The Masters, U.S. Open and PGA Championship have all been slated for late summer or fall dates, part of the revised professional golf schedule announced earlier this week that also preserves the Ryder Cup in its original date and the FedEx Cup playoffs only one week later — provided the coronavirus pandemic subsides.
The PGA Championship (Aug. 6-9 at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco), the U.S. Open (Sept. 17-20 at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N.Y.) and the Masters (Nov. 12-15 at Augusta National) survived outright cancellation. Only the Open Championship won’t be played.
The PGA Tour also is planning to resume in Fort Worth with the Charles Schwab Challenge May 21-24 and will use the weeks vacated by the move of the U.S. Open to September and the cancellation of the Open Championship and Olympic golf to re-schedule some of the nine events that were lost in March, April and May.
However, The Players Championship, which was canceled after one round on March 12, won’t be one of them.
The easy answer: Players Week had actually arrived in March. There were two practice rounds and one competitive round, with the entire build-up at the TPC Sawgrass Players Stadium Course completed.
When the tournament was canceled, the hospitality and fan areas were then torn down, tickets were refunded and the 144 players in the field received an equal share of half the $15 million purse.
The PGA and the U.S. Open build-ups were only partially finished and then halted when the governors of those states issued shelter in place orders. Augusta National has mostly permanent infrastructure and doesn’t erect corporate tents.
A PGA Tour spokesperson said that while holding The Players in the summer or the fall was discussed, it would have been impractical to have had a build-up twice within a five-month span. There’s also doubt that the tournament could have mustered enough volunteers to pull it off.
The other issue was trying to play a world-class event in the summer in Florida. The heat and traffic on Bermuda grass would have presented challenges from an agronomic standpoint, along with the strong possibility of weather delays because of almost-daily thunderstorms.
The last time a major championship was played in Florida was the 1987 PGA in Palm Beach Gardens. It was so hot and the PGA National Course was so burnt out that Washington Post columnist Tom Boswell hinted that The Players might not be the fifth major — it could shoot higher.
“If the PGA wants to lose is precarious status as the fourth major golf title, then all it has to do is make a few more brilliant decisions like this one,” Boswell wrote.
He also penned: “It’s not true that Florida is closed in August. But it should be.”
Since then, the southernmost major championships were the 2001 and 2011 PGAs.
Agronomy has come a long way in 33 years and TPC Sawgrass superintendent Jeff Plotts said his staff could have prepared the course to the satisfaction of the field — barring a summer of record heat — and the newer strains of warm-weather Bermuda grass would have held up to he traffic of more than 400 competitive rounds in four days.
“I think we could have gotten it done,” Plotts said.
But any potential Players date in the late summer also could have run into tropical weather, risking another cancellation. September is the rainiest month in the area under normal circumstances and the tournament could not have been played in October because the overseeing process to get the course ready for a March date begins that month.
Re-scheduling The Players for August or September, only to risk another cancellation with a hurricane hovering off shore?
In the end, the PGA Tour opted for caution — and to wait until March 11-14, 2021 for the next Players.
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