Salute PGA Tour on Showing Us How to Continue Despite COVID

As the year draws to a close, it’s significant that golf, specifically the PGA Tour, was the first sport to figure out how to continue during the COVID-19 outbreak.

It wasn’t the NFL, the NBA, the MBA or any of the other alphabet soups of sports. It was the PGA Tour, and later, the LPGA and PGA Tour Champions and Korn Ferry Tour. It wasn’t easy.

For the PGA Tour, it took three months – from the cancellation of The Players in March to the restart in June at the Charles Schwab Challenge — to figure out a way to continue to play tournament golf. There was a mountain of concern, and there was a chasm filled with obstacles before they could go forward. It required the greatest schedule juggling feat imaginable and total belief in science all the time.

Everyone held their collective breaths as the first tournament teed up with no fans and no pro-ams. But it happened. There was a winner, Daniel Berger, and life for Tour players resumed, albeit in a strange fashion.

The Tour had to figure out ways to overcome fears of the players and their families, of the sponsors and their constituents, of the courses and communities where tournaments were going to be held, of the television crews and announcers and more. It was an extraordinary effort and amazing that they have managed it with so few hiccups and so few players being affected by the virus.

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In all, only eight regular season tournaments were completely cancelled, plus the Barbasol opposite field event for the British Open, which was also cancelled and not rescheduled. So that makes 10 in all, PGA Tour related.

Then, in September, the 2021 season started, and even with the addition of the Masters in the middle of it, golf has continued to roll on.

The European Tour followed suit and, after halting the same week as the PGA Tour, began their season again in July. They are now working toward their season conclusion at the Race to Dubai finale in mid-December in Dubai.

That they could do this at all when so many political entities seemed to want everyone to go hide under a mattress is mind-blowing. But the players and caddies and coaches followed approved medical procedures, and the players have been as careful as they are able to be.

As a result, the PGA Tour showed the way for the rest of the sporting world and the rest of us. They showed you can go out in public and go about semi-normal activities and chances are you will not die, which we all agree is important. Some people have, and more will, unfortunately. Yes, the virus is tricky and can sometimes slip in where it’s not wanted.

Even Jack and Barbara Nicklaus were victims, but they bounced back, Jack with minimal symptoms and Barbara with no symptoms. This slippery virus caught a few more, including Masters champ Dustin Johnson.

Sergio Garcia, notably, tested positive and missed the Masters, much to his dismay.

Others had positive tests, including Nick Watney, Tony Finau, Adam Scott, Dustin Johnson, Kramer Hickok, Henrik Norlander, Bill Haas, Dylan Frittelli, Denny McCarthy, Nick Watney, Harris English, Chad Campbell, Brandon Wu, Cameron Champ, Jonathan Hodge and Scottie Scheffler. They have all isolated for the appropriate time and returned to play after that time elapsed.

At least one of those who had the virus won a major championship. None were hospitalized.

In other words, the PGA Tour’s restart was amazingly successful. How have they been able to do it for five months? They created an environment where they see the same people all the time and they got testing. Testing. Testing. And more testing. Each player tested before he got on a plane or in a car to travel to a tournament. Before each tournament, he tested again, and if there was a positive, then he had to go home and isolate, and test until he was negative.

The testing was something that the rest of us could not easily do in June. But now many of us can. It’s easy at places like CVS and Walgreens. It’s testing that allows you to assure yourself that your cold or cough is not something worse. If testing works for the PGA Tour it could work for companies, for government, for industrial locations, even for schools.

I know it’s easy to get the test because after getting a sore throat and cough and not knowing if it was fall allergies or “something else,” and remembering what Jack Nicklaus said about his symptoms, I made an appointment for a rapid test at my closest drug store. Just 15 minutes after the test, I had the answer. No COVID. So that was good. It allowed me to go on with my week without worrying that I had something contagious or that I had something that was going to kill me by noon the next day, if you know what I mean.

I asked the lady who was handling the testing if this was what the PGA Tour had. She said she had no idea. But in a world with no answers right now, I was grateful to get one. When the vaccines are ready, I’ll be, as a friend of mine said recently, 12th in line, as in he was too chicken to be first, but he wants the vaccine.

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So thanks, PGA Tour, for showing us how to do this until we can all get vaccinated.

[In the U.S., a little over .07 percent of the total population has died of COVID 19 related illness, according to CDC numbers. That’s less than one percent. Out of our total population of 331 million, 12.8 million have been diagnosed with it, and of that, more than 12.5 million have recovered. ]

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