Golf, in a vacuum: A sport that demands quiet at times is lost in it at others
The beach is still open for business across from Sedgefield Country Club’s 15th hole, all of the sand and daybeds and lounge chairs set up alongside the pond, always the focal point of the television broadcast of the Wyndham Championship.
It looks about the same on TV, but it’s a Potemkin village. Take a step back and it’s an island unto itself. The actors and actresses lounging on the resort furniture are the only fans on the grounds. This is professional golf in 2020, an eerie combination of the routine and the faux and the bizarre in an unprecedented melange.
The fairways and greens are all roped off, per usual, but there’s no one but a handful of marshals lining them, and no grandstands set up around them. With the occasional player guest — this is the first week the PGA Tour has allowed guests — following a group, it has the feel of a club championship despite the millions of dollars at stake and the electric buzz of the scoreboards and hum of the generators that power them.
“That true energy, the pressure of the first tee or the energy of the first tee and the pressure coming down the stretch just can’t be compared to what I’ve experienced for the last 20 years,” Paul Casey said. “It’s just not the same.”
Without the giant Margaritaville party tent in front of the clubhouse this year, players drive up to the front door, like any other Sunday at Sedgefield since the ACC was founded there in 1953. There’s no two-deep crowd ringing the putting green. Instead of a ring of skyboxes behind the 18th green, there’s a sand sculpture. The trophy presentation to Jim Herman lacked the usual ceremony with few people watching.
These are the concessions that had to be made to allow the PGA Tour to proceed amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Golf, among all sports, has been able to proceed most normally. But not entirely normally.
The visual differences are merely unusual. The aural incongruities are truly disorienting for everyone.
For a sport that expects absolute stillness and silence at times, the absence of noise is nothing short of jarring. Everyone, fans and golfers alike, is innately conditioned to absorb the gallery’s collective response to a shot. Every eventuality has its own sound. Players on Saturday and Sunday can track the progress of their competitors by the noise without ever glancing at a scoreboard. An approach shot that hits the pin is one note, one that catches a slope and dribbles off the green another.
“There’s nobody around, the energy’s not there, the fire’s not there,” Jason Kokrak said after his 7-under-par 63 on Friday. “So it’s a little strange. I guess it’s more comfortable, but you don’t get amped up, you don’t get the crowd going when you hit a good shot. I would love to see the crowds back, but you’ve got to stay safe.”
Without that feedback, even the best golfers in the world sometimes struggle to comprehend the world around them.
Si Woo Kim one-hopped his tee shot into the hole on the par-3 3rd on Saturday, and there was a smattering of clapping from the handful of people behind the green, but nothing like the uncaged roar that accompanies a hole-in-one dunked in front of a gallery.
Kim smiled at his caddie with eyebrows raised and exchanged a fist bump, but otherwise betrayed no emotion whatsoever. A hole-in-one on tour is an explosion emotion as much as an event, a blast wave of sound that cascades back to the tee from the green. Without it, Kim found his ace hard to accept.
“I feel like just tap-in, really close,” Kim said. “Some TV guys told me, ‘That’s ace.’”
Sedgefield, which winds through the streets and backyards of a toney residential neighborhood, has a little more of the usual feel thanks to the house parties which have proceeded unabated on decks and porches that overlook the holes this week. But it’s nothing like the wave that carried Western Carolina’s J.T. Poston to victory last year, a raucous, beer-drinking, purple-clad mob. Other locals, like Raleigh’s Doc Redman, two shots off the lead going into Sunday, might have expected similar support.
“Yeah, it stinks, especially playing well, but just playing in general,” Redman said. “I love having my parents and friends out and they love watching regardless of what I shoot. I could go shoot 80 and they’d love watching. So it stinks, but I know they’re loving watching on TV and on the computer.”
Redman and Webb Simpson were among those chasing Kim to the finish on Sunday, so close to home and yet still so alone, making their charge without fanfare in the eerie stillness that is tournament golf in August 2020.
This story was originally published August 16, 2020 at 2:08 PM.
