NICHOLASVILLE, Ky. (LEX 18) — The tournament whose title sponsor is shaving cream just got cut from the 2020 PGA Tour rotation due to COVID-19. As the tour works to revise its 2020 schedule, it needs that week in July to hold The Memorial in Dublin, Ohio. The financial hit Central Kentucky will take as a result of this decision won’t be insignificant.
“The economic impact of these events, these PGA Tour events, is about 25 million dollars,” Barbasol Championship Director Bryan Pettigrew said. “The bigger events go to the 50’s and 60’s, 50 and 60 million dollars."
That probably explains why The Memorial, a bigger event, was chosen to remain on the schedule over the event, which has been in Jessamine County since 2018, when the PGA Tour returned to Kentucky on this annual basis
“We’ve had a monsoon, then a heat wave, now a pandemic,” Pettigrew said of the Barbasol’s three-year run.
Pettigrew, as a business leader, is one of the luckier ones as he won’t be forced into making decisions about the employment of his full-time staff members.
“That was made possible by Barbasol, The PGA Tour and Global Golf,” he said.
Global Golf serves as a management and operations arm for many of these PGA Tour events. There is still an outside chance that the PGA Tour will come back to Pettigrew in the coming months and ask him to stage this year’s event.
“The Governors of other states may not want to have tournaments, or group gatherings,” Pettigrew explained.
Many states might not be ready for it depending on their respective situation in the fight against COVID-19. Pettigrew said he and his staff would need about four weeks’ notice to get their act together to host this year, and he is not at all wishing for that since it would be coming at some other state’s expense. For now, he will control only what he can.
“We started laying the groundwork,” he said of planning for the 2021 event week.
He’d also like to try to make good on many of the philanthropic events that take place in the area before, and during, tournament week.
“We’re really bummed we’re not able to contribute as much money as we normally would when we host our golf tournament, but we will do some other activities to generate some income,” he said.
But the 25 million dollars that will be lost will be impossible to generate, and tough to swallow. 2020 continues to hit us all like a professional golfer’s tee shot.
