It's actually a big day for our little game... My first order of business was to confirm that my cable provider's digital DVR remembers the standing order to tape all PGA Tour golf. Turns out that might be the only thing to survive the lockdown...
Scenes From Within the Bubble - The eyes of a lonely nation turn towards Fort Worth, so let's see what life is like on Tour.
Inevitably, thew bubble can only be so tight, as Mike Bamberger (one of the few regular scribes on site) explains:
But one day into this unprecedented five-week run of spectator-free golf on the PGA Tour, one thing is clear: there is no bubble.
The players are staying here and there and the caddies are, too. That is, in the four Tour-designated official hotels and in other accommodations, too. They’re eating … wherever. They traveled here in their own cars, on commercial flights, in private planes. They’re not sheep. Professional golfers are funny. They may look and sound like conformists. A well-honed act.
To be sure, nobody is confusing the Colonial Country Club with the O.K. Corral. Not by a longshot. There’s mandatory player and caddie testing for Covid-19 and a Tour directive to not shake hands. There were no knots of autograph-seekers by the red-brick clubhouse on Tuesday, no crowded spectator shuttle buses heading to and from the vast parking lots on the TCU campus. The Tuesday practice round at the Colonial Country Club was, surely, not like the 70 or so that preceded it. In 1946, when Ben Hogan won the first event here, he had to be more in a bubble than any of the 148 players in the field this week for the Charles Schwab Challenge.
That's a great bit at the end, because Valerie was the only other human being allowed inside Hogan's bubble....A little more from Mike:
Some players and caddies, as they gathered on the 1st tee or 10th tee at the start of a practice round, made no effort to keep six feet apart. Likewise, some players and caddies were handing clubs back-and-forth as they normally would. They’re outside, in a hot wind. Nobody has ever confused tournament golf with meal-distribution at a nursing home. Around the clubhouse, in the club’s traditional milling areas, there was one instructor wearing his mask around his left upper arm, like an old-school USGA arm bandage. A few caddies wore them. The players did not.
Word is that Karen very much wants to speak to the Tour's manager....
I'm of diametrically-opposed minds on this, and there's no reconciling the two. On the one hand, when Fairview opened I found myself a rules absolutest. I knew there was no science behind any of the protocols, but I had made a simple decision to follow the letter of the law, just to avoid any reason to shut us down. I have the same thought here, similar to Brian's tweet above, which is mostly just a hope that it goes OK.
But people are people, and what they've seen over the last 3+ months hasn't been a pretty thing. You start with the niggling detail that our experts have been wrong on everything. Then we've had to watch as public officials have gone out of their way to make the lockdown needlessly punitive, and God forbid a citizen push back to save their livlihood? And let's not forget the whiplash educing embrace of public demonstrations when its for the preferred political narrative...
To me the biggest issue is the failure to embrace any kind of gradual expansion of social networks. When they put us all under house arrest in March, we were all going on a three-hour tour two-week shutdown. Human beings are social animals, but we can endure anything for a short period of time. But it's now months later, and we're still not supposed to see our families?
This is a day when I can legitimately blog about golf, so I really don't want to impose that rant on you. But we're still worried about pins and bunker rakes, notwithstanding that the CDC still can't tell us whether the virus is transmitted from surfaces.... The point I really want to make is we now have solved or testing issues, and we have this imperfect bubble.... and a caddie still can't hand his player a golf club? Folks, we have to get past this and understand that small, recently-tested (shall I add young and healthy?) folks can be near each other and the result will not be a public health crisis?
And can we at some point talk about the public health crisis created by the lockdown? I know, never gonna happen...
Tim Schmitt is a new name at Golfweek, and he does reasonably well in capturing the zeitgeist:
The PGA Tour is the first major sport to return to action, but while this week’s CharlesSchwab Challenge gets pro golfers back into the swing of their daily work routines, it’s hardly business as usual.There are no fans, no grandstands, and the traffic that would typically clog the neighborhood is almost non-existent. Volunteers and media members start the day by walking through an airport-like thermal screening system, and everyone who comes to the event is asked a series of COVID-19-related questions after having their temperature taken.
Mostly I just needed to excerpt the piece to justify grabbing that priceless imagery of the iconic Hogan statue.... Please tell me it's Photo-Shopped.
Alan Shipnuck has a mailbag up, and is asked the inevitable Garbo question:
Is the PGA Tour equipped for the spotlight of being the first major American sport back? They’re going to find out very quickly how robust their policies are to manage the spread of coronavirus. I don’t see them getting the guinea pig benefit of doubt.—@m_shrives
Professional golf is vastly more complicated than any other sport because the playing field has to change every week or we’ll be bored to tears. The only other option would be to take over Bandon Dunes, like the NBA will do to Disney World, and rotate tournaments across the five excellent courses. I would have loved that but after, say, the third rotation, even the wonders of Bandon would get stale. The Tour has no choice but to remain a movable feast, and that brings into play an incalculable number of complications. The czars of Ponte Vedra Beach have come up with a good plan. It’s not perfect because that standard is unattainable. Hopefully the Tour gets lucky and there is no outbreak of Covid. If a dozen players/caddies test positive and they have to shut things down for a while, so be it. I’m glad they’re being ambitious and trying to make this happen. Fingers crossed that it works.
Boy, Alan does his best to avoid the actual question, no? But ultimately he gets there, albeit half-heatedly...
To me, the question evokes the media's reaction to certain governors attempting to end the quarantine. This from The Atlantic probably represented peak wish-fulfillment:
Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice
Can you feel the sympathy for those losing their livelihoods?
I think it's a reasonable question, and no doubt a risky undertaking. But first, I think the mayhem of the last two weeks has provided our game a different kind of bubble, as the media has been obsessed with the convulsions of virtue signalling and power politics. In a calmer moment I suspect there would have been all sorts of prophesies of reigniting the black plague....
But I too am glad that the Tour is being ambitious, because if we listened to the so-called experts we'd never leave our homes. This might be as good a time as any to share the update, as thus far there seem to be no issues in Fort Worth, but elsewhere is a different matter:
FORT WORTH, Texas – The layered testing for this week’s return to golf on both the PGA Tour and Korn Ferry Tour included 1,559 tests for COVID-19 and just four positive results.
All four of the positive tests were from the Korn Ferry Tour, which also restarted its schedule this week at TPC Sawgrass. One positive test was from a player and three were from caddies. All four of the positive results were from tests players and caddies took before traveling to the tournament city.
The Tour also administered 487 in-market tests at the Charles Schwab Challenge with no positive results. At the Korn Ferry Tour event, there were 407 in-market tests with no positive results.
“Certainly pleased, but if there's one thing you learn as you look back over the last 90 days and you go forward, there's steps that you take. We've passed some important hurdles. These are important steps,” Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said.
First and foremost, I give Jay and the boys props for candor. Yeah, I think we could get names, but at least they seem to be more forthcoming than is typical and than they led us to believe they would be.
But a reminder also that among this young (I do understand that not all the caddies are that young) and healthy group of folks, a Covid infection is likely just an inconvenience. I'd love some follow up on the KF circumstances, as I'm guessing they didn't have their test results before traveling to Sawgrass...
No doubt you expected the inevitable "Caddie's Hardest Hit" features, first this which troubles me from the get-go:
On the 10th tee at Colonial Country Club Wednesday, Mike "Fluff" Cowan stood apart from the golfers and caddies in his group, some of whom were getting reacquainted in
I can't stand a mask while in a store. I do pity them in the Texas heat. slightly closer proximity. Cowan practiced the standard six feet of recommended social distance—“two club lengths,” according the signage around the Charles Schwab Challenge, which puts the advice in language everyone could understand.There wasn’t much room, not with a brick wall on one side of the tee and the cart path on the other. But Cowan made it work.“Fluff, social distancing,” said Mike Greller, who caddies for Jordan Spieth.“I’m trying,” Cowan replied.That’s what the caddies can do this week as the PGA Tour returns in uneasy times: They can make an effort, a gesture, a multitude of concessions. The Tour is asking caddies to change the way they work, from keeping their distance from others, to delegating who touches what, to liberally using the three packs of 10 sanitizing wipes the tournament provided to them in the weirdest kind of gift bag.
Jim, what are you thinking? I'm perfectly comfortable with them playing, but should a guy like Fluff, who is 72-years old, really be out there? It's easy to be sanguine about Victor Hovland getting infected, but please not our Fluff...
5 ways caddies’ jobs will be different this week at the Charles Schwab Challenge
3. High fives are strictly forbidden
Really any form of contact between players and caddies are forbidden. Gone are the days of pre- and post-round handshakes and pleasantries. It will be quite odd to see air fives exchanged after a big shot or putt, but can it be any weirder than the eerie quiet that will accompany it? Additionally, players and caddies are allowed to wear face masks or coverings, but it is not required.
Again, both the player and caddie will have tested negative.... And this, which has exactly zero science behind it:
4. Sanitizing will be a priority
When you think about it, caddies have a lot of mutual touch points on the golf course — rakes, flagsticks etc. With that in mind, they will be expected to sanitize these mutual touch points thoroughly. Caddies will be supplied with sanitizer and disinfectants, and there will be hand washing stations throughout the course.
For some reason my mind travels back to those lovely images of Sergio spitting into the cup.... Wasn't that a more innocent time?
I'll conclude this portion of our programming with the necessary reminder that boys will be boys:
Pretty funny in a way, but what happens when a guy's body temperature is 74 degrees? Call in the EMTs, I'm thinking...
But if we're worried about the elderly, look no further than here:
There's a much smaller, but still enthusiastic volunteer force at Colonial this week
More than 900 volunteers originally were scheduled to work this week at ColonialCountry Club. They couldn’t wait to put on their new uniform shirts, reunite with old friends and do their parts, whether it be making sure practice balls were washed, players got safely to the first tee, corporate hospitality was satisfied or anything else needed to assure the Charles Schwab Challenge ran as smoothly as possible.Yet this week, only 300 or so will be on hand at Colonial. The rest were thanked kindly for offering their service but told they weren’t needed with the tournament being reduced in scope and scale due to the coronavirus pandemic.
I haven't seen any follow-up on the ShotLink issue, as the original headcounts there were crazy big. But, as that piece makes clear, the volunteer pool skews ancient, so that needs to be watched. One hopes that anyone with any relevant medical history takes this year off.
One of the disturbing trends in recent days has been to watch the skyrocketing participation rates in the woke Olympics, including many in our game. Shippy got a few queries of that ilk:
Since you been covering golf has a professional golfer displayed any form or protest during an event for any issue? #AskAlan—@GoranBarnes
Well, Forrest Fezzler wore shorts for one hole at the U.S. Open to protest the USGA’s dress code. Phil Mickelson raked a putt to protest the USGA’s setup at Shinnecock. Rory Sabbatini teed off while Ben Crane was putting-out on the previous hole to protest Crane’s tedious pace of play. Some members of the 1993 U.S. Ryder Cup team protested Bill Clinton’s very existence by threatening to not go to the White House. Otherwise, not so much.
Thank God we've evolved past that stage where athletes would threaten not to visit the White House... But good times all...
Have any Colonial entrants indicated an intention to kneel either before or during play in support of police reform?—@Lou_TireWorld
How cool would it be if some PGA Tour pros got grass-stains on their lily-white trousers? To show solidarity with the protesters (and athletes from so many other sports) would be quite a statement from a game that has usually lagged decades behind any social movement. Peter Malnati back in 2016 and Harold Varner much more recently have been eloquent voices on the issue of social justice. Only Varner will be at Colonial, and it doesn’t feel fair to make the only African-American in the field be the lone golfer who takes a knee. It would be awesome if some of his colleagues did it, too, to support Varner and the millions of other Americans who have been protesting racial injustice.
How about no one ever takes a knee again to anyone? Submission never used to be in the American DNA, and this might be my least favorite aspect of the last few weeks. I mean besides the death and destruction...
Here we go a little deeper:
Given what is going on in the U.S., how do you think the PGA Tour will react? What steps do you think they’ll take to bring diversity to the Tour? —@ramon_ware
The Tour’s mandate has always been to conduct the biggest and best tournaments and provide a feeder system for players to advance to the big leagues. It hasn’t been in the business of helping individual players blossom. This is the moment to reflect and reassess. Professional golf likes to bill itself as the ultimate meritocracy but that’s a fallacy. Every dev tour player will tell you it takes $40-50K a year to chase the dream. Players from well-to-do families, or with connections to private clubs brimming with deep-pocketed sponsors, obviously have a monumental advantage. It would be awesome if the Tour put aside a couple million dollars to stake minority golfers. They still have to shoot the scores but at least these players would have the financial resources to make a go of it on the minor-league tours in Canada or Latin America or China, each of which can be a portal to the Korn Ferry and beyond. And I would also love to see each KFT tournament set aside an exemption or two for minority players, to give them a toehold. Professional golf spent a century actively discriminating against minorities so it will take some direct intervention to help level the playing field.
I would argue, first and foremost, that there's nothing wrong with that mission described by Alan. In fact, I can easily make the case that the efforts Alan describes belong more appropriately to organizations like the USGA and PGA of America.
More importantly, this is another issue where we're only allowed to discuss the approved party line. My bigger problem is that we've been watching the real world implementation of minority set-aside programs for decades now, and the evidence that they actually help the affected communities is shockingly slim. Such a program effectively tells minority students/players that they're not good enough, and that's simply not message that I actually believe.
I don't know anyone that wouldn't be happy to see more black faces on the PGA Tour, but we can do a lot of damage in the process. It would be far better to focus any such efforts on poverty, not race, as the latter inevitably pits one constituency against another, almost as if that were the underlying objective.
But I do think we can all agree with Alan here:
Which player are you most excited to see playing professional golf again? —@Sam_Beishuizen
Literally all of them.
Wither Tiger - He played great at Medalist, so folks are anxious to see him. My own expectations were that Tiger would play very little, maybe only at Jack's before the early August PGA. Then I saw this from Alan, a bit of a hot mess but also thought provoking:
My question: at which tournament is Eldrick “Tiger” Woods mostly likely to make is post-COVID-19 debut? —@AnthonyPioppi
Harbour Town is attractive because he can stay on his yacht and enjoy a shotmaker’s course which has never really been a possibility because Tiger is exhausted the week after the Masters, when the Tour traditionally visits Hilton Head. Travelers does a great job recruiting players and River Highlands is a fun course so that’s a possibility, too. It gets interesting after that. You would think Tiger has to play Memorial, right? He doesn’t want to snub Jack, who just turned 80, reminding us all of his mortality. But I’m sure a big part of Tiger would *love* to play the week before, in the fan-free serenity of the tournament at Muirfield Village that is replacing the Deere. Then he could skip the actual Memorial, play the following week in Minnesota, take another week off (thus avoiding the draining sweat-fest of Memphis) and roll into the PGA Championship with the right mix of preparation and recovery time. But as always, Tiger’s back will determine his schedule and the rest of us just have to roll with it.
Let's deal with the profound silliness first, that Memorial fever dream. Tiger parachuting into a fan-less tournament is about as unrealistic as your humble blogger being offered a sponsor's exemption into the event. First, the circus would follow him into town, so really just can't possibly happen in this lifetime... I don't think Tiger has given such a thing a second's thought, because it's so inconceivable and would be such an imposition on the organizers.
But also, Minnesota? Where did that come from?
But he did make me see the potential error of my ways with Harbor Town, especially after seeing this:
Tiger Woods' yacht makes its way to Georgia one week before RBC Heritage at Harbour Town
Yeah, I could see that, assuming he's feeling as good as he looked at Medalist...It is a course that might be of interest, and isn't this exactly what we'd like to see form the man? Similar to his trip to Tampa a couple of years ago...
Capture This - Aside from the obvious, there have been two major subjects of discussion this week, the first being audio capture. First this update:
Fan favorite Rickie Fowler will be the lone PGA Tour player miked up when golf returns Thursday at the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth, Texas.
"Other players have agreed to wear mics. But there's only certain groups that are within the TV window," Molly Solomon, an executive at Golf Channel, which will exclusively broadcast the first two rounds, told the Sports Business Journal. "For now, it's going to be Rickie."
I had heard Graeme McDowell as well, but he wouldn't be expected to get much airtime these days.
But the more interesting take are those that are refusing to wear a microphone, surprisingly including this guy:
A few weeks ago, Justin Thomas turned in a masterful performance on the golf course.That in itself is nothing new, he’s ranked #4 in the world, after all. But the plaudits this time came for his work as an on-course reporter during The Match.
That broadcast featured all four competitors wearing microphones and earpieces, while Thomas asked Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods insightful questions and then mostly got out of the way of the answer. (He also called Charles Barkley a fat ass.) It was the work of someone who clearly gets what golf broadcasts need more of: entertaining while understanding what on-course thoughts and insights viewers would want to hear as they happened.
The reaction is at the least surprising:
“I would not wear a mic, no. That’s not me,” Thomas said. “What I talk about with (caddie) Jimmy (Johnson) and what I talk about with the guys in my group is none of anybody else’s business, no offense. I mean, as close as those mics are on the tees and the greens and as close as I get to boom mics during competition anyway, I basically feel like I am mic’d up.”
…Thomas agreed that there’s a time and a place for discussion, and while many have already insisted he’d make a great TV commentator when his career is over, he said he’d prefer to offer his thoughts in a more controlled setting.
“I can’t say some stuff that I usually say anyway, and it is not that it’s bad, but no, if I want somebody to know what I say, I’ll say it in a press conference, I’ll say it in an interview or put it out on social media, whatever it is,” Thomas said. “But I personally am not one that would care to get mic’d out there.”
Jay Rigdon (of the wonderful Awful Announcing blog) thinks Thomas (and Jon Rahm, as well) are missing the point:
Justin Thomas, it should be clear, plays a spectator sport for a living. And in a world without fans in attendance (a world that might become the new normal, for the foreseeable future), any way to remove more of a filter between the at-home audience and the action is a good idea. It also rings hollow considering the nature of the game itself; there are no signs or plays for competitors to steal, nor is there much of a strategy that other competitors could find useful for themselves.
There’s also the fact that other sports already do this! Not necessarily with a live microphone that broadcasts can throw to throughout coverage, but NBA, NFL, and MLB players routinely wear microphones that networks use for quick replay looks or for edited packages, even as the game progresses. Just as a random example, David Ross was mic’d up during Game 7 of the 2016 World Series and still managed to perform just fine, but Justin Thomas thinks that Saturday at the Charles Schwab Challenge is a stage too important for that kind of distraction.
The whole piece is well worth your time, as there does seem to be a disconnect involved. Jay speculates that the player take it as a command to be entertaining, which to me is not the intent. I also think people assume CBS will be airing open microphones, which just can't be the case folks. 99% of that which gets captured is banal drivel, they'll need to carefully curate it for their audience...
Jay also makes the case that this can be an opportunity for the lesser-known players to embrace, a way of making your name amid the clutter of a full-field event. An interesting issue we'll be discussing more and more, I'm guessing.
Will I See You In September? - The other much-discussed issue in our game is the Ryder Cup, a story whose ending remains very much in doubt.
Earlier in the week this story popped up:
U.S. Ryder Cup captain Steve Stricker to have six at-large selections
I'm a simple guy, but is it too much to ask that we decide whether we're holding the event before we tweak the qualification process?
Shack has this graphic that makes the point that we'll likely end up wit the same twelve guys regardless of how they're picked:
Hey, just as long as Patrick is there...Selfish, but I went long on popcorn for this very reason.
Captain Stricker helpfully laid out a basis that could maybe work:
Although no decision has been made on that front, Stricker was confident a compromise could be reached, pointing out that if Wisconsin were to allow 50-percent occupancy, that would be good enough for players.
“That's way above my pay grade to make any of those determinations," Stricker said. "You know, I still think it's up in the air. Just our whole world is up in the air a little bit with this uncertainty. There's just so many things that are unanswered and that we can't answer right now, it's hard to say whether we're going to play the Ryder Cup or not.”
With fans first allowed in early July at The Memorial, this doesn't seem unreasonable... But, wouldn't we rather have a full-throated version in '21 as opposed to a "yawner" (Strick's word, not mine) this year?
But here it gets crazy, as there's dissension in the ranks:
“If we’re not playing in front of fans, it’s just like us playing a game in Florida,” Koepka said. “If there's no fans out there you're not going to see guys fist pumping and that passion behind it.“The Ryder Cup is a true sporting event. It’s different than any other golf tournament we play. It’s a true sporting event, and I think if we can have fans, that’s perfect, and if we can't, it just seems kind of like an exhibition—which it kind of already is. I just don’t want to play it without fans.”
Koepka is hardly the only one opposed to a Ryder Cup without fans. A number of players, including Rory McIlroy, have spoken out against the idea and even the captains for each team, Steve Stricker and Padraig Harrington, don’t like the concept.
I think he's making a valid point. I don't actually take the threat that seriously, and I suspect some will over-react to that, but I take it as Brooks asking whether we really want to go down that road...
The problem is that the indecision itself causes the questions to be asked, and then the accusations start to fly:
Brooks Koepka has already made his feelings known about the idea of September’s Ryder Cup being held without fans. He doesn’t like it. Wednesday, he took things a step further.Asked at the Charles Schwab Challenge if he could see a scenario in which a player protests no spectators at Whistling Straits by opting not to compete, his answer was a simple “yes.”Would he sit out?“Possibly,” Koepka said. “I think there’s a lot more that goes into that, why they [PGA of America] would be playing, personally. As players, I think we all know why they’re playing or why we would play.”Money is what Koepka was referring to as he rubbed his index fingers and thumb together. “That’s the only reason,” he added.
And this comes on the heel of the R&A cancelling the Open Championship to collect on their business interruption policy, so it obviously hits home.
You guys will be tired of hearing it, but this one should have been deferred long ago. It's a crazy year in which the guys have nowhere to play, so why put us through the wringer over a 24-player exhibition? But, alas, Brooks gave us the answer above...
I shall leave you there and hope that you'll enjoy the golf. I can't imagine not being here in the morning to discuss the experience, though there are no guarantees in this life.
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