In a Hard Life,
a Harder Choice
Less than 24 hours before the Minor League Golf Tour’s one-day tournament at PGA National in late March, the event was cancelled — victim to the coronavirus pandemic that has shuttered sporting events and claimed more than 29,000 lives around the world.
But the tournament wasn’t halted by organizers; it was local government that pulled the plug. Just a day before the 69-player field was scheduled to tee off, Palm Beach County — Florida’s third-most populous county, and site of nearly 200 coronavirus cases — ordered non-essential businesses closed. That included all public and private golf courses, including PGA National. And, for a day, that decision left the Minor League Golf Tour — a prominent mini-tour in south Florida — without a home.
A day later, the tour cancelled all its events through April 8, making its next scheduled tournament a two-day event beginning April 13 in Plantation, Fla. — in Broward County, immediately south of Palm Beach County.
The Minor League Golf Tour isn’t alone. Unlike the PGA Tour, which cancelled the Players Championship mid-tournament on March 12 and immediately began cutting scheduled events en masse, some mini-tours continue navigating — or flaunting — the pandemic. On the same day the Minor League Golf Tour was scheduled to play PGA National, the Florida Professional Golf Tour staged an event near Orlando; nine players participated. The All Pro Tour, which began the year with 12 events scheduled from Kansas to Mississippi, completed a four-day event on the same weekend that the PGA Tour cancelled the Players — then moved ahead with plans for two more events in late March and early April, before pulling the plug the day before one of those events was scheduled to begin. And the West Florida Golf Tour has brushed off the pandemic altogether and continues to play (“the WFGT feels in the right circumstance golf can be an escape from our current everyday stresses,” a tour statement said); its next tournament is scheduled to begin March 30.
Caught up in this game of chicken between mini-tours and the pandemic are players who, in many cases, were scraping by financially even before the pandemic sent the world economy to Hell. They now find themselves forced to choose between their livelihoods and their safety.
For the moment, the game of chicken is off, for the most part: even the mini-tours who aren’t voluntarily shuttering are having trouble attracting players. But southern politicians eager to avoid an election-year depression have poured the least possible amount of water on the pandemic’s fire, in an effort to put out the flames without drenching the campsite. In the resulting regulatory patchwork, mini-tour organizers — like other businesses who rely on contract workers — are all too eager to gamble with their workers’ health. The mini-tours stand poised to resume play at the first moment they can do so credibly — even if not safely.
The Centers for Disease Control has urged Americans against holding any events, including sporting events, with more than 50 people until at least mid-May. But the CDC is a federal agency, not a police force; its power to enforce that recommendation is limited. Meanwhile, many southern states’ governors — most notably Florida’s Ron DeSantis — have resisted calls to shut down business altogether. That leaves mini-tour golfers in the same position as food service workers, janitors, airline attendants, and other Americans who can’t afford to self-quarantine: if you can work, then you have to.
“There’s plenty of guys on those tours who are getting by with family money,” said Ryan French, who covers mini-tours on his popular Monday Q Info Twitter account. “But there’s also plenty of guys playing out there who are betting on themselves to pay the rent. This is their job.”
Making a living on the mini-tours is theoretically possible, French explains, but most mini-tour golfers are barely getting by. In 2019, French spoke to a player who dominated the year’s mini-tour schedule and earned status on the Korn Ferry Tour through Q-School; but at Final Stage, the player told French that he didn’t know how he’d get to the 2020 season opener in the Bahamas, because all his credit cards were maxed out. “If he wasn’t making any money,” French said, “no one is making any money.”
Mini-tours generally operate a lot like pyramid schemes: the players fund the tournaments’ purses with their entrance fees, and then they fight like mad for a slice of the pie that’s bigger than the slice they contributed — but only after the tour takes a healthy slice for itself. For example, when Sunny Kim shot 59 recently to win against a 46-player field on the Minor League Golf Tour, the event’s entrance fee was $420; but the purse was barely $13,000, meaning that players were competing for just 68 percent of the money they’d contributed.
Players aren’t ignorant to this, of course. But they accept it as an unfortunate cost of business. French says players on mini-tours are often talented enough to compete on the PGA Tour’s subsidiary developmental tours in Canada and Latin America; but he estimates that a season on the PGA Tour Latinoamérica costs players at least $30,000.
“Money often stops talented guys,” French said. “There are plenty of guys playing on these tours to save money for Q-School. You can play these tours and sleep in your car.”
But that car’s gas tank doesn’t fill itself. And the cell phone bill doesn’t wait for a player’s big break. So if there’s a tournament, players generally have to play just to try to make ends meet. And the mini-tours are there, ready to offer a venue — and to take their cut.
Capitalism, of course, is not illegal. Mini-tour organizers are allowed to make a living. The question remains, though, whether the events they organize can be held safely — particularly in Florida, a mini-tour hotbed and the state with the sixth-highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Even without large crowds, mini-tour events are typically not models of social distancing: players play in foursomes, making their ways around the course two to a cart.
Some of these elements can be changed to account for the virus’ new reality. For example, the Florida Professional Golf Tour played its nine-man event in twosomes, with each player taking his own cart; the West Florida Golf Tour also began assigning each player his own cart. Check presentations can get crowded, even on the mini-tour scene — but tournament organizers say they still can be kept below the CDC’s recommended limit of 50 people in a single gathering.
Whether that’s enough to be safe is debatable, though, and the PGA Tour has not exactly modeled best practices: it brought tens of thousands of fans into close quarters during Players week, even after the outbreak’s danger was well known. And even after it began canceling events, the Tour has not transparently explained which factors will guide its decision to restart (a Tour spokesperson declined to speak on this subject).
But in a state like Florida, where the governor has resisted drastic measures and only a few local governments have acted more aggressively, pointing to the smaller footprint of a mini-tour event is enough to keep a straight face — if not truly enough to prevent the virus’ spread. In that regulatory patchwork, where one community’s safeguards can be flaunted simply by hopping the county line, mini-tours and other businesses have little incentive to be more protective than they’re required to be.
Where mini-tours have shut down, that problem has been put off — but only temporarily. After the nine-player event in March, the Florida Professional Golf Tour decided to halt play until at least April 23; the Minor League Golf Tour plans to restart even earlier than that. Neither of those timelines meshes with experts’ diagnosis that bringing the pandemic to heel will take far longer; even President Trump, who has repeatedly downplayed the outbreak’s seriousness, conceded that the crisis could last until August. By resuming events before the outbreak wanes — even in counties without stay-at-home orders in place — mini-tours risk exacerbating the crisis both in those areas and in surrounding communities.
“If we do piecemeal,” University of Tampa professor Tracy Zontek told WUSF News, “we risk infecting other communities that are not infected, because it will tell people, ‘Well in my county I can’t do this, but I can do it in the next county.’ So the piecemeal approach is really going to increase our number of cases because we won't have controlled anything.”
And on a playing circuit where players rarely enjoy fairness, this is the cruelest twist of all. The incentive — the necessity — of snuffing out the risk of mini-tour events falls in the most unfair place, on the only people for whom the choice is no-win: on the players.
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