Kisner finds silver lining among uncertainty as PGA preps to resume season
Bad news for Kevin Kisner: The coronavirus outbreak forced the PGA Tour to cancel “the part of the schedule that I love,” the Aiken pro said.
Good news for Kisner: If current plans come to fruition, “the new schedule starts on courses I love to play,” he said. “The order is different, but I love Colonial, Harbour Town and the Travelers.”
The hard part for Kisner and his fellow pros: Waiting to see if details can be worked out to make the proposed June 11 re-start realistic.
“You don’t turn it on without a lot of preparation, and for me personally it’s too difficult to plan too far ahead and set goals,” Kisner said. “We can call the June start off. I want to see a complete plan, then I’ll look (at goals). It’s obviously going to be very different with three majors late in the year.”
Since the PGA Tour suspended tournaments after one round of The Players in mid-March, Kisner has enjoyed family time around his Aiken home, turkey hunting and tinkering with his game.
“In terms of golf, I’ve been working on some things I want to change,” he said. “I’ve worked on things you don’t really want to work on during tournament season. You don’t normally have time to make technical changes and feel comfortable with it.
“Having Scott (Brown, fellow PGA pro) to practice with is a good thing. It can get boring pretty fast by yourself. When we do play, it will be like the start of a new season.”
There are no better places for Kisner to start than in the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial and the RBC Heritage at Harbour Town. He won at Colonial in 2017 and his three top-11 finishes at Harbour Town include sudden-death loss for the title in 2015.
“Harbour Town is going to be different in June,” he said. “It’s overseeded in April and in June; we’ll be playing on bermudagrass. It’s going to be firm and fast, and I like firm and fast conditions.”
Kisner’s coronavirus-interrupted season includes a fourth-place finish in the Sony in Hawaii in his 10 starts. He is 76th in the season-long FedEx Cup standings, 36th in the world rankings and 13th on the U.S. Ryder Cup points list.
The Ryder Cup is an automatic goal, but so much uncertainty makes looking too far ahead counter-productive, he said. The subject-to-change schedule has the 2019-20 Tour Championship ending on Sept. 7 and the 2020-21 season beginning on Sept. 10.
The re-scheduled U.S. Open and the Ryder Cup are shoehorned into the new season’s September schedule, and another plum, the Masters, looms in November.
With the British Open canceled, the reconfigured 2019-20 schedule will have only one major, the PGA (moved from May to August). This year’s U.S. Open and Masters fall on the 2020-21 schedule.
“It’s a difficult time,” Kisner said. “We would like to be playing, but obviously, safety is more important. The players understand that sacrifices must be made. Tournaments will be different, at least for a while.”
Differences include coronavirus testing, at least four tournaments without fans and a myriad of changes to conform to the CDC protocols.
The top pros share the “anxious-to-play” theme, and count Kisner in that group. The revamped schedule suits him just fine.
Chip shots. The 2021 Sonic Columbia City Women’s Golf Championship is the latest golf event to fall victim to the coronavirus outbreak, tournament chair Lynn Holmes said. In canceling the event scheduled for June 16-17 at Forest Lake Club, Holmes said the committee felt the integrity and quality of the championship would be at risk since the size or caliber of the field could not be guaranteed because of the pandemic. . . . Jason Day, whose 12 PGA Tour wins include the PGA Championship, the Players and two World Golf Championship events, told reporters he plans to resume his season with starts at Colonial and Harbour Town.