PGA Tour pro rages at management: "An absolute joke"
PGA Tour pro Dylan Wu has described the decision not to move final round tee times forward at the RBC Heritage as 'a complete joke'.
PGA Tour pro Dylan Wu has described the decision not to move the final round tee times forward at the RBC Heritage as an 'absolute joke'.
Wu took to X after the $20m prize purse signature event was forced into an anticlimactic Monday finish.
The tournament was halted on Sunday afternoon because of the threat of lightning at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head.
And when the players got back on the course two-and-a-half hours later there was absolutely no chance the event could be concluded.
When play was stopped due to darkness, world number one and recent Masters winner Scottie Scheffler was on the verge his fourth victory in five starts.
Scheffler, 27, sat atop the leaderboard on 20-under par, five strokes ahead of Wyndham Clark who had earlied fired a 65.
Wu wrote on X: "69 players in a signature event and they can't finish today because they didn't want to start times earlier.
"That's an absolute joke. Everyone who finished before the horn got the break of the tournament.
"Pure carnage for all the guys resuming smh."
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Signature events were introduced in late 2022 as a response to the growing LIV Golf threat.
The idea was to have the cream of the PGA Tour's crop competing in the bumper prize purse tournaments.
But so far in 2024, some have suggested they have failed to deliver value for money.
The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am was reduced to 54 holes in February owing to inclement weather and the WM Phoenix Open at TPC Scottsdale was marred by rowdy fan behaviour.
PGA Tour rules official Gary Young told reporters on Sunday at the RBC Heritage that they did not expect thunder and lightning.
"We had a 30 percent chance of thunderstorms," he said.
"We did have a 70 to 80 percent chance of rain, but we were only looking at about four tenths of an inch that he was predicting, anywhere from four tenths to six tenths of an inch.
"The golf course was really very dry. We felt that could handle it easily."
He added: "It actually held up very well through the rain that we got, but it was really the thunder and lightning that put us down.
"We did not expect that. Our meteorologist Stewart Williams felt that the front would be to our south when we came in in the morning, so we would be on the cooler side of the front, and it would keep the probability of thunderstorms down quite a bit.
"Unfortunately when we arrived this morning, the front had stalled to our north, which kept us on the warmer side and allowed for the temperatures to warm up, and of course late in the day we saw the thunderstorms develop."
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