When PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan made the decision to cancel the 2020 Players Championship after one round, it was in dread anticipation of the unknown.
On that evening — almost a year ago, March 12 — there were just a few hundred known cases of COVID-19 in the United States and no recorded deaths. How different that tally will look when the Tour returns to TPC Sawgrass next month: more than 28 million infections and north of 500,000 Americans dead.
The cost of this pandemic — in lives lost, mostly, but also in jobs, families, businesses and economies sundered — makes for an awfully somber accounting. Amid such wreckage, it’s human nature to cling to whatever semblance of normalcy one can find. For many of us, that familiarity was found in golf. One year on, and still far from normal life as we once understood it, the PGA Tour is as much therapy as entertainment.
At the final event before the ’20 Players, the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, it was business as usual, with only a smattering of small talk about the looming pandemic. There was no social distancing in effect nor masks evident on the range.
Eamon Lynch
But there was awareness and wariness if you were looking closely. I recall moving to shake hands with Rosie McIlroy, only to have her offer an elbow bump instead. Hers was the first of what became a default greeting over the next 12 months.
A few days after the Players was called, I had a brief telephone exchange with Rosie’s son, who wondered aloud when he would next compete. Rory guessed at the RBC Canadian Open three months away, June 11-14. He was right on dates, but not on the event. He instead found himself playing the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth, the first event back in a rejiggered schedule.
Jun 14, 2020; Fort Worth, Texas, USA; Rory McIlroy putts on the second green during the final round of the Charles Schwab Challenge golf tournament at Colonial Country Club. Photo by Raymond Carlin III-USA TODAY Sports
McIlroy will arrive at the 2021 Players as the reigning champion of 725 days standing, a record he will eclipse should he defend the Canadian Open starting June 10, 732 days after his victory there.
The PGA Tour that resumed action in Texas seemed then to be patched together with duct tape and hope, an eerily quiet caravan leaden with the fear that a handful of COVID cases could derail everything. The positive tests came — plenty of them, in time — but the Tour held, and professional golf became a welcome sign of normality for sports fans.
Today, as we near the anniversary of the lockdown, the only discernible difference for the majority who view golf on screens rather than in person is the absence of the meathead fraternity hollering for the ball to get in the hole 450 yards away.
Not all of the enforced change has been bad.
The opening round of the Players Championship on Thursday, March 11, will be a milestone that bears commemorating. There’s nothing to celebrate in an environment where thousands of people are still dying daily, and certainly nothing as frivolous as a golf tournament.
But that day is as good a time as any to offer appropriate tribute to the unseen army of workers — not only at the Tour but at all bodies, professional and amateur — who helped golf navigate the pandemic.
There were too many uncertainties during the Tour’s return at Colonial last summer to fully acknowledge those people who labored behind the scenes, assuming no small risk to their own health in doing so. Their reward was seeing Ryan Palmer send that opening tee shot into the morning sky.
But when we reach TPC Sawgrass again this week, the PGA Tour will be more than 270 days into its new normal, which for golf fans has proved to be a pretty comforting facsimile of the old normal, given the precarious days we live in.
It’s about time we took a moment to thank those who got us there.
This article originally appeared in the February edition of Golfweek magazine.
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