“If I was living in America,” one England-based player said, “I’d be playing right now.”
England’s top player, Tommy Fleetwood, was the world No. 10, one spot ahead of Tiger Woods, when the PGA Tour suspended its schedule in March. With four top-3 finishes in his seven worldwide starts before the coronavirus halted the season, Fleetwood had momentum on his side. But when tour play resumed last week, he was on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
In its haste to return, the tour, whose playing membership spans the globe, set up the stakes so that any player not based in the United States was effectively out of bounds. From Fleetwood’s perch in northwest England, the hazards were many, including a two-way quarantine, the possibility of catching the virus from a fellow passenger on a trans-Atlantic flight, and a months-long separation from his wife, Clare; their two-year-old son, Franklin; and his stepsons Oscar, 13, and Mo, 12.
“If I was living in America,” Fleetwood said, “I’d be playing right now.” But he doesn’t, and so he is not.
Golf is not the only sport that has forged ahead without the full support of its competitive membership. This week’s decision by the United States Tennis Association to hold its marquee event, the United States Open, later in the summer in New York, one of the cities hardest hit by the virus, drew a sharp rebuke from the Australian player Nick Kyrgios. On Twitter, Kyrgios described the move as “selfish” and wrote, “People that live in the U. S. of course are pushing the Open to go ahead.”
He added, “I’ll get my hazmat suit ready for when I travel from Australia and then have to quarantine for two weeks on my return.”
Kyrgios’s countryman Adam Scott, a former major winner, was the only player in men’s golf based outside the United States other than Fleetwood in the top-10 when the season was suspended. He also struggled with the idea of a restart, and some of his concerns were validated on Friday when Nick Watney, an American player, withdrew before the second round of the RBC Heritage in South Carolina after testing positive for the coronavirus.
Watney had tested negative at the start of the week as a condition of entering the tour’s so-called bubble and playing this week.
