The PGA of New Zealand, founded by twelve golf professionals in 1913, has more than four hundred members serving around one hundred of the country’s clubs in the modern era. Their HQ is based in Auckland, co-located with New Zealand Golf at Remuera Golf Club, from where teaching services are delivered to golfers at all levels, from junior to senior, amateur and professional, men and women.

Both the New Zealand Amateur (1893) and New Zealand Open (1907) pre-date the first Professional Golfers Championship in 1909, when all three competitions took place the same week during the nation’s annual golf meeting. Four professional champions were crowned before the PGA was founded but they’re all recognized in the record books as bona fide title holders.

The competition was organized by the New Zealand Golf Council as a match play tournament up until 1963, when the PGA gained control of the event, converting it from a match play format to 72-hole stroke play contest. From that point on, the professionals went their own way, though some might say to the detriment of the championship once it stopped moving around the country annually.

The first edition of the competition in 1909 was played on the course at Auckland Golf Club’s former One Tree Hill location, which was rated with a bogey score of 86, including three par sixes in the first nine holes. Players had a number of hazards to negotiate here, including stone walls, sheep pens and outcrops of volcanic rock.

Twenty-year-old Joe Clements – who also won the New Zealand Open that same year – overcame all obstacles to win the first PGA final 3&2 against Fred Hood. Clements would eventually win a total of three Open titles and two PGAs so he was the first New Zealand-born professional to become prominent in the development of the game at that time.

Other overseas players made their mark in the formative years of the tournament: James Herd from Scotland won the second championship at Christchurch in 1910, beating Clements 6&5 in the final; Ted Douglas and Willie McEwan (another two Scots), lifted the trophy either side of World War I; and Joe Kirkwood Sr. from Australia beat Arthur East 3&2 at Hamilton in 1920.

But it was local hero Ernie Moss who became the first man to win three successive titles, starting in 1923 at Wanganui, and he would go on to triumph three times in the New Zealand Open between 1924 and 1933.

The next person to emerge as a golfing titan was Andrew Shaw, who learned how to play the game at Troon in Scotland before emigrating. Beginning in 1926, he contested nine of the following eleven PGA finals, winning six of them, and he also defeated reigning champion Alex Murray immediately after World War II in 1946 to claim a seventh title – the same number of New Zealand Opens that he captured between 1926 and 1936.

In the first eighteen editions played after the war – up until the parting of the ways with the New Zealand Golf Council in 1963 – Australian professionals, led by Peter Thompson at Otago in 1953, won seven of the PGA Championships that were staged around the country.

And that foreign dominance continued from the dawn of the new stroke play era at Mount Maunganui in 1965, when Barry Coxon from Sydney held off Bob Tuohy by two strokes to win the first PGA played under its then 3-round format which would change to four rounds the following year.

Until the tournament went into hibernation for fourteen years in 1988, nineteen of the twenty-three PGAs staged at that time were held at Mount Maunganui, with the other four events hosted less than ten miles away at Tauranga Golf Club.

During this residency at the Bay of Plenty, England’s Tony Jacklin won the championship after a playoff in 1967 – shortly before he became Open Champion at Royal Lytham & St Annes in 1969 then US Open Champion at Hazeltine 11 months later – and his Kiwi one-off victory was matched five years later by Jumbo Osaki from Japan, who enjoyed a seven stroke win over the field.

When the championship resumed in 2003 at Clearwater on the South Island, it stayed there for eight seasons before moving further south to The Hills for a couple of editions. It’s since gone back to the North Island to be hosted at Remuera (2015-16) then Manawatu (2017-18) before pitching up at Pegasus, outside Christchurch, in 2019.

Mount Maunganui has hosted 17 competitions, followed by Clearwater with 9, Christchurch with 7, then both Manawatu and Wanganui with 6.

You'll not find Miramar, Tauranga or Te Puke listed below, as they're currently not included in our New Zealand rankings.