By Sam Weinman
On Sunday at Seminole Golf Club, as longtime head pro Bob Ford introduced the contestants in the TaylorMade Driving Relief Skins Game, Rory McIlroy, Rickie Fowler, Dustin Johnson and Matthew Wolff fanned out in the background, far enough apart they looked like four singles tossed together by the starter.

In another context, the image might have run contrary to the spirit of a charity match designed more around camaraderie than cutthroat competition. Here it was an unspoken endorsement of golf’s new reality.

When first announced, the primary objective of this event was to raise money for COVID-19 charities and to bring live sports back to a competition-starved audience. But not far behind was an opportunity to showcase how golf, even played by the game’s elite, can still exist in an era of social distancing.

Mike Ehrmann
Rickie Fowler, Matthew Wolff, Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson await the start of the TaylorMade Driving Relief charity event.

From how they stood on the tee, to their staggered walks up fairways, to even how they read each other’s putts from respectful distances, McIlroy, Johnson, Fowler and Wolff sought to champion many of the practices that are being employed at golf courses around the country. In the absence of caddies, all four players carried their bags. None of them touched a flagstick or rake. Even after McIlroy stuck his clinching wedge shot in the closest-to-the-hole playoff, the celebration with his partner Johnson was a restrained, mildly awkward “air five.”

“It would have been nice to give him something or a high five, but obviously we can’t in these times,” McIlroy said.

RELATED: Six takeaways from the TaylorMade Driving Relief charity match

Mike Ehrmann

The diversions from the new norm owed to the unique stage. Flagsticks and bunker rakes were tended to by others. Although most golfers these days are asked to show up only minutes before their tee times, players on Sunday were afforded a proper warm-up thanks to an exception to a local ordinance. Perhaps most notable, anyone on site for Sunday’s event was only granted access after testing negative for COVID-19.

Was it spotless social distancing? In the same way armchair rules officials relish spying a questionable drop, they could have flagged a fleeting exchange inside the six-foot circle of trust, although rarely by players at the heart of the action. But considering how public health officials cite these guidelines as ways to minimize risk, it’s hard to think of anything specific from players on Sunday that would have raised their ire.

When Golf Digest recently consulted a trio of infectious disease specialists to understand the transmission risks of golf, all three spoke to the game’s relative safety due to number of factors: because it’s played outside, because players are spread out over a broad playing field and because the number of shared surfaces are manageably few.

Where it gets tricky is when you sprinkle in everything else: carts and locker rooms, beers and nachos in the 19th hole. And that’s not even factoring the myriad complications of staging a grand-scale professional tournament, where players are expected to gather from around the world, with support staff in the hundreds necessary to pull the whole thing off. It’s no wonder the proposal the PGA Tour sent to its players about its resumption of competition was nearly 40 pages long.

“This is actually how it’s going to be a little bit, for the most part,” Johnson said. “There’s going to be no fans, it’s just going to be us and some TV cameras. It was kind of nice to get out and kind of see and feel what it will be like a little bit.”

There will be plenty more questions before the tour resumes play in Fort Worth at the Charles Schwab Challenge on June 11, but none would be worth asking without first determining if the core game was safe. Sunday offered the first serious test, and golf passed.

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Architecture experts marvel at Seminole’s compact yet complete routing. On a trapezoid of land of just 140 acres, Ross positioned his 18 so that golfers must contend with wind from a slightly different direction on nearly every shot. His remarkable layout lies on three levels. Closest to the seacoast is a lateral sand dune parallel to the beach, on which two greens (the 13th and 18th, the latter later added by Dick Wilson) and three tee complexes now rest. Inland is a wide, low basin, just a few feet above sea level, previously swampland that Ross’ crew drained and graded into eight holes now edged by palms, bunkers and lakes. On the far west edge of the site is a wide sand ridge some 40 feet higher than the basin. It contains three complete holes and the tees and greens for seven others. Its topography is reminiscent of Scotland’s Royal Dornoch, where Ross was born, raised and first took up the game.

Competitive players have long admired the subtle challenges of Seminole. Most fairways are comfortably wide, but deceptively so, because on windy days and when turf is firm and fast, drives can trundle off a fairway and into one of the more than 70 fairway bunkers or, on some holes, into a sandscape rough recently enhanced by the design team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. The true test lies in shots onto the greens, putting surfaces that range from long and skinny to wide and shallow. Unless hole locations are toward the centre, flag-hunting is risky, as the perimeters of most greens slope gently toward deep bunkers that frame most greens and encircle several. Once on the greens, most contours are imperceptible at first look and make for deceptive putts. Some of today’s finest players, Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff will take on these challenging elements during the recently announced TaylorMade Driving Relief Skins Game, to take place at Seminole on May 17, 2-6 p.m. on NBC.

Carlos Amoedo

While Ross had the reputation of mailing in many of his blueprints to be built by others, there are newspaper clippings that document his presence on site supervising construction of Seminole, which was built in seven months and opened Jan. 1, 1930. Ironically, whatever attention to detail Ross gave to greens and bunkers have been lost, as a regrassing effort some 50-plus years ago showed little regard to his original rolling contours. Even before that, the bunkers had been reshaped and rebuilt by Wilson in 1957 (not 1947 as repeatedly misreported in the past by this writer). There is no desire to reclaim the original Ross greens because members like what’s there now, but in recent years, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw have restored the look and purpose of many original bunkers.

Stephen Szurlej

Any number of Seminole’s holes are classics of the craft. Crenshaw’s favourites are the sixth and 15th (above). No. 6 is a straightaway 390-yard par 4 that plays like a dogleg because of a diagonal string of bunkers that eat into the line of play from the right. The 15th is the second of back-to-back par 5s (a rarity for Ross) and features alternate fairways (also a rarity), a gambling right-hand route along a water hazard separated by bunkers and palms from the longer, safer left-hand one.

Jon Cavalier

An equal share of Seminole’s majesty is provided by its timeless clubhouse, a pink stucco structure of Spanish American flavour built in 1929, with its original lockers of California knotty pine still in use. Positioned in the southeast corner of the property adjacent to the coastal dunes, it has no window to the sea. The story goes, when asked why, Ross replied, “This is a golf club, not a beach club.” As Ross had nothing whatsoever to do with the design or construction of the clubhouse, the tale is likely apocryphal.

Although it hosts a top-level amateur competition each year (the Coleman Invitational), Seminole has never before hosted a professional event witnessed by hundreds of thousands of television viewers, so most golfers around the world have known Seminole only by its reputation. How it will stand up to the rigours of the power game that dominates professional golf today is a great unknown. The four combatants in the TaylorMade Driving Relief Skins Game are capable of reducing Seminole’s par 4s and 5s into a succession of short-iron approach shots, but if the wind blows, that’s doubtful, and if the pins are tucked, the targets will become much smaller, even if approached with short irons.

In a way, the Skins Game will serve as a prelude to next year’s Walker Cup Matches, which are scheduled to be held at Seminole in early May. That event is expected to be open to spectators. For now, we’ll cherish this moment to admire Ross’ masterpiece, all for a good cause.

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