Eugenio Chacarra finished today in China, with an eleventh place in the Hainan Classic, achieving the goal of getting into the PGA Championship through the Asian Swing of the DP World Tour, a section of the calendar that concluded today and whose partial ranking awarded three spots for the second Major of the season (besides the Spaniard, the Japanese Nakajima and the Englishman Penge, winner of the Hainan Classic, also qualified).
This was a new entry point to this Major, introduced this year following the agreement reached by the European circuit and the PGA of America to enhance and add incentives to this part of the season, which the Madrid player has masterfully taken advantage of, making the most of an invitation he received to play in India, where he won the tournament, and then achieving the goal with a fourth place in the Volvo China Open and the aforementioned eleventh in Hainan.
And debuting in the PGA is no small feat. The first Spaniard to play this Major was Manuel de la Torre in 1959, the son of the legendary Ángel de la Torre, who was the first Spaniard to play the Open (1920) and the US Open (1925). Well, Chacarra will be the 18th Spaniard to play it. Here is the list of names, each with the year of their first appearance in the PGA:
1.Manuel de la Torre (1959)
2.Seve Ballesteros (1981)
3.Manuel Piñero (1986)
3.José María Cañizares (1986)
5.José María Olazábal (1987)
6.Miguel Ángel Jiménez (1995)
7.Nacho Garrido (1997)
8.Sergio García (1999)
9.Gonzalo Fernández Castaño (2006)
10.Pablo Larrazábal (2008)
11.Álvaro Quirós (2009)
12.Rafa Cabrera Bello (2012)
13.Jon Rahm (2017)
14.Jorge Campillo (2019)
14.Adrián Otaegui (2019)
16.Adri Arnaus (2022)
17.David Puig (2024)
18.Eugenio Chacarra (2025)
