The Hall of Fame began in 1974 as a local project at the Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina, privately operated by the Diamondhead Corporation. Its inaugural class of 13 members included Walter Hagen, Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Sam Snead -- names that needed no committee to establish their greatness. But the institution grew beyond one resort's ambition. The PGA of America took over management in 1983 and acquired full ownership in 1986. Meanwhile, the LPGA had been running its own Hall of Fame for women's golf since 1951, with charter members Patty Berg, Betty Jameson, Louise Suggs, and Babe Zaharias. In 1998, the women's hall merged into the World Golf Hall of Fame, creating something unusual in American sports: a single institution honoring both men and women competitors equally.

In 1994, the global golf industry established the World Golf Foundation to promote the sport, and a grander Hall of Fame was its centerpiece. Construction began in 1996 at World Golf Village in St. Johns County, Florida, between Jacksonville and St. Augustine. The museum building, designed by E. Verner Johnson and Associates of Boston, opened on May 19, 1998. Exhibition spaces designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates told the story of golf's history, heritage, and techniques through permanent and rotating displays. For a quarter century, the Florida campus served as the sport's memory palace, welcoming visitors to exhibits on course design, equipment evolution, and the personalities who shaped the game. The PGA of America's own 1940-era hall was folded in during the 1980s, consolidating three separate halls of fame into one. The Florida facility closed in September 2023, and the Hall returned to where it started -- Pinehurst, North Carolina, where the new USGA Golf House opened in 2024.

The Hall's induction criteria have been rewritten almost as many times as the course record at Augusta. From 1996 to 2013, members entered through five categories: PGA Tour, LPGA Tour, International, Lifetime Achievement, and Veterans. Male competitors needed 10 PGA Tour wins or two major victories. LPGA players qualified through a point system -- one point per tour win, two for a major, one for a Vare Trophy or Player of the Year -- needing 27 total. In 2014, the system was overhauled into four categories. The minimum age was set at 40, raised to 50 in 2016, then lowered to 45 in 2020. By 2020, the categories had been simplified again to just two: Competitor and Contributor. Elections now happen every other year, with a 30-member nominating committee selecting 10 candidates and a 20-member selection committee requiring a 75 percent vote. Each class is capped at five inductees. The constant tinkering reflects a genuine challenge: how to measure greatness across eras, tours, genders, and continents in a sport with no single governing body.

The membership list reveals golf's reach far beyond the fairway. Two U.S. Presidents are members -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, inducted in 2009, and George H. W. Bush, inducted in 2011. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope earned their places not for their scorecards but for founding PGA Tour events that became American institutions. Course architects Donald Ross, Robert Trent Jones, Alister MacKenzie, and Pete Dye were recognized for shaping the landscapes where the game is played. Golf writers Bernard Darwin, Herbert Warren Wind, and Dan Jenkins were inducted for the way they told the game's stories. Charlie Sifford, who broke professional golf's color barrier, was inducted for lifetime achievement. And in 2023, the LPGA's 13 founding members -- including Alice Bauer, Helen Hicks, and Shirley Spork -- were finally inducted as a group, a recognition decades overdue. By the time the Florida campus closed, there were over 160 members, a testament to a sport that has always understood that greatness shows up in many forms.