For one glorious Sunday afternoon in the middle of June, a small ray of golfing light shone upon the bleak American sports landscape. Baseball’s labor pains, Black Lives Mattering within the NBA’s Orlando “bubble”, the NHL trying to finish its season before winter begins, Confederate flags flying at NASCAR racetracks…all of these weighty subjects could briefly be forgotten.
Because at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, Xander Schauffele and Collin Morikawa both lipped out crucial four-foot putts – putts that you or I would make at least seven times out of ten – in horrifying fashion.
Their agony in defeat, and Daniel Berger’s muted ecstasy in victory, were emotions remarkable for their rarity in competitive sports at any level since early March. Two golfing exhibitions in May – one of which featured Tom Brady and Peyton Manning – were thin gruel for sports fans starved of normalcy. And while the absence of sports must rank low on any list of the world’s many miseries in 2020, the PGA Tour’s return was a much needed mental salve for golfers like me, and proof that lockdown life need not deny us all of our favorite distractions.
Golf might be the perfect pandemic pastime: social distancing is easy, and surely no professional sport looks or sounds better without fans. Clear sightlines, no temporary immovable obstructions and ridiculous free drops, and no drunken shouts of “MASHED POTATO!” are all novelties I could get used to; never has the PGA Tour more closely resembled the Saturday medals at my club in Scotland. Rickie Fowler’s attempts to play to the television gallery by wearing a microphone on Thursday at Colonial (when he shot 73) and being interviewed while walking toward one of his tee shots at Harbour Town (only to discover his ball was out-of-bounds) were probably unnecessary; the purity, not to mention quality, of the golf we’ve seen easily speaks for itself.
With most of the world’s best golfers returning to competition in unison, we eagerly waited to discover what they’d done on their (enforced) holiday. Rory McIlroy forgot how to play like the undisputed world number one: his streak of Top 5 finishes on Tour screeched to a halt at Colonial. Berger looks like he’s been auditioning to become McIlroy’s understudy, adding a Hilton Head T3 to his win in Texas. Bryson DeChambeau gained another 20 pounds of muscle and twice as many yards of length off the tee: the Tour’s resident mad scientist is morphing into a middle linebacker. And Jordan Spieth’s mental block seems to have grown several stories taller: nobody in golf misses so many three-foot putts relative to the number of 30-footers he makes.
Golf’s return has not gone entirely smoothly. Nick Watney’s positive test for COVID-19 and subsequent withdrawal after one round at Harbour Town was a sobering reminder that sporting “bubbles” are easily popped, and the projected return of fans at The Memorial in mid-July seems awfully premature. But the RBC Heritage continued in Watney’s absence, and the Sunday shotmaking all across a crowded leaderboard was truly breathtaking: Webb Simpson had to shatter the tournament scoring record to defeat Abraham Ancer by a single shot. Lengthy layoffs can’t stop these guys from living under par, and certainly no aspect of Simpson’s or Berger’s victories need be asterisked.
Stranger sights await professional golf, including back-to-back events at the same course (Muirfield Village) in July, a US Open and possibly a low-key Ryder Cup in September, and an azalea-free Masters in November. There is no “new normal” in sports; nothing is normal about what we’re all living through. But the timeless nature of golf may help it weather the pandemic surprisingly well. And at the end of a weather-delayed Heritage Sunday, Calibogue Sound at sunset was a glorious sight harkening back to simpler, happier times. It might have felt like golf from a century ago, had I not remembered DeChambeau’s driving stats.
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