Zero key for PGA this week
Much as we like to focus on personalities, the PGA Tour is really all about numbers posted: hole scores, round totals, cash earned, FedEx Cup points awarded, charitable dollars raised, eyeballs watching. All of those figures matter at this week’s Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth, but they carry considerably less import as the Tour resumes action amid the COVID-19 pandemic. (Note: amid, not after, since cases are spiking across the country, not least in Texas.)
Instead, the number that matters most to the Tour at Colonial Country Club is zero.
Zero positive tests among players and caddies.
Zero drama.
If the Schwab Challenge were to be the most boring, uneventful 72 holes of his tenure as Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan would heave a sigh of relief.
The typical barometers of a good week on Tour — exciting finishes, superstar winners, scoring records — simply don’t matter as much. The yardstick being used in the coming days is much more daunting. Golf is a guinea pig for the greater sports world, and a misstep or health issue will have ramifications far beyond the Tour’s carefully constructed resumption.
Fans will of course notice everything that is amiss at this most unusual of tournaments.
Rather than presiding from his traditional 18th hole tower, CBS’s Jim Nantz will plow a lonely furrow in front of a monitor in a remote building at Colonial. His sidekick in the booth, Nick Faldo, will chime in from a studio 1,100 miles away in Orlando.
The course will seem naked, stripped of the grandstands from which crafty players have long been accustomed to expect a fortuitous bounce or generous relief.
There will be no spectators, the very lifeblood of sport drained from the proceedings until at least the Memorial Tournament in July. (That’s not entirely bad, since it provides a respite from the smattering of meatheads whose hollering plagues too many telecasts).
The last time golf’s best player hit balls in such eerie silence in Fort Worth was when Hogan was practicing 15 minutes away at Shady Oaks.
World No. 1 Rory McIlroy heads the best field Colonial has ever hosted. The top five players in the world ranking are all here, and 16 of the top 20. There are 148 men in the field, 101 of whom have won on Tour, the kind of wheat-to-chaff ratio seldom seen outside the Seminole Pro-Member.
It’s almost enough to make one overlook those competitors who might have been better served watching from home.
Like Keith Clearwater, who won here two years before McIlroy was born. Now 60 years old, Clearwater still takes his spot each year as an ex-champion grandfathered into the field. He has made only seven Tour starts outside this event in the last 15 years. The last time he made a cut in any Tour event was 19 years ago, in 2001.
He’s not even the oldest guy in the field. Tom Lehman, 61, is here on the same senior pass 25 years after his victory. So, too, is Olin Browne, also 61 and the ’99 champ. And David Frost, the ’97 winner, who is just 10 days younger than Clearwater. All of them are younger than Bernhard Langer, who turns 63 this summer. He’s here alongside Scott McCarron (54) and Steve Stricker (53) as sponsor’s invites.
PGA Tour stop or Cocoon cast reunion?
None are taking a spot in the field from anyone else, to be fair. This is an invitational event, and a sponsor may do as it pleases with invitations. It’s entirely fair if Schwab wishes to invite winners of the Cup it generously finances on the senior circuit (Langer and McCarron in this instance). All of the aforementioned have earned the right to tee it up, though continuing to exercise that right might warrant reflection. If nothing else, we should at least commend this higher-risk demographic for heading back to work in a pandemic.
Everyone understands what will constitute a best-case scenario by the time we reach Sunday night in Fort Worth, and also the worst.
A positive test among players, caddies or officials — all of whom traveled there, increasing their potential exposure — would fuel skeptics who think the Tour is taking unnecessary risks and rushing its resumption. No amount of testing or safety protocols will change those minds. And even a drama-free outing in Texas just shifts that onus to next week’s RBC Heritage in South Carolina, and beyond to Connecticut and Michigan.
In that respect, PGA Tour players — whether Rory McIlroy or Keith Clearwater — really are now just like the rest of us, reckoning with a macabre new reality that means having to assume a certain amount of health risk just to go about the humdrum tasks of our workdays. Having assumed that risk, everything else is up to fate. And not even Jay Monahan has sway over that.