‘It was mania’: Inside a chaotic 48 hours of a Valspar Championship that never happened

Tracy West woke up on Saturday morning, two days after her Valspar Championship was canceled, and still had 300 emails to sort through. All from the last 48 hours. Text messages were coming in at about 20 an hour, although at this point they were mostly well wishes from family, friends and colleagues, and less about the logistics surrounding a pro golf tournament.

Overall, West estimated she’d been a part of 1,000 phone calls, emails or text messages from the past two days as she and her team dealt with the hour-by-hour changes to the Valspar, which went from scheduled, scheduled but without fans, to canceled, just like that.

“It was mania,” she says.

The spread of coronavirus has been a fluid situation in the United States, and the sports world, like everyone else, has been forced to react. West has been the tournament director of the Valspar since 2015, when she became just the second-ever female tournament director on the PGA Tour (she was the only one at the time, but there’s more now). West recently explained the hectic few days that she and her team went through as they prepared to host next week’s Valspar, scheduled for March 19-22, only to have it canceled a few days out. She, of course, understands the big picture. This is just a golf tournament, after all, but thousands of bodies were heavily invested in putting on a golf tournament for the Tampa Bay area. A drained Jay Monahan said “who cares about my sleep” when speaking to the press on Friday morning. West said something similar a day later, admitting she hadn’t had more than four or five hours a sleep per night yet adding: “But again, who cares. I am not the important thing.”

The Players Championship, the Tour’s flagship event, never seemed in question until the middle of last week, when the coronavirus worsened and an NBA player tested positive. West’s first serious indication that the Valspar could be in danger was on Wednesday night, when the NBA canceled its season. But Valspar staff continued on, finishing up the build, training volunteers and putting the finishing touches on the grounds.

“After that happened, that’s when things started to move pretty quickly,” West says. “It was really a whirlwind.”

Directors from the Valspar, WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play and the Valero Texas Open — the next three events after the Players — were on constant conference calls with members of the Tour’s leadership. The first decision made, which came late Wednesday night, was to go on with the Players but allow fans to get a refund for the first round. Then at a noon press conference on Thursday Monahan announced they’ll continue with the Players but without fans for the rest of the week, as well as ban fans from the next three tournaments.

West and her team dove into last-minute adjustments, as they had little time to decide what needed to stay, what had to be adjusted and what had to go. They canceled buses but not security. They made tweaks to vendors and food orders. They made sure key committee members and volunteers were still in place where they needed to be. The show was going on.

“The intention was we were still going to put on a pro golf tournament from a competitive and television standpoint,” West says, “so we had to figure out, OK, what are the committees we still need to support that mission?”

But at about 9:40 p.m. on Thursday night, West and others got another text from the Tour saying they needed to hop on a call.

“We knew at that text,” West says.

The Tour released a statement at 10 p.m. The Players was canceled, and so were the next three events through the Valero Texas Open. (A day later, the Masters was postponed.)

At 8 a.m. Friday morning, Monahan met with the media in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. He said several factors contributed to his decision to cancel the Players and the next three events, one of which was the closings of Disney World and Universal Orlando. About 230 miles southwest of the Players at Innisbrook Resort in Palm Harbor, Fla., West and her staffers began their morning by taking care of the inevitable loose ends: breaking the news to those who hadn’t heard, speaking with sponsors, ticket vendors, ticket holders (who were fully refunded), canceling the rest of the operations and more.

It takes more than a thousand staffers and volunteers to put on a pro golf tournament. Some of the hardest conversations, West says, were to the team at Valspar, the title sponsor with whom they worked so closely with, and telling the eight college interns who dedicated so much time and effort over the last two months that they wouldn’t be able to experience a tournament week.

“A lot of people spend all year putting these tournaments together,” West says. “Most people don’t understand what operationally, and how much time and effort goes into these things. I feel very badly for all of those folks, but we also put it in perspective. What our country is going through right now is of much more importance than this tournament.”

For the last several years, Copperhead Charities, the Valspar’s host organization, raised at least a couple million dollars to put back into the community, much of which is through its Birdies for Tampa Bay Charities program, which consists of more than 30 local charities that get pledges for birdies made that week. Much of that money had already come in, so now West and her team is working on turning that around and giving it back to those charities. Sometimes a bonus comes with, West says, but this year, without a tournament, it’s too early to make some of those calls. There’s also more discussions to have with several contractors. The whole process, with vendors, sponsors and more, takes weeks and sometimes months.

“It’s not like our charitable number is going to be zero,” West says. “I don’t know if it will be $2 million — but it’s not going to be zero.”

Surreal couple of days. Proud of our team, volunteer family, vendors, and partners for their hard work and patience these last 2 days. Fully support our PGA TOUR decision as the health and safety of our fans and players are our #1 priority. Back stronger than ever in 2021!

— Tracy West (@tracywest11) March 14, 2020

This year was supposed to be a big year for the Valspar. Paul Casey was attempting to win for the third straight year among a field that boasted big names like Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Gary Woodland and Bubba Watson. Even Jordan Spieth and Patrick Reed came on as late commitments.

“We were staged to have the best year of our tournament,” West says. “We had the highest level of sponsors that we ever had. We’d grown under Valspar the last seven years dramatically. We had a huge amount of tickets sold, our highest sponsorship levels, the build looked fantastic and the golf course was in prime shape.”

But there’s no looking back anymore. And West promises big things in 2021. “The tournament will be back stronger and bigger than ever,” she says.

On Friday, West and other staffers took a few pictures of the setup, which they’ll use as notes for next year. The teardown started in the afternoon. There was no use in waiting. It will take about two weeks to complete. Organizing a tournament that never happened took significantly longer.

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