Murray: What Are The Governing Bodies Waiting For To Cancel The Opens?

While we all enjoy the break of imagining fall majors or any kind of tournaments to anticipate, it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine scenarios where any significant professional tournaments are played.

We’re a long way from large crowds gathering. And when they do, at the minimum there will there be spacing, temperature checks, masks and even travel restrictions that still might alter fields even after the return. But, we’ll let the five families keep jockeying over fall dates as the rest of the sports world appears frozen by COVID-19’s spread.

With yesterday’s news of The Open likely headed for cancellation and rather forcefully refuted by Chief Executive Martin Slumbers in a statement, The Guardian’s Ewan Murray is trying to understand what the R&A is waiting on as the pandemic worsens. Is it money? Or their love of matching up certain years with anniversaries?

If the R&A doesn’t know precisely what to do about this year’s Open, something is seriously amiss. Sport has been paralysed by coronavirus, with events and seasons dropping from billboards one by one. It is fanciful to suggest the Kent coast can – or should, in respect of public services – host 200,000 visitors and global competitors in a golf event in little over three months’ time. The R&A, for its many faults, cannot be ignorant over a pandemic.

At the very least, if not providing a full explanation of contingency, the R&A should have put a public line through Sandwich in its standard slot long before now; spectators alone deserve that much. Augusta National is still to issue detail of a 2020 Masters alternative but it was swift in postponing when coronavirus took hold. That the United States Golf Association hasn’t ditched plans for the US Open in New York in June catapults golf into territory beyond Clubhouse Cuckoo Land. They and the R&A set the rules for this game, you know.