Brooks Koepka is part of a 123-player field this week at the ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic, where the winner at Dunes Golf and Beach Club will earn a spot in next week’s PGA Championship if he is not already exempt. On Tuesday, the tournament field also changed when Marco Penge withdrew and Taylor Montgomery took his place.
The event is being played on the Grand Strand of South Carolina, on a course that stretches 7,347 yards and features three par 5s. The bermudagrass greens can get to 12½ feet on the Stimpmeter, and the overseeded bermudagrass rough is 2½ inches this year. That setup helped keep scores in check in the first two editions of the tournament, when both cuts on the par 71 came at 2-under 140.
Chris Gotterup won the inaugural event in 2024 by six strokes, and last year scoring rose to 70.271 as the field found a little more freedom at Dunes. This week’s edition comes with more than local bragging rights attached: it is the first stop of three in the next phase of the Aon Swing 5, a points race that leads to the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday in the first week of June.
That race sits inside a crowded stretch of the PGA TOUR season that has already included the Masters, two majors, three Signature Events, a team competition and an Additional Event. As of Tuesday, 26 commits in Myrtle Beach already knew they would be headed to suburban Philadelphia for the PGA Championship, which leaves the rest of the field chasing one of golf’s cleaner rewards: play well at Dunes, and the road opens again next week.
The course itself is unchanged from last year, so returning players arrive with at least some sense of what the greens and rough will ask of them. Weather may add a wrinkle, with a reasonable chance of rain and daytime temperatures expected to peak in the 70s. That could matter more than usual on a track where a small miss can quickly turn into a lost stroke.
Koepka’s presence gives Myrtle Beach a little more star power than a typical Additional Event, but the tournament’s real pull is practical. A player can leave South Carolina with a place in the PGA Championship, or with a run of Aon Swing 5 points that keeps June in play. That is enough to make this week feel larger than a stop on the calendar.
