Marco Penge withdrew from the ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic on Wednesday because of health reasons, pulling out of the PGA Tour opposite-field event just days before he is due to play the PGA Championship.
The 27-year-old Englishman said on X that the pga tour golfer withdrawal was not for anything serious, adding that he needed to be fully fit for next week at Aronimink. Penge is ranked 39th in the world and will make his sixth major appearance at the PGA Championship.
Penge’s absence is a setback for a player whose 2025 form lifted him into the top tier of the game. He won three times in six months on the DP World Tour and nearly caught Rory McIlroy in the Race to Dubai, then secured his PGA Tour card for the 2026 season. Last month, he made the cut on his Masters debut at Augusta National and finished tied for 49th, and in March he finished tied fourth at the Valspar Championship.
The withdrawal leaves him with work to do in a rookie PGA Tour season that has already brought five missed cuts in 11 starts. The Myrtle Beach Classic at Dunes Golf and Beach Club in South Carolina lost its sixth player of the week when Penge stepped aside, after Andrew Putnam and Austin Smotherman also withdrew. Alternates Troy Merritt and James Hahn were added to complete the field, with Brooks Koepka headlining the tournament.
For Penge, the calculation is straightforward: skip one week, get healthy and keep the focus on a major championship that arrives with much more at stake than an opposite-field stop. If he is able to tee it up at Aronimink next week, the larger test will be whether his strong start to life among golf’s elite can survive a brief interruption.
