Charlotte got close to two inches of rain by lunchtime on Thursday, which is the kind of weather number that does not so much delay a golf tournament as rewrite it. The Truist Championship, the signature event the PGA Tour likes to position as the warm-up to the second major of the year, was supposed to begin at first light at Quail Hollow. The first tee time eventually went off at twelve-thirty in the afternoon. The format had been changed twice by then. The two-balls that had been on the pairings sheet on Wednesday evening had become threesomes off split tees by Thursday morning, and even those threesomes were sent off later than the revised schedule had promised. None of that is unusual for May in the Carolinas. The unusual thing was the silence with which the Tour absorbed it.
There is a particular kind of resignation that settles over a major-rota golf course when the weather has the upper hand. The marshals stand under umbrellas. The merchandise tent fills up. The players sit in the locker room and look at their phones, which is what professional athletes do when the alternative is being told for the third time in two hours that the rain is not done with the property. A weather delay at a signature event is a small economic disaster as well as a competitive one. The pro-am the title sponsor wanted on Wednesday was already curtailed. The first-round broadcast window the Tour sold to the networks contracted by the hour.
A round nobody finished
By the time the horn sounded for the day, the field had been split into the players who got around in the late afternoon and the players who would return early Friday to complete a round-and-a-bit before starting the second. The leader, in any meaningful sense, did not exist. There were players in red figures on the front nine of their first round, players in red figures who had played fifteen holes, and players who had played nothing at all. The leaderboard the Tour put on the broadcast had a column of asterisks that was wider than the column of scores.
This is a familiar shape for a Quail Hollow opening round. The course sits in a pocket of the Carolinas that catches frontal weather in early May the way a saucer catches tea. The 2017 PGA Championship, several Wells Fargo editions across the last two decades, and the original Truist Championship cycle that began in 2024 have all at some point conceded a day to rain. What changes is what the Tour decides to do about it, and what the players decide to do with the day they get back. In 2026 the answer to the first question was the rolling switch to threesomes. The answer to the second will not be clear until Friday afternoon.
A field that has lost its number one
Scottie Scheffler, who arrived at Aronimink last week as the favourite for the second major of the year, decided not to play the Truist at all. Scheffler has been clear for the better part of a year that he treats the week before a major as a preparation week rather than a competitive one. The world number one is also the defending PGA champion. He has earned the right to manage his own calendar.
The absence still left the Truist field thinner than the Tour would have liked. Rory McIlroy, in his first start since winning the Masters for a second consecutive April, is the headline act in Scheffler’s place. The McIlroy-at-Quail-Hollow narrative has been a fixture of the Tour for fifteen years, since his first PGA Tour win at the 2010 Quail Hollow Championship, and he arrives this week with multiple wins on the course and the look of a player whose game is in the most settled state of his career. Justin Rose, Cameron Young, Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele round out the upper half of the betting.
The Sevy shirts
The other story Thursday produced was not a competitive one. May the seventh marked the fifteenth anniversary of Seve Ballesteros’s death, and the European-born players in the field had agreed in advance to mark it the way the Ryder Cup teams of the early 2000s used to: a navy trouser and a white polo shirt, the colours Seve wore on the final day of the 1988 Open at Royal Lytham, and which his teammates have made into the closest thing to a uniform their game has. McIlroy wore them. So did Rose. Kristoffer Reitan, the Norwegian whose first signature event this is, asked the wardrobe staff at Quail Hollow on Wednesday evening whether they could find him a pair of plain navy trousers in his size, and they did.
The tribute was not announced. The Tour did not put it on the broadcast graphic. The first time anyone watching at home would have noticed it was when McIlroy walked onto the first tee at one in the afternoon and the camera lingered on his shoes long enough to take in the trousers. There was a moment, on the broadcast, when one of the analysts asked whether the white polo was a sponsor change. The other analyst, who had played alongside Seve, said that no, it was not, and did not elaborate. That was about right. The players who organised the gesture did not want it to become the story. They wanted, on the day, for it simply to be there.
What Friday will need to be
The forecast for Friday is better. The Tour has announced that the second round will begin in threesomes off split tees at first light, with completion of the first round running alongside it, and the cut, if the schedule holds, falling some time on Saturday morning. None of this is ideal for a tournament the Tour wanted to use as a clean warm-up for next week’s major at Aronimink. Most of the players will tell their caddies that what they want from Friday is a normal eighteen holes of golf. What they will get is not that, but the field is professional enough, and the venue familiar enough, that by Saturday evening the leaderboard will have organised itself into a recognisable shape. The major next week will not wait. Quail Hollow knows it. The players know it. The weather, having had its turn, will probably know it too.