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Springfield, NJ | The plan arose out of necessity. After 60 years and four title sponsors, the LPGA Championship, the second-oldest continuous women’s tournament after the US Women’s Open, stands at a crossroads. Wegman’s, a Northeast grocery chain, moved the event to the Locust Hill Country Club at its headquarters in Rochester, New York, in 2010. The golf course was good, but it definitely wasn’t Oak Hill. And the city was, well, Rochester, good for the PGA Championship once a decade, but it wasn’t the city that would finish in the LPGA major year after year. So in 2014, with his contract expired and the event stalled at $2.25 million, Wegman exercised his option to opt out, leaving the LPGA Championship in the lurch.
Previous sponsors had included Mazda and McDonald’s, and the event had taken place all over the country—Massachusetts, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware—five years ago…