FORE! ... BEFORE BIG FOUR
PGA tour returns to action this week, with a strong field and plenty of unknowns
There’s a saying in golf about blind shots, that they’re only blind the first time you play.
It’s a fitting description of where we are this week as the PGA Tour restarts at Colonial beginning Thursday. Nobody knows what to expect.
So much has changed since we last saw the world’s best golfers competing for millions of dollars. I could fill this entire column listing the events of the past week, let alone the past three months. We are in the midst of the most uncertain time in many of our lives and the role that watching sports plays for us has perhaps also become hard to reconcile.
The PGA Tour is returning to action before any of the big four sports leagues in North America. The Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial in Fort Worth, Tex., will be the first tournament since the COVID-19 pandemic stopped the world cold.
“There were a lot of questions that we didn’t know the answer to, and there were a lot of questions that the PGA Tour didn’t know the answer to, and I’m not being critical,” Colonial tournament director Michael Tothe told Postmedia.
“We focused 10 months working on a normal Colonial
and then it’s anything but normal, and we had eight weeks to create a new checklist.”
One of the only certainties heading into this week’s no-spectator event is that the field of players is superb. The world’s top five players, and 16 of the top 20, will be in Texas to get back to work. It’s a who’s who of golf stars minus Tiger Woods, who hasn’t announced where he will tee it up next. Despite Woods not competing, it still will be the strongest field of the 2019-20 season to date. Expect to see a wide dispersion in scoring as varying degrees of rust and differing impacts of a loss of routine are sure to be on display.
Players and caddies will be tested for coronavirus upon arrival and have their temperature taken every day. The PGA Tour is tasked with keeping everyone involved safe while hopefully becoming an example for other sports to follow. Golf is in a unique position in that it has both inherent advantages and disadvantages in these times. It’s played outdoors and golfers can generally avoid contact with their opponents, but the very definition of a tour means there can be no hub cities, so the PGA Tour has to pull off a travelling bubble of 400 people. Whether the complicated logistics will work is unknown. More than six months into this worldwide pandemic, there are still many unanswered questions about the transmission of the virus, making the success of the return of sports anybody’s guess.
As interesting as that story will be to follow on golf courses and inside arenas and stadiums in the coming months, there will be another story playing out inside homes across North America.
The sudden stoppage of sports leagues was, for many of us, the first sign that life as we knew it was about to change. Stay-at-home rules and school closures quickly brought the pandemic to every aspect of life, but sports fans were already wondering how they would get by without sports.
Turns out many of us got our fix watching a documentary on the 1990s Chicago Bulls, reminiscing about or discovering Michael Jordan’s ruthless greatness (which for golf fans probably looked a little familiar). Degenerate gamblers were forced to learn the intricacies of Korean baseball and Russian table tennis (who knew they scored it by hand?). And everyone else found time to do the chores they had put off since the Maple Leafs last won the Cup (sorry).
The biggest surprise in many cases wasn’t how much we missed sports, but how quickly we adapted to life without it. It began to feel as though sports might return more as a delightful distraction than the addiction it was before it left. Then came the killing of George Floyd, civil unrest in America, and the ongoing worldwide movement supporting black Americans and equal rights for people of colour everywhere. For many, this was a wakeup call that perhaps we’ve been too distracted for far too long.
The escapism of sports is up against the return of reality. There is every chance that the Masters, the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Super Bowl, and other big games will instantly reclaim their status as cultural touchstones, but standing on the first tee, it’s hard to see where the ball is going to land.
We focused 10 months working on a normal Colonial and then ... had eight weeks to create a new checklist.
Colonial tournament director Michael Tothe