Fort Worth’s PGA Tour win, and loss, is here: You aren’t invited
Fort Worth won the sports’ lottery, but permit us a tiny moment or two, or 10, to throw a tantrum over our big win.
Our town will soon host one of America’s first major sporting event in the country since the world shut down to COVID-19.
The Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial Country Club this week will have the best field in its history, with 16 of the top 20 players in the world coming here.
If you care at all about golf, or just love to drink and walk around and pretend to like golf while looking at people, the 2020 Charles Schwab Challenge is an upper-tier ticket.
Because it’s the year 2020, where every single aspect of our daily lives has become an attack of traveling murder hornets, of course you can’t go to this year’s Colonial.
Check that, I can go but my preference is that you are all there to join. This is not going to be the same without you.
When the PGA Tour announced 60 days ago its intention to return by starting here in Fort Worth, but with no fans, a great many of us thought the event would still be canceled. That Colonial would merely be another COVID closure.
Now that the week of the tournament is here, the reality of the restrictions for the Charles Schwab Challenge have set in.
This is all wonderful and great, and it absolutely stinks.
“It was always, at least in my view, we kind of sort of politely called it the greatest cocktail party in the world,” said former PGA Tour pro and currently NBC Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee on Monday when I asked him if this tournament is bittersweet. “It definitely had that buzz to it. ... It definitely had a festive feel to it. It was sort of a fraternity for Fort Worth and the Dallas/Fort Worth area.”
Driving around Colonial’s 18 holes this week to see the setup for the 2020 tournament was surreal. The course is so pretty it looks Photoshopped.
But the rest looks like a setup for a college, or high school, golf tournament. The course is the same, but everything else is not.
There is little to suggest Colonial will soon host a major PGA Tour featuring the likes of Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and the rest who will be playing competitively for the first time in months.
Event planners still put up ropes along the fairways, but I’m not exactly sure why.
The par 3 No. 13, known for its stadium seating and extensive suite setup, it now looks like a nice pitch-and-putt. One that I would be lucky to drain in 8.
There are towers for the TV cameras, and a couple of tents.
All of the areas that fans of this tournament, and Fort Worth’s favorite see and be-seen event, are accustomed to are not here.
Because this is the first PGA Tour event since it canceled the Player’s Championship on March 12, everyone involved is following every precautionary step to the letter.
CBS Sports president Sean McManus said on Monday during a conference call they will have about half of its normal staff at Colonial in Fort Worth. He also said that this is “the most complicated” production for an event he has ever done.
To pull this off under social distancing guidelines will require crews working from Orlando to Fort Worth to California.
CBS voice Jim Nantz will be in a tower at Colonial by himself with a robotic camera. His partner, analyst Nick Faldo, will be in an NBC broadcast studio in Orlando.
“My role will be to leave the hotel, drive to the site, park my car and march immediately to the 18th tower,” Nantz said Monday. “I won’t be allowed in the clubhouse. ... It’s just different.”
McManus said some players, who previously agreed, will wear a microphone and they can answer a question to a stationary, unmanned camera on the course inside the ropes.
He also said there is no plan to add crowd noise.
From a TV standpoint, the Charles Schwab Challenge should be quality TV. God knows we could watch dogs playing blackjack and confuse it for quality TV these days.
It’s great that Fort Worth bagged this event with the sport’s biggest names, and it’s a crushing shame you can’t come.
