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Remember the music hall magician who placed a pound note in one pocket of his suit and pulled it out of another? Remember how he put his assistant in a box and pretended to saw the box in half? Remember his coup de grâce, which was to take his top hat off his head, reach into it and pull out a rabbit. At this the audience always gasped and then applauded. Keith Pelley, chief executive of the European Tour, has just brought off his equivalent of this trick by producing a 2021 schedule for his players that has earned admiration considering the circumstances under which it was produced not forgetting the speed with which it was accomplished.
Remember that in compiling this schedule, Pelley and his team did not deal with his neighbours, local government or even regional government, nor with people he could jump in his car and go and visit. Instead he often negotiated with people hundreds if not thousands of miles away whose second or third language is English. He worked with government officials in countries as different as the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and Spain. One morning this year he had successive calls with four government agencies in four different countries. It sounds as though doing a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle in semi-darkness would be child’s play in comparison.
“The reason the schedule has come together so quickly is there are a lot of challenges during the pandemic but there are also a lot of opportunities to learn,” Pelley said last week. “Back on April 14 we started having morning scheduling meetings at 7:30 or 7:45 every single day. For the first three months it was 100 percent on 2020. Then it got 80 percent on 2020 and 20 percent on 2021 and then we just rolled on to 2022. We have two events in 2022 that have never been on the schedule before.”
“It (the 2021 schedule) is not back to where it was but it’s not far off. It is a very decent schedule. They have done an amazing job.”
Chubby Chandler
Next year’s schedule has 42 tournaments in 24 countries, of which 18 were due to have been held this year and were either postponed or cancelled because of the pandemic. The number of Rolex Series events in 2021 is reduced to four but each has an $8 million minimum prize fund. It remains a surprise that in the build-up to a Ryder Cup in Italy, the Italian Open is not a Rolex Series event as it used to be. The absence of a French Open, which dates to 1906, may yet be rectified. There is at least one week when a yet-to-be-announced event is scheduled – May 6-9 is described on the schedule as “European event confirmed” – though the word is that it won’t be a French Open. “This schedule is not yet finished,” Pelley said. “I believe that Hong Kong is coming back. We have another event that we are discussing in another region and there are two events that want to come in at the end of the year and we can’t fit them in.”
Another improvement in next year’s schedule is the way that tournaments are grouped together geographically. This has been an aim for some time to reduce travelling. In 2021 there is the Middle East swing at the start of the year, a run of events in Spain or Portugal after the Masters in April, a UK and Ireland swing in July and August and two more events in Spain in October – the Open de España in Madrid and the Estrella Damm N.A. Andalucía Masters at Valderrama on the Costa del Sol followed by the Trophée Hassan at Rabat in Morocco. No long-haul flights there.
One of the impressive features of the revamped, COVID-19-aware, 2020 season was the European Tour’s medical policy. More than £3m was spent testing more than 20,000 people and implementing a stringent health policy on the 500 or so people involved in each week’s event. It was new, intrusive, not always easy to understand, always unusual to follow and yet it worked. Unlike other sports where competitors were interned for just a few days and still broke their quarantining rules, there were few transgressions by players or officials on the ET, which is impressive considering the restrictions the players were under and the length of time. The only serious case of rule breaking is described by Pelley as being “a genuine mistake,” when the player and his caddie went to a local pub. The player was instantly disqualified from the event.
A good example of the restrictions imposed on everyone in an ET bubble occurred at the DP World Tour Championship in Dubai earlier this month. Players and officials stayed in one tower of the comfortable Atlantis Hotel. In the hotel’s other tower, which was within easy walking distance, there were numerous high-end restaurants such as Nobu and the famous aquarium, the largest in the United Arab Emirates.
The ET erected a barrier between the two towers, which meant that everyone in the ET bubble had to eat with their designated buddy in the designated restaurant. “I am incredibly proud of the fact that we are the only international event to play in Dubai this year,” Pelley said. “As an international sporting event you have to be more restrictive because you have people coming from so many different countries. Nobody complained seriously. I stood on the first tee from 7 am to 12 midday on Sunday morning and thanked every player for their willingness to accept what was a very restricted bubble.”
The year that is ending is far from normal. Listen to Chubby Chandler, the highly experienced manager of Matt Wallace, among other players.
“I have heard some players complaining this year that they have to finish in the top 30 of certain events to make any money,” Chandler said. “I say to them, ‘Play better,’ or, ‘You don’t have to play, you know.’
“The world has changed. I am never in the office. I am at home wearing a hoodie and tracksuit bottoms. Managing players has to be different from now on and the way players operate has got to be different, too. Players ought to be able to book their own hotels, look on the internet for decent flights. As I say, the world has changed.”
Pelley sounded tired last week. His voice was croaky. Those daily scheduling meetings followed by five or six hours of conference calls most days had taken their toll. He said he had flown less and driven more miles this year than ever.
“I am not as good a sleeper as I would like to be,” he said. “I am looking forward to 10 hours of sleep a night over the holiday.”
He deserves it and so do those who worked with him.
“It (the 2021 schedule) is not back to where it was but it’s not far off,” Chandler said. “It is a very decent schedule. They have done an amazing job.”
E-Mail John