WE’LL PLAY 24/7!
Golf set to pack the calendar to avoid losing tournaments
The european Tour are ready to hold events on every day of the week whenever they get the green light to start playing again and are prepared to have tournaments running concurrently in a desperate bid to save the season.
A tour source said: ‘We’ve got to stop thinking of tournament golf as just being about Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm. It’s also about the Bradley Dredges and the David Drysdales, and we’ve got to try to give them a living.’
They have also got to fulfil some stringent television demands from Sky and the Golf Channel in America, whereby a set number of events have to be played to trigger all the money stipulated by the lucrative contracts.
Over a two-week period, therefore, it is likely we will see an event played from Monday to Thursday with a day’s break, followed by another beginning Saturday to Tuesday and a day’s break, and then a third from Thursday to Sunday.
‘It’s fair to say the scenarios we’re planning are nothing like any we’ve seen before, but the times call for such thinking,’ said the source. ‘We want to do everything possible to put on as many tournaments as we can when it’s safe to do so.’
Who knows, of course, when that will be. The tour’s first scenario starts with the Irish Open at the end of May, but the chances of that event being played are sadly beyond slim.
As well as trying to salvage something for his own tour, chief executive Keith Pelley is in regular contact with his PGA Tour counterpart Jay Monahan, and the organisers of the four majors.
With the Masters and US PGA Championship already looking for new dates, and the US Open set to join them given it is scheduled for mid-June, the scramble is on to fit them all in.
They will get no argument from the european Tour in terms of dates. On the question of whether the Italian Open would be happy to stand aside if the Masters was held in its projected new date of the second week in October, the attitude is more: why not run them concurrently?
Then there is the Ryder Cup in Wisconsin which, despite the rumours yesterday of a postponement for one year, is still scheduled for the end of September and a date that both the tour and the PGA of America are desperate to fulfil.
That, of course, might change if time goes on with little sign of progress on coronavirus.
In that dreaded instance, before the Ryder Cup there will be the Open at Royal St George’s in mid-July to consider. Imagine if that cannot be played at all, given how much the R&A has invested in the 150th Open taking place next year at St Andrews?
No wonder the increasingly anxious leaders of golf’s six main organisations are in regular dialogue, trying to work out bestcase scenarios when all around now, there are only the worst.