It has been 53 years since Gary Player hoisted the Wanamaker Trophy at Oakland Hills Country Club ‑ the second of his two PGA Championship titles, and his sixth Major. So it's been more than half a century since a South African tasted success at what used to be the final Major of the year.

Since then, we have collected our fair share of men’s Majors – four US Opens, three Open Championships and two Masters titles. But no PGAs. In fact, in the past decade, only Louis Oosthuizen (runner-up in 2017 and 2021), Branden Grace (tie-fourth in 2016) and Erik van Rooyen (tie-eighth in 2019) have finished inside the top 10.

It’s a bizarrely barren statistic, given how competitive South African golf is at every level. This month, the task of correcting this anomaly is a tough, yet not impossible one. The PGA Championship returns to North Carolina’s Quail Hollow Club from 15-18 May with South Africans Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Erik van Rooyen, Thriston Lawrence, Dean Burmester, Daniel van Tonder and Garrick Higgo outsiders to reverse the trend.

Gallery below

They will be up against it on a course that feels like home turf to players on the PGA Tour. Quail Hollow has hosted a PGA Tour event every year since 2003 and lists recent Masters champion Rory McIlroy as a four-time winner here.

Two-time PGA champion Justin Thomas claimed his first Major here, back in 2017, while Xander Schauffele has finished runner-up at the Wells Fargo Championship for the past two years running. Throw in the usual suspects, including world No 1 Scottie Scheffler, Bryson Dechambeau, Brooks Koepka, Ludwig Aberg, Collin Morikawa and Viktor Hovland, and it’s hard to see a way through for the South African contingent.

Yet there is hope. The PGA Championship, arguably more than the rest of the Majors, is prone to the occasional shock result. David Toms, Rich Beem and Shaun Micheel from the early 2000s spring to mind, and you can add Keegan Bradley, Jason Dufner and Jimmy Walker to that list. There was another PGA bolter in 2021 when a 50-year-old Phil Mickelson sprang one of the biggest upsets in the event's history.

Bezuidenhout, the top-ranked South African golfer, has played on the PGA Tour for a few seasons and finished last year inside the top 30 on the moneylist. He finished tie-16th at the 2024 Wells Fargo Championship at Quail and was part of the International Team that contested the 2022 Presidents Cup here.

Van Rooyen seems to be finding his form again at a good time after finishing second at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson in early May and shooting up 35 places, from 101 to 66, in the World Ranking.

Burmester, who finished tie-12th last year at Valhalla, has won four times in the past 18 months, while Lawrence, now a full PGA Tour member, has four DP World titles to his name. He finished fourth at last year’s Open Championship, so he’s been in the mix before.

Van Tonder, the reigning Sunshine Tour Order of Merit champion, won four times this past season. This will be his third appearance at The PGA Championship, with a best result of tie-44th in 2021.

Meanwhile, Higgo earned himself an entry into the Major when he won the Corales Puntacana Championship in late April. It was his second PGA Tour victory, which has also earned him exemptions into the 2026 editions of The Sentry and The Players Championship, and he is fully exempt again on the PGA Tour through to 2027.

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