ARDEN, NORTH CAROLINA – SEPTEMBER 20: Jacob Bridgeman of the United States poses with the trophy after winning the Biltmore Championship Asheville 2026 at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove on September 20, 2026 in Arden, North Carolina. (Photo by Alex Slitz/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Jacob Bridgeman shot a career-best 61 Sunday to claim his second PGA Tour victory at the opening event of the FedExCup Fall slate and put a rising star’s name atop the inaugural Biltmore Championship Asheville leaderboard.
But the top circuit’s return to this mountain city after an eight-decade hiatus rippled far beyond the fairways at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove. As leaf season begins in earnest, the tournament offered a fresh vote of confidence in an Asheville visitor economy still regaining its footing.
Two years ago Hurricane Helene tore through Western North Carolina, leaving 107 people dead statewide and inflicting an estimated $59.6 billion in damage and recovery needs across the Tar Heel State.
Asheville, Western North Carolina’s largest city, and its surrounding communities were among the hardest hit. Flood-swollen waters from the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers overwhelmed neighborhoods and businesses, while mudslides battered roadways, homes were swept from their foundations, and power lines and other infrastructure were destroyed. The city’s River Arts District and Biltmore Village, two major visitor districts, were inundated during the storm. In the hardest-hit reaches of the former, floodwaters rose to the rooflines of some buildings.
Against that backdrop, Explore Asheville, the region’s tourism marketing arm, made a four-year, $2.4 million commitment to co-sponsor the tournament through 2029.
“Partnering with the PGA Tour has been the largest investment we’ve made in sports tourism,” said Vic Isley, president and CEO of Explore Asheville.
Talks to bring the tournament to Asheville began in August 2024, shortly before Helene hit. When they got back to the table in early 2025, Isley said, the effort took on a new urgency.
“We were all very focused on this tournament being part of our comeback,” she said.
Championship co-sponsor Biltmore shared that view, seeing the event as a chance to restore economic momentum.
“Business in this whole community, it’s been stuck,” Chase Pickering, Biltmore’s vice president of guest experience and a fifth-generation descendant of George and Edith Vanderbilt, said.
“What can we do to showcase the beauty, the vibrancy and the resiliency of this community? How do we get that out there on the world stage and show that Asheville, that Western North Carolina, is still a spectacular place?” he added.
The last time golf’s top circuit rolled into these parts was the 1942 Land of the Sky Open and Ben Hogan topped the leaderboard for his third consecutive victory in the Asheville event.
Biltmore’s own links to the game have deep roots. George Vanderbilt’s property maintained a nine-hole golf course along the French Broad River in the late 1890s. Edith Vanderbilt and her daughter, Cornelia, later helped establish Biltmore Forest Country Club in 1922.
Biltmore, a co-sponsor of the championship, has deep ties to Asheville golf history (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Skyview’s Enduring Legacy
Despite an 84-year absence of PGA Tour action, the Asheville area continued to build a rich mountain-golf history in the interim. In 1960, local Black golfers and community leaders kickstarted the Skyview Golf Tournament, in an era when racial barriers made access to the sport severely restricted. A year later, the tournament was open to all races. Six decades on, Skyview remains Western North Carolina’s longest-running tourney and the country’s oldest Black-owned and operated golf tournament.
Part of that legacy is Asheville Municipal golf course, Skyview’s longtime home and the focal point of the documentary Muni, narrated by Hootie & the Blowfish frontman and avid golfer Darius Rucker. After Hurricane Helene inflicted extensive damage on the Donald Ross-designed municipal course, the tournament temporarily relocated to the Country Club of Asheville last year, and will be played there again this year while the course continues its recovery from storm damage.
Skyview gave many Black golfers a competitive outlet in an era when such opportunities were scarce. Among them was Lee Elder, a four-time champion who would go on to become the first Black golfer to compete in the Masters. Other notable participants included heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis; Jim Dent, a 12-time PGA Tour Champions winner; and Jim Thorpe, whose 21 professional victories included a three-stroke win over Jack Nicklaus at the 1985 Greater Milwaukee Open.
“SkyView does have a very good name for projecting people into the upper echelons of golf. Other than Tiger Woods, Charles Sifford and Calvin Peete, all the other names that got onto the tour played and spent many years cutting their teeth, learning and coming here,” Matthew Bacoate Jr., president of the Skyview Golf Association and a longtime Asheville community advocate, said. Peete was an exception. He never entered the tournament, Bacoate noted, but made a couple of appearances around Skyview in the 1960s. Long before becoming the Tour’s preeminent fairway finder—leading all players in driving accuracy for a decade—Peete sold jewelry from the trunk of his station wagon in the clubhouse parking lot.
Skyview’s history is interlinked with Bacoate’s wider civil-rights work. In 1959, he spearheaded the integration of Asheville’s Star Lanes Bowling Center by securing Sunday-evening access for Black bowlers.
“I’ve always had the attitude and worked to change social conditions wherever I saw it,” he said.
Current LIV Golf player Harold Varner III is a more recent name connected to the event. “He played for four years as a kid in the youth program and played in 2015 as a pro,” Bacoate said. Skyview’s 66th edition wraps up Tuesday.
The Tourism Tail Beyond Tournament Week
For Explore Asheville, the tournament’s potential payoff extends beyond gallery size and hotel rooms booked during an inaugural running that sold out three of its four tournament rounds. The tour’s return put Blue Ridge Mountains golf in front of a national audience, exposure that can influence future trip-planning decisions of the travel-golf set.
“We have a four-year agreement between ourselves, Biltmore, the PGA Tour and The Cliffs at Walnut Cove, and we are confident that stay-and-play travel is only going to increase year over year,” Isley said.
The championship came mere weeks after the Omni Grove Park Inn hosted the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting, a formal gathering of the world’s major economic powers. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hosted the to-do, which followed an earlier G20 deputies session in Asheville.
So, the city has rolled out the welcome mat to financial masters of the universe and a field of world-class ball-strikers—certainly two enviable group-travel sets in tight succession, and perhaps a sign that Asheville is decidedly back in the saddle as a big-event host.
Leave a comment