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Hopefully, the aspirational revised schedule the PGA Tour released last week happens just the way it’s been laid out, starting in early June at Colonial Country Club when the Texas summer heat is just getting started, rolling through Hilton Head Island and on from there to a sweaty, satisfying conclusion at the FedEx Cup finale in Atlanta in early September.
If that seems optimistic to you, you’re not alone.
Not because the PGA Tour isn’t earnest and intent on doing all the right things to make this happen, because it appears it is. Commissioner Jay Monahan has a gift for knowing the right thing to do and doing it, a trait that runs through his team. Monahan leads with three invaluable assets – his head, his heart and common sense.
Nevertheless, this is a unique and unforgiving challenge in which the long view feels like the one that matters the most, no matter how much we all want to speed the quarantine clock.
“It seems like the answer to every question right now is I don’t know,” Charles Howell III said last week. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt further away from a golf tournament with what this country and everyone is going through.”
Part of getting through this frightening pandemic is finding a goal and working toward it. Flattening the curve. Social distancing. Restarting tournament golf.
Those three items rank 1, 2 and somewhere far down the list of priorities these days but there are reasons to think the PGA Tour could be part of the so-called “re-opening of America” starting in the great state of Texas.
It wants to be. It’s trying to be. We want it to be.
Even if there is no one there to watch but caddies and rules officials, think about how good it will be to hear (even if it’s figuratively from a thousand miles away) the sound of the opening tee shot being struck early on a Thursday morning at Colonial eight weeks from now. It feels – and I will resist the urge to make a political statement here – that we’re living in silence.
There are scattered pockets of cheers for the front-line health care angels who deserve a worldwide serenade but our games have gone quiet.
To protect what and who we have, we’ve been forced to give up so much. It will come back to us, most of it anyway, but not in one big, crashing wave. It will come in little ways and then bigger ways, and the PGA Tour eventually will be part of that.
If it means safely playing some events without spectators, at least it’s a step on the way back. It won’t look or feel the same but golf still can succeed in a relative vacuum, at least for a little while.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, the European Tour is plotting its own return, but it apparently has been staggered by the impact the virus has had on life there. It may be autumn before the European Tour restarts and, when it does purses will likely be cut, luxuries will be eliminated and opportunities will be gone. Golf may be a game but professional golf tours are businesses and we all know what has happened in the working world.
At a time when we should be making sense of what happened at the Masters while watching the grass green up on courses across the country, the tour is doing its best to cobble together a season that, if it’s fortunate, still will produce 36 tournaments while missing approximately three months.
It has moved events around like puzzle pieces, resuscitating the RBC Heritage and putting it where the RBC Canadian Open was to have been, giving the Memorial Tournament the date previously reserved for the Open Championship and working toward a season with one major championship in hopes of playing six in the next wraparound season.
Instead of talking about how Tiger’s playing or who’s the favorite when the PGA Championship heads to Harding Park, questions swirl about testing and tracking, and who is essential and who isn’t.
It’s difficult, it’s fluid and it’s a dangerous problem with no easy answers. Last week, the governor of North Carolina said on a national news show that he could foresee the famous Duke-UNC basketball games being played without fans – next year. That’s where the world is at the moment.
With some good fortune, the hope is that testing will have advanced quickly enough and expanded far enough that players can be tested before they leave for a tournament. Once there, other measures will be in place to assure, as best as possible, that everyone remains safe and virus-free.
That is contingent on testing being widely available for everyone, not just tour players. It’s contingent on clear progress being shown in this fight against the invisible and it’s contingent on what else happens between now and early June. There is reason for hope, tendrils of optimism.
What happens if a player or caddie tests positive at a tournament site? Rory McIlroy was asked that at the Players Championship hours before it was canceled and he had a simple answer: “Shut it down,” he said.
We want this to be about golf, not about all the things we’re bombarded with in our seclusion. But it’s not that simple right now. Maybe it will be. That’s the goal, the flagstick waving in the sunshine.
As we continue to hunker down, as we pull masks across our faces to make a simple stop at the grocery store and as we miss the game that ties us together in ways not everyone can understand, there’s a day when it will come back.
Right now, that day is June 11, 2020.
Top: Rickie Fowler during the 2019 Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial Country Club
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