It’s about time.
The postponement of the Ryder Cup until September 2021 due to the global coronavirus pandemic had a sense of inevitability really since the day in March when the Players Championship was canceled after the first round and the Masters was postponed until November.
The Ryder Cup joins the British Open not to mention March Madness, the Boston and New York City Marathons, Wimbledon and the Summer Olympics among great sporting events not happening this year. An unfathomable scenario on New Year’s Day, but here we are.
You knew it was going to end this way when The Daily Telegraph’s Jamie Corrigan, citing unnamed sources, declared postponement to 2021 was imminent despite the cries of fake news.
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You knew it was going to be postponed when players from both sides agreed that it wouldn’t be a Ryder Cup without the fans – the rare time that Rory McIlroy and Brooks Koepka and everyone down the line were all on the same page – and some threatened not to play.
You knew it even as the PGA Tour resumed play after a 91-day suspension and played on without fans. But the Ryder Cup?
Players react to Ryder Cup postponement: ‘It’s the right decision’
“If you can’t play the Ryder Cup with fans, it’s not the Ryder Cup,” Spain’s Jon Rahm said. “It’s something else.”
U.S. Ryder Cup captain Steve Stricker said it would’ve been “a yawner,” while former European Ryder Cup player and captain Tony Jacklin said, “It would be a disaster.”
We can do without the knuckleheads cheering a shot hit into the water or some of the four-letter words and unsportsmanlike gestures that have become all too commonplace in recent years (no matter which side of the pond the biennial match is contested), but the patriotic furor and the passion and pageantry of a Ryder Cup has turned it into a rock concert, where the first-tee intensity is second to none. The fans are the 13th man; they are part of what makes the Ryder Cup so great and one of the greatest scenes in all of sports. The game is better off waiting an extra year for a Ryder Cup done right than a watered-down version.
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As Stricker put it, “It would be more like an exhibition. And that’s not what that event is about.”
The powers-that-be did the necessary due diligence, but they knew it to, and despite dragging out the official announcement, the writing was on the wall.
“We did everything we could to make it a Dewey beats Truman headline. We really wanted to do this,” PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh said.
They gave it the old college try, but did anyone really think this was going to get played?
Money was the only reason to go forward this year. The Ryder Cup is a financial juggernaut for the PGA and European Tour, and postponing it for a year has forced both entities to make some tough decisions in their profit-and-loss models.
But staging the Ryder Cup this fall couldn’t be justified as positive tests for COVID-19 spiked, as mandatory quarantine periods were extended, as qualification criteria were rejiggered and lacked meaning, and as the PGA Tour called an audible and announced it wouldn’t allow limited fan attendance at next week’s Memorial Tournament. Too much uncertainty. What promises do we have that we won’t just be in the same position a year from now?
“None, frankly,” Waugh conceded. “I’d bet on science is what I’d say, personally. The ability to figure out treatments/vaccines or protocols for safety given that we have 15 months to do that, but there frankly is no guarantee.”
That just further confirms that it was the right decision to postpone. But it was also the only decision that could have been made.
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