"PGA Tour, other tours should take cue from Olympics"

One of the more lucid reads in a while on golf tournaments, postponements and the big picture comes from Morning Read’s Dave Seanor. He highlights both the tough-but-necessary call by the IOC to postpone the Olympics, as well as the reasoned stance of the International Golf Federation head Antony Scanlon.

As it turns out, the IOC was ahead of the curve. In the ensuing weeks, only the R&A has taken similar forward-thinking action by postponing the 149th British Open until July 2021. The PGA of America, U.S. Golf Association and PGA Tour continue to operate under the wishful thinking that the PGA Championship, U.S. Open and various Tour events can be played in 2021. Ditto for Augusta National Golf Club, which holds out hope that a November date for the Masters will be doable. (It’s noteworthy that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, unlike his counterparts in California and New York, resisted early shelter-in-place directives and recently displayed a commerce-over-citizens’-health predilection by opening his state’s beaches against the wishes of local governments.)

The IOC, of course, had to consider the needs of many more sports than golf. While it may have dilly-dallied for several weeks, it ultimately concluded that a piecemeal attempt to salvage Tokyo 2020 would have been futile. International sports federations welcomed the schedule clarity, but the IGF still finds itself at the mercy of various pro tours hoping to rescue some portion of their 2020 seasons.

“Now that we know the new dates, we will work to finalize the qualification system for the Tokyo Games and adapt all our operational plans accordingly,” Scanlon said.

Scanlon’s positive outlook in a bleak time highlights how you’d hope an executive would think. That’s a nice way of saying he appears to have grasped reality and is thinking how to properly position golf when the time is right.