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The COVID-19 pandemic brought the world of sports to a screeching halt during the wild 24-hour period that unfolded in the middle of March in 2020, and a PGA Tour golfer has revealed just how painfully close Hideki Matsuyama supposedly came to a multimillion-dollar payday at The Players Championship that year.
On March 11, 2020, the NBA became the first domino to fall when it announced it had suspended its season after Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 just days after he made light of the growing threat by going out of his way to touch a number of microphones at a press conference.
The NHL, MLB, and MLS quickly followed suit, and if that wasn’t enough to drive the seriousness of the situation home, the NCAA did exactly that when it announced March Madness had been canceled.
The PGA Tour, on the other hand, initially attempted to power through when The Players Championship kicked off at TPC Sawgrass on March 12th.
Fans were permitted to attend the opening round (although players were instructed not to sign autographs or interact with members of the gallery), and while the organization initially planned to complete the final three days of the tournament without any spectators, it ultimately elected to cancel the event before play got underway on Friday.
That was a particularly unfortunate development for Hideki Matsuyama, who had a two-stroke lead after shooting what would have been a course-record 63 on Thursday. However, as far as the official history books are concerned, that round didn’t technically transpire, as there were four players who’d failed to complete all 18 holes when play was suspended due to darkness prior to the cancelation of The Players.
Based on what fellow PGA Tour golfer Michael Kim had to say about the situation, that quartet’s inability to finish the round came back to bite Matsuyama in a big way, as the 31-year-old asserted the PGA Tour would have opted to pay out the entire purse for The Players if every competitor had completed a full 18—including the first-place prize that was pegged at $2.7 million.
Fun fact about the COVID Players Championship:
On Thursday, everyone in the field but 4 players finished the round and on Thursday night it was decided the entire tournament was cancelled. Half the purse was evenly distributed amongst everyone at 52k.However, if those 4…
— Michael S. Kim (@Mike_kim714) October 27, 2024
Kim has more knowledge about what went down behind the scenes than I do, but it’s worth noting the PGA Tour handbook has this to say about tournaments that end prematurely:
If at least one official round is completed, the host organization shall pay the full amount of any service fee payable to PGA TOUR under the tournament agreement, and 50 percent of the purse.
If at least two official rounds are completed, the host organization shall pay the full amount of the service fee payable to PGA TOUR and 100 percent of the purse.
Commissioner Jay Monahan alluded to that rule while explaining the decision to evenly distribute the purse among competitors even though the first round technically hadn’t been completed (each golfer in the field received approximately $52,000 in the wake of the virtually unprecedented situation).
As a result, it seems like Matsuyama would have only been entitled to half of the first-place prize if the round had officially counted, but that’s obviously still a pretty significant amount of money compared to what he got.