Championships

São Paulo Golf Club is the oldest club in Brazil, formed in 1901, so the game has been played in an organized format for well over a century in this country. The national Amateur championship was inaugurated in 1929, with the first edition played at Gávea in Rio de Janeiro. The early years of hosting this event then alternated between Gávea and São Paulo (apart from 1933 when it was played on the 9-hole course at Santos São Vicente).

Organized golf has been played in Mexico since 1894, when the Club de Golf Santa Gerturdis was founded by Scottish jute workers in Orizaba, Veracruz. More than a dozen other clubs were then established around the country before the formation of the Federación Mexicana de Golf in 1926.

The first Abierto de Argentina (Argentine Open) took place on 7th September 1905 when it was called the Río de la Plata Open Championship, with 42 amateurs and only two professionals participating in the inaugural 36-hole competition.

The Golf Coaches Association of America approached Arnold Palmer in 1997 with regard to him lending his name to an international collegiate competition between the United States and Great Britain and Ireland. The event would be played in a Ryder Cup-style format, bringing together the top university and college players on either side of the Atlantic. Of course, Arnie was only too keen to agree to this request.

The Australian Amateur championship started out as the Victorian Golf Cup in 1894, with Melbourne Golf Club organizing a tournament which was open to all amateur players in the country. Both the inaugural event and the second edition were bogey competitions over three 18-hole rounds before the 1896 Amateur switched to a match play contest with the final played over thirty-six holes.

The Australian Golf Union was formed in 1898 and the following year it organized the first official Australian Amateur Championship. However, since 1894 Melbourne Golf Club had organized an event open to all amateurs in Australia (the Victorian Gold Cup). Now the tournament had the authority of a national governing body in control of proceedings.

During the first sixty years of the Australian PGA Championship, most of the editions were played as a match play contest, with qualification for the tournament dependant on scores posted in the Australian Open the week before. Scottish-born players dominated the early years of the event with Dan Soutar and Carnegie Clark – both friends hailing from the golf nursery of Carnoustie – winning the first six editions of the competition, starting in 1905 with Soutar defeating Gilbert Martin 4&3 in the final at Royal Melbourne.

The first Australian Women’s Amateur Championship was played in 1894. It was held at Geelong in Victoria as a 36-hole Bogey Competition and seventeen players took part with handicaps ranging from scratch to 24. Competitors played for the Championship Cup (which cost 25 pounds to purchase) and the first competitor to be presented with it was Eveline McKenzie from Victoria.

Established in 1990, the Austrian Open is a men’s professional tournament on the European Tour. After seven editions, it dropped down to the Challenge Tour between 1997 and 2005 before returning to the main circuit. Like nearly all championships at this level, it’s played over four rounds at a designated venue, with a sudden-death playoff taking place if two or more players are tied on the same aggregate score.

The BMW Championship has its origins in the Western Open, which ran from 1899 to 2006, before the great god of golfing commercialism dictated that a brand new tournament was the best way to keep pace with the modern world and all its pecuniary benefits. And so, a hundred years of American golfing tradition was cast aside in favor of a shiny new professional event sponsored by the German multinational company Bayerische Motoren Werke AG.