PGA Championship 2018: Schedule, tee times, and other info you need for Thursday

The first round of the final major tees off bright and early from St. Louis on Thursday. The 100th PGA Championship features the deepest major field of the year and a full helping of questions about the course and its conditioning. Those questions always tend to consume the practice days at a major, but there appear to be some real problems given the heat and humidity and water that have stressed this Bellerive track out all summer.

Hopefully, we can set those aside and now just watch the best in the world play for the final men’s major of the year. Tiger Woods is back after a three-year absence from the PGA and he’ll tee off in the early half of the draw. So ignore your work and dive into the first round of what will be our last major for an interminable, cold eight months. Here are some of the nuts and bolts for the first round.

Thursday’s first round coverage

The PGA television deal is antiquated. There is no other way to put it. The Masters TV arrangement is antiquated by choice — they want limited TV coverage and people mad and fiending for it. The U.S. Open and British Open have modern TV deals, in that there’s basically a broadcast up and running for the entire tournament and you’re not going to miss anything important. Those are relatively new contracts with FOX and Golf Channel, which goes a little crazy at The Open and shows almost 50 damn hours through the night for four days.

The PGA deal? Well, we get six hours each of the first two rounds. That’s the same as The Players and even the WGC Match Play, and close to several other regular old PGA Tour events. It’s just not commensurate with what we should get for a major. We should be able to watch almost from the start and drop in throughout. Instead, TNT won’t be live on Thursday until 2 p.m. ET.

That should be right about the time Tiger Woods is finishing up his first round alongside Justin Thomas and Rory McIlroy. Of course there will be streaming options, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense for TNT to just be running episodes of Charmed and Supernatural all morning when there’s a major and Tiger Woods is playing in it for the first in three years!

Anyways, the TV coverage should feature lots of technology, most importantly, buckets of TopTracer on every tee and several roamers in the fairways. It’s just, I wish it was on more these first two days. Here are your coverage options for Thursday:

Television

2 to 8 p.m. -- TNT

Online streams

Radio

Noon to 8 p.m. — PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 92/208) or on PGA.com

TEE TIMES

The PGA is a logistical marvel. It does not have the benefit of as much daylight as the U.S. Open, which falls during the longest days of the year. The British Open, of course, has all the daylight you could need and only needs to send the players off one tee rolling across 11 hours. They always have ample time and rarely get the kind of storms that suspend play.

But the PGA? The PGA has less daylight and often deals with a prime thunderstorm season, as we saw through most of the practice days this week. It’s got the same size field as the two Opens — 156 players deep — but always needs a bit of good fortune to get everything done on time the first 36 holes.

It appears we’ll get some good weather these first two days, when that 156-man field will be off split tees in groups of three for some sun-up to sun-down golf. Here’s your tee sheet for the opening round (all times ET)