The history of Memphis has been a story of comebacks. But a comeback, by its very nature, only follows adversity. The short life of the World Golf Championships-FedEx St. Jude Invitational fits that pattern cleaner than its executive director, Darrell Smith, might wish. After 60 years on the PGA Tour circuit, the event originally known as the Memphis Open (and eventually the FedEx St. Jude Classic) rebooted as one of the year’s four World Golf Championships events. In its first turn as a WGC tournament in 2019, it fell in an impossibly difficult position on the calendar: the week following the Open Championship, more than 4,000 miles away from Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. In 2020, it nestled into a cozier spot on the calendar, two weeks after the U.S. Open and two weeks ahead of the Open Championship. But then came COVID-19, and with it came massive disruptions to Smith’s planning and to the PGA Tour calendar. But Smith and his staff have adjusted both to their new, pandemic-necessitated normal and to their new spot on the Tour’s schedule (July 30-Aug. 2, 2020), ready to do what Memphis always does: roll with the punches.
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LYING FOUR: This whole COVID-19 thing went down about four months before you were scheduled to tee off. What are y’all usually doing to prepare for the tournament around that time?
DARRELL SMITH: We were doing the same stuff that we would be doing every single year when everything came to a screeching halt. The NBA closed up shop, and then of course our marquee flagship event, the Players Championship — that’s when the impact on professional golf was really felt. For us, at that moment in time, we were doing a lot of the same thing that we’d be doing in a typical year, and that’s primarily talking to our partners and trying to gain support for the tournament — if that’s a unique hospitality experience, or if it’s any one of several items that we offer to purchase. We were — and still are — in the planning stage of the operation build, putting together the look and feel on-site. We were talking to volunteers. We were doing a lot of the things that have to take place in order to produce an event of our size.
LYING FOUR: And how did the shutdown change what you’re usually doing during April and May?
DARRELL SMITH: For the most part, we’ve still been focused on a lot of those same, core responsibilities. Now, we’ve been doing it remotely. We’ve been impacted, and we’ve had to change the way we operate. We office out here at TPC Southwind, and we had to go into a remote-work environment. But we continued to focus and plan for a PGA Tour event. Since that, that focus has remained our priority, but there are several different scenarios that we’re contemplating and developing. There’s a whole list of possibilities that could transpire, because we’re so focused on the health and safety of everyone involved. We know that the world is a very different place right now. The PGA Tour has released their return to golf plan, and a lot of the stuff that was released will be part of what we have to implement on-site at TPC Southwind. There’s new guidelines in place for social distancing, and that impacts a lot of our hospitality menus and the grounds itself. We’re taking all of the new information around COVID-19 and trying to understand the impact it has on our event and what things might need to change to be compliant with all those new guidelines.
TPC Southwind, which will host Memphis’ second World Golf Championships event from July 30-Aug. 2, 2020.
LYING FOUR: What sorts of scenarios are y’all tossing around? You mean like if the virus flares back up, that sort of thing?
DARRELL SMITH: Yeah, so we’re an outdoor venue. We know the game of golf is a game that you can play recreationally in a very social-distanced manner — and also, from a professional standpoint, that the game of golf is very easy to play in a social-distanced manner. But at the same time, we have thousands of people that come on-site every single year and watch the world’s best players. So we’ve been focused on that player-caddie experience, but we’ve also been focused on outside the ropes and those scenarios. So how do the entrance and exit procedures work? How do you space people out over 200 acres here at TPC Southwind? How does that need to be policed, or how do you make sure it’s compliant with local regulations? Really just taking a deeper dive into those type of things, and how they might look different come late summer.
LYING FOUR: You’re right, of course — if you’re talking about just getting players and their caddies around the golf course, then it’s pretty easy to imagine how you can do that without getting into trouble. But are there other elements of the tournament that have been tougher to nail down than usual? For example, everybody knows it’s harder to get meat right now than it was three months ago.
DARRELL SMITH: I would say that everything around the planning of the tournament has been harder to nail down. This is a very fluid environment, and it’s gonna remain a fluid environment all the way up until tournament week. The data changes really by the hour, and you have to review the data and the local guidelines, because those are what help your decision making process. We have a lot of different scenarios, and we feel very confident in all the different scenarios, but we haven’t finalized which scenario we’re going to implement come July 27 through August 2. You have to rethink the entire operation. It’s much more difficult to plan a live event during a pandemic, there’s no question about that.
LYING FOUR: Obviously, the economy looks a lot different now than it did at the beginning of the year. Has keep sponsors on board been a challenge?
DARRELL SMITH: It knows no boundaries, right? COVID-19 is impacting businesses and planning all across the world, and we’ve been extremely cognizant of that — because without great corporate support, we’re not nearly as healthy and viable as we can be. So we have been very proactive in talking to our partners. Ever since the PGA Tour suspended its schedule, we have made it a point to reach out to our partners and to be very transparent with them in our planning — and really just checking in on them, to see how they are doing during these times, and knowing that we’re here to help. And we’re hopeful that we can have a tournament that is a sense of pride for our community and, really, for the country when it’s broadcast all over the country and the world. But we’re very cognizant of that. Our partnerships are very, very valuable to us. They matter. All of those things are case-by-case; some businesses are not nearly as impacted as others, and some are. And for this that are — and even those that aren’t — we’re willing and able to stand by them and work with them to find the perfect compromise or solution to any challenges that we might face together.
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The short, par-3 11th hole at TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tenn.
LYING FOUR: Is there any advantage to not being one of the first ones to have to go? Are there things you can watch for in the first few events after the restart to learn lessons that you can apply at your event?
DARRELL SMITH: Personally speaking, I think when we were able to move our tournament from July 1-5 back to our dates now — which are July 27-August 2 — that was an extreme positive. What that did was that bought us time to plan and prepare. We’re all hopeful that the data continues to improve. So come late July, what will the impacts of COVID-19 look like? Well we’re hopeful that they’ll continue to improve — that if we all abide by social distancing guidelines and the different orders that are in effect, we can all be in a better spot in July. That is extremely positive. There are still some unknown unknowns for those first four; there are probably more unknowns for us, being outside those first four, because right now we’re hopeful that we’ll have fans on-site. But at the same time, we know that the first four are not gonna have plans. We’re still in the midst of some very deep planning to look at all those different scenarios, and those first four are moving forward with their plan. I wouldn’t say it’s an advantage or disadvantage to not have that conclusion — knowing that you’re not gonna have fans at your first four — but it brings some finality to the situation. You can move forward. Right now, we’re in a middle stage where we’re still trying to figure that out. But at the end of the day, that’s a positive, because we want to produce the most successful event that we possibly can.
LYING FOUR: What do you think of your place on the schedule right now? In 2019, you were the week after the Open Championship; this year, you were originally scheduled to go two weeks before the Open. Is that a good spot for this event?
DARRELL SMITH: Our date for this year was changed because of the Olympics. Before COVID-19, I’ve always said that any date on the PGA Tour schedule is a good date. I think our platform, with a World Golf Championship, makes us even more attractive in terms of dates. Being scheduled two weeks after the U.S. Open and two weeks before the British Open, I will tell you that was a very marquee position. But at the same time, our revised dates — being right before the PGA Championship — I think we’re in a very, very good spot there as well. The dates and the schedule will continue to change on a yearly basis, I would expect. The most impacted time that we’ll have around the schedule will be Olympic years. I think we’ll be somewhere around the same general timeframe that we’re in this year, moving forward.
LYING FOUR: What’s the biggest difference between putting on and planning a regular PGA Tour event and doing a WGC?
DARRELL SMITH: There’s things about the World Golf Championship that are — I don’t really like the word easier — and there’s things about the FedEx St. Jude Classic that are easier. One thing that’s massively different is that we have a limited field. Last year we had 63 players come play in Memphis, and they had no cut and were here for all four days; the FedEx St. Jude Classic had a field of 156 players, and there was a cut after Friday for the top 70 and ties. Any time that you remove people from an equation, things tend to get easier when it comes to player relations. From the player side, it’s a little easier because they’re here all week and there are less of them. When they get here, just getting courtesy cars to them and making sure that they get wherever their housing is — there’s less of that. That was a big difference. And we don’t have a pro-am event here at the World Golf Championship, just due to the level of the event — and with the FedEx St. Jude Championship, we had two pro-ams, one on Monday and one on Wednesday. And those are very big customer events for what we call “the co-sanctioned world,” and they add great value, but there’s a lot of moving parts to pro-ams. Not having those, and not having to deal with the nuances around those events — it lightens the load, but it doesn’t necessarily make it easier. For a WGC, it’s a larger event on a larger scale, so we’re doing more things: more fan activations, we’re having larger attendance. They’re very similar. They’re still golf events; it’s not like one is a golf tournament and one is a baseball tournament. There’s still guys playing golf, and our venue’s the same, so there’s a lot of similarities that you can pull and play from both of them, and that makes the job very rewarding.
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All photos: credit WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational
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