off at Olympia Fields in late June.

The next U.S. Open, which take place in mid-June, isn’t located far away—at Erin Hills in Wisconsin, barely an hour from Chicago’s northern suburbs. Golf’s premier American tournament hasn’t been played in the Chicago area since Jim Furyk’s win at Olympia Fields 14 years ago. This year’s will be well worth the trip across the state line.

The best college men’s and women’s players will be competing in their biggest tournament—the NCAA Championship—at Rich Harvest Farms in Sugar Grove in late May, and the Western Amateur stays on the North Shore for another year with a staging at Skokie Country Club in Glencoe in late July and early August. In a bonus for collegiate players the history-rich Women’s Western Amateur makes a rare Chicago appearance at River Forest Country Club mid-June. Additionally, the PGA’s satellite Web.com Tour returns to Ivanhoe for the second playing of the Rust-Oleum Classic in early June.

And then there’s the usual array of great local stuff—events like the Illinois Open, Illinois Women’s Open, Chicago District Amateur, Illinois State Amateur and Illinois PGA Championship, which run the risk of being lost in the shuffle with the glut of national events on the horizon.

The first of the season’s significant competitions is the Illinois PGA Match Play Championship from May 8–11 at Kemper Lakes. After that, it seems like there’s a big event every week through the BMW Championship

June is the busiest month with the Web.com Tour in the Chicago area for the Rust-Oleum Classic from June 5-11 before heading to Panther Creek in Springfield from June 19-25 for the Lincoln Land Classic. In between is Erin Hills’ U.S. Open, the first time that tournament has ever been played in Wisconsin. Before the month is out, the Chicago District Amateur will decide its champion and the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship will tee off.

There may never be another tournament year in Chicago like this one. The U.S. Open is booked through 2024, and no Chicago courses are on the calendar. There’s no Chicago sites among the future PGA Championship venues, either—they’ve been assigned through 2023.

The Women’s PGA Championship will hang around Chicago for another year, with dates set for Kemper Lakes in 2018, and a USGA championship—the U.S. Senior Open—also comes to Exmoor in Highland Park that year. Still, 2018 will be nothing like what awaits in the next seven months.

There’s something for everyone on the spectator front this year, and I’d recommend you mark the tournaments on your calendar right now. You won’t want miss a single shot.