The PGA Tour’s senior vice president of tournament administration and anti-doping, Andy Levinson, joins senior writer Bill King to share insights into the Tour's return to the links and what lies ahead.
On the process of rebuilding the PGA Tour’s tournament schedule:
Levinson: You had to look at the tournaments that were missed and whether or not there’s an opportunity down the road to play those tournaments, but if you move some tournaments, are the agronomic conditions going to be appropriate to play them in the mid-summer? … The schedule in a normal year is always a complex puzzle and, in this case, it was even more so. But we spoke with our medical advisers and marked a date on the calendar that said, "This is when we’re going to try to come back," and then built the schedule around that, trying to accommodate everybody as best as we can.
On the COVID-19 testing procedure and the ability to get test results back quickly on-site:
Levinson: We were very fortunate to partner with a health care provider based out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, called Sanford Health and Sanford happened to have a mobile laboratory so what this enables us to do is bring all of the resources with us … from city to city. With respect to result times, our result times in Fort Worth were 90 to 120 minutes which is just incredible.
On video conferencing used to replace some sponsor activations, such as “pro-ams” and player hospitality “visits”:
Levinson: It is important for us to deliver value to our sponsors who are not able to host their customers on-site, so we are doing virtual sponsor value activities with our players to some of their key constituents, and that’s something that we’re trying and have done this week … and we are going to learn as we go. But it is critical to deliver value to our sponsors. They have remained committed to us through all of this.
