Five days after Australian Golf Digest first reported that the Open Championship would be cancelled due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the R&A made it official overnight.
As golf’s various stakeholders – the PGA Tour, European Tour and LPGA Tour, Augusta National, the PGA of America, the USGA and the R&A – cancel and postpone their own events and explore potential alternative dates, all are working with the assumption that the Olympics would go on as scheduled.
A bit like the Old Course that sits directly below his office window, R&A chief executive Martin Slumbers’ annual sit-down with members of the UK media typically offers up all kinds of angles.
Maher’s paper is the first from a major golf company chief executive to explicitly counter the ruling bodies’ conclusions from their Distance Insights research project.
If you’re looking for definitive conclusions in the massive reports that contributed to the USGA and R&A’s recently released Distance Insights Project, they are quite nearly at every turn and occur so often they can occasionally contradict themselves.
With the USGA and R&A having released the preliminary results of their Distance Insights Project – and concluding that something needs to be done to keep the cycle of distance increases from continuing – it seemed a worthwhile exercise to ask the players responsible for much of the handwringing what it is, exactly, they think needs to be done.
Windred is bound for European Tour Q-School next month with a head full of confidence and a renewed outlook on what it takes to close out the biggest tournaments.
The AAC champion this weekend will earn an invitation to the 2020 Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club and a place in the 149th Open Championship at Royal St George’s.
Australian Golf Digest
