The penultimate event of the PGA Tour playoffs is headed east.
The BMW Championship will move from the Chicago area to Caves Valley Golf Club in Owings Mills, Md., next year, the tour announced Thursday.
According to the Baltimore Sun, the PGA Tour most recently played an event in the Baltimore area in 1962, when the Eastern Open Invitational was held at Baltimore’s Mount Pleasant Municipal Golf Club.
The tour did hold the Quicken Loans National in Maryland from 2012-14 and 2016-18, but those events were played at Congressional Country Club and TPO Potomac at Avenel Farm, both in Washington suburbs.
Caves Valley, which opened in 1991, is rated No. 152 in Golf Digest’s list of greatest U.S. courses. It has hosted NCAA men’s and women’s championships as well as the 1995 U.S. Mid-Amateur and the 2002 U.S. Senior Open.
The BMW Championship has been played in five states since joining the FedEx Cup playoff rotation. It originally replaced the Western Open as the Chicago area’s PGA Tour stop when it was held at Cog Hill in Lemont, Ill., in 2007, but it since has been contested at Bellerive in Town and Country, Mo.; Cherry Hills Country Club in Cherry Hills Village, Colo.; Crooked Stick in Carmel, Ind.; Conway Farms in Lake Forest, Ill.; Aronimink in Newtown Square, Pa.; and Medinah (Ill.) Country Club.
The 2020 BMW Championship is set to be held Aug. 20-23 at Olympia Fields (Ill.) Country Club’s North Course.
Justin Thomas is the defending champion, having topped Patrick Cantlay by three strokes last August.
Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson are the only two-time winners of the BMW Championship. Woods triumphed in 2007 and 2009 at Cog Hill, and Johnson emerged victorious in 2010 at Cog Hill and 2016 at Crooked Stick.
–Field Level Media
