Tee to Green

PGA Tour’s return in Texas odd but entertaining

Golf’s back! Your correspondent could barely contain the excitement comensurate for someone in their mid50s when the pictures from Texas flooded my screens (yes, multiple) at the weekend.

Come on, you know me better than that by now. The Charles Schwab Challenge itself, as a tournament without the contemporary baggage, was half-decent, actually.

It was a nicely simmered build-up with a quality leaderboard all four days, culminating in a reasonably dramatic finish that saw Daniel Berger and Collin Morikawa contest a play-off, with Berger – a “certainty” for the US Ryder Cup team in Paris until he fell off a cliff – prevailing.

With people there reacting to it, it might have been even better. Instead, watching often seemed a little like the PGA EuroPro Tour highlights on Sky, save for the fact that the players were a little more recognisable.

These are unprecedented times, goes the standard cliché of the moment, so the oddness to it all is perfectly tolerable to the viewer. But let’s not have any illusions about why this is happening and the precautions, such as they are, that are in place.

This was no bio-bubble, that much is clear. There’s a nod towards distancing here and there, with no crowds, swing instructors stuck behind ropes on the range with the media (I had a snigger at that one, I have to admit) and, of course, the testing.

But players off-site are doing what they like, drinking and dining with who they wish – including the instructors they’re distanced from at the venue.

The onsite testing regime is the complete and entire defence against Covid-19, and the rest – including the charter flight taking the field to Hilton Head in South Carolina where the infection rate was up 60% last week – is mere window dressing.

As Michael Bamberger said in golf. com, it’s not so much ‘the show must go on’ as the tour have decided to let it go on. With that in mind, and given this is no bubble at all, why not let some fans in suitably distanced and wearing facemasks? They’d probably be better protected than the officials, none of whom seemed to be wearing any PPE last week.

But of course, we know that restarting the PGA Tour, and the Premier League, and horse racing and all the other sports is not about providing necessary entertainment to a locked down populace or raising morale or anything to do with the fans or public at all.

“The onsite testing regime is the entire defence against Covid-19

It’s about pleasing CBS and Sky Sports and their legion of advertisers – it wasn’t even 50-50 in terms of live action to commercials when I turned to the US coverage. It’s about trying to reap back the money lost in lockdown. It‘s about regenerating custom for parasitic betting companies.

It’s certainly not about safety. The pandemic has a clear socio-economic pattern so one would expect the gilded set of PGA Tour golfers may not suffer the same fate as the handful of players and caddies on the secondary Korn Ferry Tour who tested positive last week.

But I note Tiger Woods has not entered either of the first two weeks and probably won’t play until the Memorial in July. Woods, as usual, moves to the beat of his own drum.

In the meantime, the tour will go on, leapfrogging the virus hotspots or simply go on hopefully. And the full $7.5 million prizefund was paid out at Colonial, which beggars belief in the current economic situation.

The Tour’s tribute to what’s going on? They put the names of local health workers on caddie bibs. What a gesture, eh?

Picture: AP. Fans were kept out of Colonial last week but the PGA Tour’s “bubble” against Covid-19 was hardly water tight.