Web.com Tour Championship Canceled Due to Hurricane Matthew

On Tuesday, the Web.com Tour announced the cancelation of this weekend’s Tour Championship in Florida, finalizing the current money list.

Add the Web.com Tour Championship to the growing list of events in the Southeast that have been canceled due to the ominous threat of Hurricane Matthew.

A statewide emergency was declared in Florida on Monday, and the Jacksonville metro-surrounding tournament site, Atlantic Beach Country Club, is directly in the path of the storm with projected winds of 120 miles per hour.

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“People have less than 24 hours to prepare,” Florida Governor Rick Scott said in a press conference. “Having a plan could be the difference between life and death.”

With the grave reality that Scott and meteorologists are warning of, no one can fault the Tour for pulling the tournament from Atlantic Beach. In fact, some were wondering why it took until Tuesday to formally announce it. On top of that, it would be a practical impossibility to relocate the event within a week’s time.

A question worthy of posing, though, is this: could it have been moved to a different time at a different place? If this were a regular season Web.com Tour event, not many would bat an eye if the higher-ups decided it wasn’t in the cards to reschedule.

This is different.

Dozens of players’ livelihoods were staked on this tournament, whether it was to improve their priority ranking on the PGA Tour totem pole for 2016-17 or, more dramatically, to simply break through and reach the Tour in the first place.

Workers taking down the viewing stands due to #HurricaneMatthew #WebTour @WebDotComTour #pgatour #golf pic.twitter.com/HFlZXL6nbs
— Gary L McCullough (@garywiththeshot) October 5, 2016

Like a rained out baseball game deemed final after five or more completed innings, there’s got to be some fine print explaining the decision to declare the current money list as final. But how could players have anticipated such a wild scenario, especially when strategies regarding the best approach to the Web.com Tour Finals go back weeks, if not months?

For example, a player may have skipped an event to rest in hopes of a late surge at the Tour Championship to push him over the top. With the Finals consisting of four events over five weeks, it seems reasonable for the hopefuls to at least have that option.

What’s more, a particular batch of players whose games are better suited to ABCC than the other Finals venues were robbed of one last shot to earn their cards. That kind of injustice is unbecoming for a series that has drawn comparisons to a major championship in terms of the pressure players face.