Report: PGA Tour "On Track" For June 11 Restart
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GolfChannel.com’s Rex Hoggard, citing a memo to players saying the PGA Tour is “on track” for a June 11-14 restart week at the Charles Schwab Challenge, says we can expect to learn details this week about how it will all work.
He reports that the “Health and Safety” plan will center around multiple tests and include things like no locker room, spacing-minded setup of operations and even making caddies optional. Though as he noted in the Golf Central report below, that plan still seems to be a bone of contention. Hoggard also cites one member of the players advisory council as saying he is "95% sure” the event will go forward.
PGA Tour Commissioner has said testing across the country needs to be “widespread” to not take away from the “critical need” currently still experienced.
As UFC dealt with positive tests this week, the LA Times’s Arash Markazi notes that dealing with the inevitable positive tests results opens up even more questions for sports leagues. In golf, the independent contractor status of players adds other wrinkles, particularly if the player is asymptomatic but is also precluded from playing in a battle to retain tour status.
Ultimately, those are minor concerns in the grand scheme of our current COVID-19 world.
Increasingly, I sense the greatest fear with the PGA Tour’s fan-free return is not with a virus spread or lack of safety planning, but instead, optics. Given models showing huge daily death tolls and continued strain on front line response efforts in a variety of locations, what will it looks like if players competing, perhaps whining about flagsticks or bunker lies, or blaming bad room service for their play?
How those optics are gauged is beyond my pay grade and may not be something that can be tracked. But given all other golf organizations either suspending or cancelling events well beyond mid-June, the risk to both the Tour and the sport’s reputation is great if the return is seen as too abrupt.
To put it another way, years of goodwill earned with billions raised for charity and professional golfers seen as a certain kind of model citizen, could be put at risk. And for what? To get the FedExCup chase restarted and preserve the wraparound schedule?
Today, May 10th, the desire to play in mid-June seems like a big gamble with a low long-term reward. A month from now? Maybe not. After more people see golf courses as very safe places to be or the markets hosting events are deemed relatively safe, the risk may seem less dangerous.
Anyway, the full Golf Central segment:
