Golf will be placed under the world’s largest microscope when the sport and some of its biggest stars return to live television on Sunday.
Not only will everyone want to watch Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson compete against Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff in a team skins game at Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Fla.; how they interact on the course and adhere to safety guidelines in place because of the COVID-19 pandemic will receive just as much attention, if not more.
Granted, there are only four players, walking by themselves, with no caddies. But every step — or misstep — they take will be scrutinized as if it’s a Senate sub-committee hearing.
“I think we have a big responsibility on ourselves to make sure that we practice all the guidelines that the PGA Tour is going to set in place,” Johnson said the other day on a conference call with national golf media. “Obviously everyone is going to be watching what we’re doing, so I think it’s very important for us to do it all correctly. We have a responsibility to ourselves and all the other players to stay safe and stay healthy.”
But that’s nothing compared to what will happen in another month.
The scrutiny will ramp ten-fold when the PGA Tour resumes its season June 11 with a field of 122 players and caddies at the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas. Maybe it’s a good thing spectators won’t be allowed there or for any of the tour’s events for the foreseeable future. Social media would be flooded with cell-phone pictures from the social-distancing police just waiting for a player and caddie to violate their six feet of separation.
“That will be the one tough part,” Johnson said. “Your caddie will be the one person that you’re going to have to be close to at times.”
Indeed, players routinely talk with their caddie on the tee and in the fairway, going over the yardage book. And they usually do it in librarian tones.
“You wouldn’t be able to whisper to each other,” Fowler said. “We might have to speak up a little bit more than normal to talk from more than a few feet away. Maybe I’ll keep a club in my hand and hold my caddie at an arm’s length or something. It’ll be interesting.”
I bring this up because it’s not just the tour players who are being monitored and scrutinized on the golf course. It is everybody — public and private players, single-digit handicaps and weekend warriors, young and old, tea-totalers and beer guzzlers. They are being watched, not only by those on the golf course, but, more important, those off the golf course.
People who live near or along golf courses, even those driving by, are taking photos of golfers violating the guidelines mandated by the Center for Disease Control that have allowed 95% of the courses in the country — the National Golf Foundation’s latest figure — to be open. Joe Beditz, the NGF’s president and chief executive officer, said his office received a photo the other day from a person who took a picture from their back window of golfers not following the specific measures.
“We could see more of this,” Beditz said. “We want to implore golfers to put peer pressure on themselves and other golfers so we don’t have to have the authorities coming in and putting pressure on us. If we want to keep playing, we have to behave like we should behave.”
For this reason, Beditz said amateur golfers will feel what it’s like to be a PGA Tour player because “they’re playing in front of the biggest galleries of their lives … the paparazzi are out there.”
Beditz said it’s up to the board of directors at private clubs to make sure their members comply with CDC guidelines. It is not the role of the golf professional to enforce the rules because, technically, they work for the dues-paying members who own the club. At public facilities, Beditz said owners and/or staff members have to be sure to marshal the course on a consistent basis to make sure safety and distancing measures are being followed.
“We feel for the golf professionals and the owners and operators out there who are having to deal with golfers who maybe want to push back on some of these rules we have,” Beditz said. “We need to set a good example, we need to set a good example for other sports who might be following our lead on how to open safely and securely.”
Beditz said a course in Florida recently was shut down by the local sheriff’s department for flagrant safety violations. In Naugatuck, Conn., a woman driving past Hop Brook Golf Course was so upset at players not practicing social distancing that she drove into the parking lot and took a video on her phone. After seeing the video, the town’s mayor immediately closed the course.
“We need to keep in mind we have a yellow light here, not a green light,” Beditz said. “Yellow means caution, it means being prudent, and careful.”
After all, everyone is watching.