Opportunity and Necessity
Cry Out for the PGA Tour
to Require Vaccination
Maybe the newly discovered Omicron coronavirus variant will amount to sound and fury, signifying very little.
Two years into the COVID pandemic, Omicron is hardly the first variant strain whose emergence has caught scientists’ nervous attention. But the early reports of a more transmissible, more vaccine-evasive version are cause for concern. And for the first time since the pandemic landed on America’s shores in early 2020, the sporting world already has reacted: when players fled South Africa en masse after the Joburg Open’s second round, the European Tour canceled the tournament’s remaining two days and dropped its sanction of the following week’s South African Open.
It would be folly to suggest that Omicron’s timing is convenient. But for the PGA Tour, at least, the variant has raised its head during the closest thing that the Tour has to an offseason. There is time, then, to treat Omicron with the seriousness that it deserves and to formulate a legitimate plan for all possible outcomes, rather than barreling forward as if nothing has changed.
That plan should include, at long last, mandating that the Tour’s players and employees be vaccinated.
For most of the COVID era, the Tour’s decisions have prioritized events over public safety. When the danger to America became clear and present in March 2020 during the Tour’s flagship event, the Tour resisted calls to change course, and pressed forward with a crowded midweek concert and the tournament’s first round — before finally acknowledging the obvious and canceling the rest of the event. After the Tour resumed play in June 2020 — the first major American pro sports circuit to do so — several high-profile stars predictably tested positive. Even during the Delta variant’s midsummer surge in 2021, the Tour pressed forward as though nothing were amiss.
Throughout 2021, the Tour has saved its blindest eye for the world’s greatest weapon against COVID: safe, effective vaccines. They are no failsafe. But they represent the best, most effective way to guard against a disease that has killed nearly 780,000 Americans in fewer than 21 months.
Even so, the Tour has refused to require employees or players to receive the vaccine. After claiming the mantle in June 2020 for a pro sports circuit able to operate safely during the pandemic, the Tour now lags behind the NFL and the NBA, both of whom require their employees be vaccinated.
The Tour’s justification for this negligence has been twofold.
First, the Tour points to the fact that, unlike the NBA, the NHL, and many NFL and Major League Baseball events, all its tournaments are outdoors. Golf “lends itself naturally to social distancing,” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said in 2020. And he’s right, of course — for recreational golfers, anyway. At PGA Tour events, though, fans frequently group together in the hundreds and thousands, in close contact with one another — a setting which the Centers for Disease Control has consistently advised risks transmission.
Second, the Tour relies on the fact that its players are independent contractors, rather than employees (an excuse that offers no defense of its policy not to require vaccination for its actual employees). But this fact does not support the Tour’s decision — it undercuts it. As contractors, the Tour’s players do not enjoy the rights of employees. They have no bargaining rights. They have no power that the Tour does not cede to them. The Tour knows this, of course. Its decision to bow to players at the expense of public health is shortsighted, and speaks volumes about its highest priorities.
We know by now that vaccine mandates work. In October, the New York Police Department’s union warned that a vaccine mandate would pull 10,000 officers off the streets; a week later, when the mandate’s deadline arrived, fewer than three dozen officers were placed on leave. A few weeks earlier, the mandate deadline for the health care company Kaiser Permanente arrived; less than 1 percent of its workforce had not complied. In a universe of players, caddies, officials, and employees as small as the PGA Tour’s, there’s no reason that the Tour could not match Kaiser Permanente’s results.
Moreover, the Tour has a unique opportunity among American sports circuits to communicate to its overwhelmingly conservative fanbase that the pandemic’s rules have changed — that whatever assumptions we carried into this era about herd immunity or “riding it out” have proven to be folly. Achieving herd immunity against COVID would require at least 70 percent of the world to be fully vaccinated; today, though, we are hundreds of millions short of 50 percent. Furthermore, many experts foresee COVID becoming endemic — that is, it’s here to stay, just as much as the flu or the common cold. If they’re right, then there is no “riding it out.” Even if they’re wrong, reaching the finish line won’t happen by itself — it’ll require vaccines.
These are not pleasant possibilities to accept. We can choose to recognize reality, though, or not. The PGA Tour faces the same choice. Is it truly willing to ban players who support an upstart rival, but unwilling to discipline players who endanger public health?
With any luck, the Omicron variant will fade from the public health landscape with a whimper. Perhaps it will prove much ado about nothing, and that hindsight will show the European Tour’s decision to flee South Africa overly hasty.
Even if that comes to pass, though, Omicron will not be the pandemic’s final curveball. For the foreseeable future, the pandemic is here to stay. Its risks remain deadly serious. The time has come for the PGA Tour to get deadly serious too.
. . .
You might also enjoy reading…