Quiet, please: PGA returns with birdies aplenty at a muted, fanless Colonial

Fort Worth: In the offbeat new world, you could hear golf balls plop onto fairways, birds singing more audibly than ever in some multi-hole chorus, church bells and train whistles in the distance. You could see players waving make-believe to a make-believe audience after successful putts, a first-aid station unbothered even in spiteful heat, a white crane on a barely bothered stroll in front of the drink in front of the ninth green — mid-round, free from crowds of human menaces.

You might halt your putt because of tee shots — from elsewhere.

“Like, you can hear people hitting tee shots around the course,” Brian Harman said after his 65.

But in the interest of fulfilling that global desire to have somebody compete against somebody in something, please, anything, the PGA Tour did return on Thursday. It broke its 91-day coronavirus hiatus when it broke ground on the Charles Schwab Challenge with a sterling field at stately Colonial Country Club. It began when local man Ryan Palmer struck the first ball at 6.50am, and then continued past 8:46 when the smattering of people on the course stopped to pay respects to George Floyd.

And it ventured into the suboptimal pandemic realm of social distancing and sanitiser and professional golf played without the galleries who always fuel it even as they sometimes annoy it. Course access went only to those with related jobs and the whirring of carts on the sidewalk joined the day’s soundtrack.

It all meant you couldn’t hear cheers as for Rory McIlroy’s 13-foot birdie putt on No. 9 — even if its whirlwind tour of the lip of the hole before dunking made you think you’d hear cheers — and you couldn’t hear that other common by-product of spectated golf: groans.

It all got players thinking up comparisons, which might have reached its quintessence as 61-year-old Tom Lehman conversed with playing partners Tyler McCumber, 29, and Henrik Norlander, 33. McCumber and Norlander likened it to the Triple-A Korn Ferry Tour, while Lehman could go both with his long-ago days on that tour’s former name, the Hogan Tour, or his more recent days on the Champions Tour, that outlet for golf geezers.

“You know, believe it or not, there’s been a few Champions Tour events that kind of felt like this, where you kind of played maybe later in the day and there are not a lot of folks around,” Lehman said after he became the oldest man to shoot a 65 on the PGA Tour since 1980 when the record-keeping began budging out of the Mesozoic Era. “Maybe not quite this few.”

He had entered as a past champion who “can play without causing somebody else to not be able to play,” he said, his win here coming so long ago (1995) that on that same day, Dennis Rodman got 19 rebounds and David Robinson 20 points as the San Antonio Spurs evened at two games all the NBA Western Conference Finals with the Hakeem Olajuwon-led Rockets. Twenty-five years and one pandemic later, Lehman said, “I think it’s a lower-pressure atmosphere. That’s the thing about the PGA Tour; I wouldn’t say it’s a circus, but it’s a big event. There’s so many people and there’s so much happening each week at a Tour event, and this is such on-the-down-low-type thing.”

Justin Rose shot 63 and said, “It kind of feels like a competitive practice round.” Reigning US Open champion Gary Woodland found it like “kind of going back to college days.” That linebacker of a golfer, Bryson DeChambeau, said it “reminded me of US Open qualifiers,” missed the fans but saw a bright side and called it “nice to not have to worry about anybody saying something weird.” Harold Varner III shot a glistening 63 late in the day and expected his closing 11-foot birdie to wreak silence, so that a TV cameraman bursting onto the green felt like “a curveball because he came out of nowhere, and I was like, ‘Whoa.’”

Palmer, a member at the 84-year-old club, began the day at that lonely 6:50 and said, “Well, Thursday mornings early are kind of like that.” The rest of it was less like anything else as he said, “Yeah, you hit a putt and it goes in, and you’re talking to yourself, making the crowd noise yourself, I guess,” and, “Today I noticed everybody is walking four, five, six feet away while we’re talking.”

It could be disorienting in the heat just gazing into that first-aid tent with its little skylines of available sanitiser and bug spray and one big box of partly used Cheez-Its. (They figured they’ve helped out maybe six people across four days including three days of practice.) It could be disorienting just walking around with no crowds, no crowd flow, no sense of when one might stray into somebody else’s potentially lucrative golf round. It could be disorienting playing that golf round. “I told my caddie early on,” Woodland said, “I didn’t feel like I was hitting it as far because my adrenalin wasn’t up. It’s a big deal. Especially when you play with Phil [Mickelson] and you get some of those big groups, you get so much adrenalin, the golf ball seems like it goes miles.”

Woodland did play in a trio with Mickelson, that great lurer of thick galleries. A ball did stray into the rough on the left side of No. 9, and it did turn out to have come from Mickelson, who trudged over to it without his accustomed encouragement from fans, but with help from a marshal, to whom Mickelson said, “Thank you.”

He plopped his next shot in the water where the crane soon would walk, and he half-slammed his club to the ground before stopping, even if nobody looked except a TV audience.

Woodland hit a good shot toward a birdie and got some applause from the guys seated in white chairs fairway-side, the shot-trackers, who watched with the marshal. Woodland acknowledged those real people just as players such as Justin Thomas and DeChambeau and Rose went for puckishness and acknowledged the imaginary.

“Yeah, I was kind of having a little fun with it,” Rose said of an early birdie, “tipping the cap to the silence.”

He veered to give credit.

“But to be fair, Dustin Johnson’s caddie, his brother, he kind of gave me a little round of applause there.”