Welcome golfers, but not fans

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Don’t look now, but the BMW Championship is being played at Olympia Fields Country Club beginning today.

Really, don’t look. At least in person. There’s no admittance for spectators this week, courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic. The PGA Tour wants nobody about the premises except players, caddies, a handful of volunteers and a scant number of reporters for print and TV.

You? No. You’re on the outside looking in. There’s Golf Channel and NBC for you.

This is how it’s been since the professional circuit resumed action after taking the spring off when the pandemic hit in mid-March – and after considering plans to play the last three rounds of the Players Championship without fans.

This is how it will be until there’s a vaccine, one would imagine. If the virus is still about, it’s hard to change the reaction to is – unless you’re a governor of a southern state and throws caution to the wind.

Thus, when Richy Werenski goes off No. 1 and Alex Noren does the same off No. 10 at 11:30 a.m., they’ll do so with no gallery, and only the PGA Tour’s online TV service watching.

This isn’t what the good folks at Olympia Fields expected when they renewed acquaintances with the Western Golf Association. A longtime devoted supporter of the WGA’s Evans Scholars Foundation, Olympia last hosted the Western Open – this is the 14th under the BMW moniker – in 1971. Bruce Crampton won that. Jack Nicklaus won the one before, in 1968. Walter Hagen picked up the title at Olympia in 1925. Machine Gun McGurn was picked up by the police for being McGurn and in the Western Open field in 1933. He missed the cut.

The Olympians were expecting 35,000 fans a day, a profitable cut of the concessions and corporate sales, to go with the 20 hours of network TV coverage and a burnished reputation.

Instead, the gallery ropes were put up for no logical reason at all. Olympia still gets a healthy site fee, but it’s who will be missing this week that hurts.

And we don’t mean Webb Simpson, who figured out he doesn’t have to play this week to play next week in the Tour Championship. Remember, the BMW is the effective semifinal of the PGA Tour season, which ends next week at East Lake in Atlanta, where FedEx will carpet-bomb the fairways with cash.

Unlike every professional tournament since the 1997 U.S. Senior Open, Olympia’s testing North Course will play to the rotation architect Willie Park Jr. intended when he designed it in 1923. That means the iconic 14th hole will be just that, and so on.

Among the more interesting groupings is the 1:09 p.m. group off No. 1: newly minted PGA Championship winner Collin Morikawa, Harris English, and bomber Bryson DeChambeau, whose 2015 U.S. Amateur title on Olympia North thrust him to stardom.

The 12:03 p.m. group off No. 10 isn’t bad either: Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas and Daniel Berger. Right behind that trio is the 12:14 p.m. group: Carlos Ortiz, Tiger Woods and Bubba Watson.

It should be fun. This is the first tournament for the regular PGA Tour crowd at Olympia since the 2003 U.S. Open, where all manner of low scores were recorded in the first two days, including a 63 by Vijay Singh, and then the wind blew and the rough grew. Four players, led by Jim Furyk, finished under par. The PGA Tour likes birdies, so the numbers will be low – remember last year’s dissection of Medinah No. 3? – but if Johnson or someone else shoots 30-under, as occurred last week at TPC Boston, a certain clock tower might fall over.

– Tim Cronin