From ‘normal’ to ‘really terrible’ in 4 days

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – “It felt like a normal tournament.”

That the 2020 Players Championship was anything but “normal” is a matter of historical fact, but as Tom Hoge recalled the week began with a business-as-usual vibe. Wednesday will mark the five-year anniversary of the most surreal day in the history of the game, if not the history of the modern world, when the PGA Tour declared a full stop as a pandemic consumed the globe.

But the journey from “normal” to anything but was as dramatic and unexpected as the circumstances. Even as the storm clouds built in March 2020, the Tour pushed ahead to play its flagship event at TPC Sawgrass.

“Everybody was still kind of confused trying to figure out what was going on around the world,” recalled Lucas Glover.

Two days before the circuit halted play, Tour commissioner Jay Monahan told the media, “Suffice it to say it’s a very dynamic situation, but I’m really proud of the amount of effort and thought that’s going into not only where we stand today but the commitment to continue to gain as much information as we can, and candidly the contingency plan for a lot of different scenarios, given that this is an unprecedented situation.”

Even on Thursday as other sports leagues began shuttering operations amid warnings from local and federal governments, the Tour teed off for the opening round on schedule, although with a limited crowd on the Stadium Course and a surreal vibe.

“I actually didn’t take it too seriously but on Wednesday when some of the other leagues shut down it was the first time I thought this was quite odd,” Adam Scott said. “I started thinking it might be tough for us to play this week. The pressure was building but generally the PGA Tour doesn’t call anything off.”

Following the first round, Rory McIlroy was asked what the Tour should do if a player or caddie were to test positive for COVID-19: “We need to shut it down then. Yeah, one, I mean, and that’s the thing, more than anything else, we need everyone to get tested,” he said.

As the day wore on the situation across the nation became more dire and at 4 p.m. ET Major League Baseball announced the cancelation of all spring training games and pushed back the start of the regular season by two weeks.

As the Tour scrambled to respond to a rapidly evolving crisis, Hideki Matsuyama posted a 9-under 63 to tie the course record and take a commanding two-shot lead. It was the round of a lifetime and an eventual footnote largely forgotten in the chaos that followed.

The Tour initially announced play would continue Friday but without fans on property and a dramatically reduced footprint but before most players went to sleep on March 12 the rug was pulled out from under their feet.

At 9:50 p.m. ET, players were informed via text that the tournament had been scrapped because of the “rapidly changing situation” regarding COVID-19. In a follow-up text, the Tour said that the next three events (Valspar Championship, WGC-Dell Match Play and Valero Texas Open) were also canceled.

“They normally send us a message after we finish with our tee time, and that day they sent us, ‘Adam Scott, 2 under, T-9, $400,000 payout.’ Because they paid out after the first round and I remember thinking Hideki just got a text message [saying he won] $2.4 million for the one round,” Scott laughed. “And then after another minute the next message came, scrap the last message – no payout. Everyone was probably excited and then the next message came.”

There was the inevitable and understandable second guessing following the Tour’s decision to reverse course.

“I thought it was a day too late,” Glover said. “With everything else going on I didn’t think we should have played on Thursday.”

But eventually golf, like the rest of the world began to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

“I was on my own,” said Glover, who drove home to south Florida from TPC Sawgrass. “I remember stopping at Walgreens in Port Orange [Florida] looking for paper towels and toilet paper and stuff like that thinking it was going to be like a snowstorm in Alabama and everything was going to be gone. And there wasn’t anything, it was gone and no one knew what to do – bizarro world.”

Hoge managed to get his family on a flight home to Texas but Scott, who owns homes in Europe and the Bahamas but is from Australia, had a much more difficult choice to make.

“I think we quickly knew [Friday] that [the shutdown] wasn’t going to be a quick thing and I started making the best plans I could,” said Scott, who opted to take his family home to Australia despite the global uncertainty. “They were shutting down quick and my wife was pregnant at the time, so if they were really stuck and I wanted her to be there.”

It would be nearly three months before the Tour would begin to play again at the Charlies Schwab Challenge in June, albeit with no fans and a mountain of protocols and testing.

Lost in the politics of professional golf at the moment is how deftly the Tour navigated the uncertainty of the pandemic and returned to action.

“I feel like it’s one of the few proactive things the Tour has done coming back form that,” Glover said. “Kudos to them, I’ve said it for years that it was pretty impressive we were the first sport to really come back. The logistics that went into that were impressive.”

Circumstances and an unprecedented threat to the Tour from the Saudi-funded LIV Golf league have caused those memories to fade but for those who lived through the most surreal episode in the history of the Tour it is something they will never forget.

“It was like an apocalyptic-type world we were living in,” Mackenzie Hughes said. “Thinking back to where we were, it makes you really appreciate where we are now. It was really terrible.”