Players Championship: A year full of the unexpected

One year ago, Hideki Matsuyama was leading after the first round of the Players Championship. He had finished the opening round with a fantastic -9 63, and looked to be in a great position to make a run at what many call the unofficial fifth major.

Then, in a move that now surprises no one, the PGA Tour, like many other sports, altered, postponed, and ultimately canceled the 2020 Players Championship.

There was no incident like Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz essentially licking microphones, but at least the NBA was able to set up a bubble site. Golf is much different, as we all know. You play the course just as much, if not more than those you are playing against.

We saw majors moved, events canceled, a few players come down with the virus, and the schedule changing week-by-week it seemed like, at least for a while.

When 2020 was said and done, we still saw three of the majors end up being played, even if the 2020 Masters was during the 2021 season, which would be followed up by a Masters just five or so months later (which is now just one month away).

Now, it’s been an entire year, and we are back to where it started, the Players Championship.

What are the chances that the place that it all started, at least for the world of golf, can be the place that we could go back in another year and say “that was the place things started getting normal again”? It sounds like there are going to be around 9,000 people per day allowed in, a number that is a rough estimate of their 20% capacity.

As more and more states open things up, could golf be one of the first to start allowing 50% of their fans? We are an outdoor sport, with TONS of room to walk around.

It would be fitting for the Players Championship to be the event where things started on the path back to normal. Shoot, maybe we can even see Hideki Matsuyama at the top of the leaderboard again.