Plastic cutlery and quiet birdies: Life inside the senior golf bubble
Mark Calcavecchia is back inside the golf bubble this week after a month-long battle with COVID-19 that left the PGA Tour Champions player and 1989 British Open winner wondering if he’d ever even play golf again. Wondering, even, if he’d ever feel good again.
To prepare for this weekend’s SAS Championship at Prestonwood Country Club, Calcavecchia and his wife spent eight days in the North Carolina mountains, hiking at altitude in an attempt to get his wind back. It wasn’t exactly his usual tournament preparation.
“I’m close to 90 percent,” Calcavecchia, 60, said Wednesday. “I feel really good. Maybe a little bit short on air in my lungs. Been trying to do a little more walking than I have recently. I’m getting there. The rest of me feels fine. My strength level, I might be hitting it slightly shorter than I already was, which isn’t good, because I was hitting it short enough.”
Calcavecchia’s experience underlines how golf’s senior circuit may have higher stakes playing on during the pandemic than its younger compatriots, and why the golf bubble erected this week around several sites in Cary — Prestonwood, the Embassy Suites and the Umstead — is more than just theater.
PGA Tour Champions is following essentially the same procedures as the PGA Tour and Korn Ferry Tour, with frequent testing for players, caddies and spouses, and charter flights between back-to-back tournaments. That means no grandstands and no fans, other than a handful of sponsor guests. The SAS Championship will have a minimal 320 volunteers, about half as many as usual.
With so much of the usual atmosphere missing, there is at least one notable addition: Amid the usual compound of semi-trailers that make up the traveling tour circus of offices, equipment trucks, treatment facilities and other infrastructure, there’s a new one this fall: A mobile lab from Sanford Health, the South Dakota medical provider that handles testing for the tours.
If golf tournaments look weird on television without fans — the biggest gallery of the summer might have been the gaggle of volunteers that slowly collected around the 18th green to watch Colin Morikawa win the PGA Championship — it’s an even weirder life inside the golf bubble.
Playing without fans is odd, but there is a retro simplicity to it that helps make up for the lack of a roar greeting a well-hit shot, even if it can’t generate anything close to the same adrenaline, although even that’s different on the Champions tour.
“I can see how it might be weird for Tiger and Phil and the superstars on the PGA Tour when they’re used to thousands and thousands of people watching every move they make,” Calcavecchia said.
Life away from the course is even odder, especially on the Champions tour, where the journey is part of the reason these over-50 players keep playing a full schedule. That’s why the Champions tour tested wives from the beginning and allowed players to bring a guest starting with the second tournament back, because so many players travel with their spouses. Guests were not allowed on the PGA Tour until August. The Wyndham Championship in Greensboro was the first.
Jerry Kelly, the defending SAS champion, typically spends as much time scouring restaurant reviews as yardage books, but he joked that he’d never eaten with plastic utensils so much in his life. He and his wife have taken to packing place-settings in their luggage for all the take-out they’ve been eating.
“Off the golf course, it is a monumental change for me,” Kelly said. “My biggest thing on the road is food and wine. My wife and I like to follow the James Beard list, find the best places possible to enjoy ourselves off the golf course. There’s zero of that going on. I talk to a lot of guys who are going to Chipotle the same way they always have. That’s not me.”
And yes, not being able to eat a nice meal with an expensive bottle of wine may not not be much of a sacrifice compared to what everyday Americans are dealing with, but it’s less about hardship than it is getting creatures of habit to give up those habits. Asking John Daly to stay away from Hooters is the only way this can work.
“We’ve asked our players, no matter what community we’re in, to do the right things in the evenings,” Champions Tour president Miller Brady said. “We need to make sure we can play the following week, and the next three weeks and the end of the year.”
Of course, even those precautions aren’t always enough. Calcavecchia routinely travels in a motor home, so he already had his own personal bubble, and still tested positive at the beginning of September. He ended up driving the RV from South Dakota to his Florida home as symptoms set in — “I felt every mile,” he said — and missed two tournaments. His wife Brenda, who was with him the whole time, quarantined for 14 days at home and has continued to test negative.
“It’s no joke,” Calcavecchia said. “It’s an awful, awful virus. Some people get extremely ill or even ill enough to pass away obviously. It’s very scary. I’m going to do my best for as long as I can to stay safe and not get it again. I don’t want it again.”
Thursday, he was scheduled to donate convalescent plasma at a Red Cross donation center.
“It seems like the right thing to do,” Calcavecchia said. “It was my wife’s idea and it sounded pretty cool. I’m in a position to do that, and if it saves someone’s life, that would make me feel great.”
Calcavecchia is one of only three Champions Tour players to test positive, and the most recent, since play resumed in August. Brandt Jobe and Kent Jones are the others.
That’s fewer than the (larger) PGA Tour, and that despite weekly interaction with the amateurs who play with the pros on Wednesdays and Thursdays, an essential part of the senior tour economy. The tour arranged for all of this week’s guests to be tested over the weekend. The same is true of anyone who manages to emerge from a Monday qualifier. This week, Wake Forest golf coach Jerry Haas was one of the lucky four.
Even as he competes for a piece of the $2.1 million purse, he’s still not inside the actual tour bubble. On the practice green with his brother Jay on Wednesday, Jerry had to putt with a giant “non-member competitor” credential hanging from his neck.
“I tried to tell them at Wake,” Haas said. “They called and I was supposed to go this morning for an 8 a.m. one, but I’m like, ‘I just got tested yesterday with the tour and I’m negative.’ They were like, ‘Great, save us some money.’ ”
Jay, as a regular tour member, had a red cloth wristband that signified his admittance to the inner sanctum thanks to his regular, tour-mandated testing. Jerry wore a blue paper wristband with the day of the week on it like the volunteers, amateurs, media and other outsiders, signifying he’d had a daily temperature and symptom check, but he was inside the ropes putting with his brother and Jim Furyk just the same.
Playing on an empty golf course may actually be an advantage for Haas, who’s used to that.
“At the end of the day, it’s still a golf tournament,” Haas said. “You have to hit the shots. You have to play the holes. It’s going to be no different. Everybody gets a little nervous. Everybody does their thing. I think it’s probably different for these guys, Jim and Jay, that play in front of people all the time. For me it’ll just be like a Monday qualifier.”
This story was originally published October 8, 2020 at 10:17 AM.
