The Newport Beach Country Club touts the PGA Tour Champions event being held on its grounds this week as the longest-hosted event on the Champion’s tour “by a wide margin.”
It’s the 24th year the club has hosted it.
There’s been a few tweaks to the tournament’s swing—resulting mostly in birdies, but with a few mulligans—along the way.
Here’s an overview of some notable changes to Orange County’s only professional golf tournament:
n 1996: Toshiba Senior Classic moves from Mesa Verde Country Club to Newport Beach Country Club for the second annual Toshiba Senior Classic. The Orange County Sports Authority is brought in to run the show. The tourney loses money.
n 1997: After five years, Taco Bell hits a financial sand bunker and pulls out of the Taco Bell Newport Classic Pro-Am, the successor to Bing’s tourney, ending the 23-year run of the pro-am event in Newport Beach. Charities, a foremost reason for the pro-am and the new PGA senior event, reportedly get very little money.
n 1998: Enter Hoag Charity Sports as nonprofit operator of the newly named Toshiba Classic, and Jeff Purser’s recruitment as executive director by Deloitte Touche Senior Partner and tournament Chairman Hank Adler, to save Newport’s fledgling Champions’ event.
n Toshiba Classic skips 2017 after a scheduling change, moving the tournament back to its original spot on the calendar in March.
n 2019: Hello Hoag Classic. The hospital operator takes over for Toshiba as primary sponsor.
Along with Hoag, the event currently has about 200 sponsors, and utilizes about 800 volunteers over the course of the tournament. Nearly 50 local charities receive funds from the event.
