On Monday, PGA Tour officials, players and caddies will meet at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, to begin preparations for the Charles Schwab Challenge.
This will be the first PGA Tour event since the Players Championship was canceled on March 12 as a result of the spread of COVID-19. And when the match starts with the opening round on Thursday, it will be 90 days since the last tournament round is played.
Suffice it to say: It’s been a long time. For golf and for sports.
The PGA tour resumed its season before the NBA and NHL continued and before Major League Baseball was even about to start. When the competition starts Thursday, it will mark the first mainstream sport in America (with apologies to NASCAR and UFC) to take place since the world was paralyzed by the pandemic.
Because the PGA Tour rearranged its schedule in April after the cancellation caused by the corona virus crisis, the Charles Schwab Challenge was set to lead among the first four events announced – all of which were played without spectators and under very strict safety regulations which included testing for all “important” personnel on the grounds.
“This will be historic,” said Michael Tothe, director of the Charles Schwab Challenge tournament, last week.
“We are happy to be part of the first four,” said Steve Wilmot, director of the RBC Heritage tournament, who finished second in the bat. “This will be unique.”
Nathan Grube, director of the Travelers Championship, the third event on the schedule, said, “We all want to do it the right way. We all have an awareness of the responsibility to do this right, to help bring the Tour back, to do it in a safe and hopefully event after we can learn from us. “
What will the results look like without an audience?
“When a TV camera turns on, it won’t look different, but without an audience, it will really be quiet here,” Tothe said. “There will be no buzz that you normally have with 25,000 fans every day. It will be strange. “
These first four events will likely feel like a championship with a talent club.
We felt a bit of it with two charity events played last month – a skin game at the Seminole Golf Club involving Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff, and the match between Tiger Woods and Peyton Manning against Phil Mickelson and Tom Brady at the Medals .
But it was an exhibition that each involved only four players and a limited TV production crew.
For the first four full field events on the revised PGA Tour schedule – this week at Colonial, then the RBC Heritage, Travelers Championship, and Rocket Mortgage Championship – the curiosity factor is significant.
And that curiosity is not limited to the audience watching TV, but for the players who will compete in the midst of what will surely be a frightening silence and for tournament organizers who have struggled to arrange their events in a way they have never done before. must before.
“When we learned that we were moving to June back in early April, I thought our stress levels were very high, because there were many things that needed to be done so we didn’t have an answer,” Tothe said. .
This is a unique time when several people have answers to many questions. That is why Tothe and fellow tournament directors of the first four events leaned against each other as they tiptoed into this new territory.
“More than anything, it’s fun to ask people to talk to,” Wilmot said. “We are all different. We all have different places, different markets, facilities, sponsors, partners. ‘
RBC is the most different of the four, because the golf course intertwines with the resort community and is filled with houses, where there will be spectators watching golf from the deck and backyard.
“There are no houses to rent on the golf course,” Wilmot said. “Everything is rented out. There are people who rent a house during the week for their family vacation and suddenly they will leave, ‘Oh, there is a PGA Tour event in my backyard.’
What Wilmot, Grube and Langwell have that Tothe will not be able to see how the event is before their event is over.
“That will be a big advantage for us,” Grube said.
“The tour has told us, ‘We will not know certain things until we pass through the Colonial,'” Wilmot said. “And I’m sure Nathan was told,” We won’t know certain things before we go through two events before you. “All other tournaments will learn from us all.”
