Good morning, people! Today the curtain goes up on Part I of a three-part mini-series, and it has nothing to do with the 10-part series so many people are talking about, The Last Dance.
A quickie: The Last Dance, for anyone who doesn’t know, is an ESPN documentary about the Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls, the first two parts of which aired Sunday. It takes its name from a playbook the Bulls coach, Phil Jackson, made for the 1997-’98 season. But the actual title of that playbook was The Last Dance? It ended in a question mark.
Today’s subject, Seth Waugh, of the PGA of America, will tell you: Questions marks are doing a boffo business in golf. On Sunday afternoon I spoke with Waugh, the PGA’s CEO, and that interview is the basis for this three-part GOLF.com event. Come back for more tomorrow and again on Thursday for the exciting conclusion.
Waugh said the PGA Championship will be played in August. But will it be at Harding Park in San Francisco? He can’t say for sure. Will it have fans? He can’t say for sure. “Could you have a Ryder Cup without fans?” Waugh asked rhetorically. He hopes, of course, by September that will not be an issue. But he’s asking the question because the question needs to be asked.
Waugh, it happens, has that knack, for ending sentences with blah blah blah, a quick pause, and then, “Right?” Donald Trump, who called Waugh recently for a golf chat, does the same thing in a different way. He once said to me at his course in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. “Are these not the most beautiful cart paths you’ve ever seen in your life?” Waugh said that Trump is eager to see golfers back in action, at every level. They talked, he said, about “the public private partnership that’s coming out of this, that people are heroes when you need them to be.”
Would the Ryder Cup be the Ryder Cup without fans? PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh reflects
Waugh went out of his way to say that the PGA of America does not want to be preachy and try to tell governmental agencies whether the courses should be open now. (Close to half are, according to the National Golf Foundation.) “We’re not trying to talk any locality into permitting golf, we’re saying if you want to play golf, here are the ways to make it safe,” Waugh said. He then went through the whole litany of sensible protocols. Tee times every 15 minutes. One person per cart, or (better yet!) walking. Don’t touch the flagstick. “The safe-sex version of golf,” Waugh said. He’s funny.
Somehow, we went from that to the TV Waugh watched on Saturday night, the One World Together at Home concert.
“Did you see The Stones?” Waugh asked. “It was awesome.”
He thinks you’ll see Tiger Woods and others playing golf on TV before too long here, “creating some content, a needed distraction.”
In the meantime, there will be more of The Last Dance. It’s so good, right?
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael_Bamberger@golf.com.