One very sTranGe year

AS THIS RACE TO DUBAI SEASON LIKE NO OTHER CLOSES IN ON ITS FINAL FORTNIGHT AT JUMEIRAH GOLF ESTATES, WE ASK WHAT HAPPENS NEXT FOR THE EUROPEAN TOUR.

- KENT GRAY

KEITH PELLEY IS IN DOHA TRYING, like everyone else, to wrap his head around a strange new world. ¶ It’s March 7, a day before Spaniard Jorge Campillo would capture the Commercial Bank Qatar Masters at Education City Golf Club, and Pelley shortly thereafter pulled the trigger to suspend the European Tour’s 2020 season. The coronavirus is sweeping the world and golf’s global house of cards is falling on the Canadian chief’s watch.

The Maybank Championship and Volvo China Open had already been cancelled and now the following week’s Magical Kenya Open was gone. Everyone had questions and Pelley, quite understandably, had very few answers. What he did know was that his every move had the potential to radically alter the lives of everyone associated with the world’s second-largest circuit.

“There are probably quite a few moments I could recount as it has truly been a year without parallel for all of us,” the European Tour chief executive says when prompted for a particular event that has defined 2020 for him personally.

“But in terms of a moment... it was the day after our tournament the following week in Kenya had been cancelled by the Kenyan authorities and a player came up to me on the range in Qatar and said: ‘The Masters will be okay though, won’t it?’.

“At that time nobody knew what to think, but the very next week it was cancelled by Augusta National. I think it was at that point that everybody thought, right, this is going to be one very strange year.”

Indeed.