No rush for this gold

Golf : A better schedule would have ensured that top players turn up with enthusiasm for the Olympics

Adam Scott has a daughter, his firstborn, who will be 18 months old this summer. After careful consideration, he decided his child should take precedence over the baby conceived by an abbreviation-heavy crowd — the IOC and Augusta National, the PGA, the R&A, the LPGA, the USGA and the IGF — for delivery at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics after a seven-year gestation period.

After a disappointing tie for 42nd at the Masters in his sixth start in an eight-week stretch, Scott took stock of his schedule. If he participated at the Rio Games in golf’s modern-era Olympic debut, Scott would have spent seven days with his family in the nine weeks between the US Open, which starts June 16, and the end of the men’s Olympic competition in mid-August. In that span, he would be competing in three majors and a World Golf Championships event.

With too many important tournaments and not enough time with his daughter, Bo Vera, at an important stage in her development, the math did not add up for Scott, who bowed out of the Olympics. Ranked seventh in the world, Scott, the first Australian to have won the Masters, is the most conspicuous golfer in his sport’s budding Olympic Medals Don’t Matter movement.

“The tough part was to choose not to represent Australia,” Scott said, adding, “but I feel like I do that every week.”

Scott’s decision opened him to criticism in his homeland, where the Olympics are highly valued, and in the tight-knit circle of athletes for whom an Olympic gold medal is the most treasured currency.

Michael Phelps, the most successful Olympian in history with 22 medals, including 18 golds, said last week, “I think it stinks not having Adam in there, somebody who has been such a big part of the game over the last few years.”

Phelps, 30, mentioned Jordan Spieth, a 22-year-old American who has enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to compete.

“You see some of these golfers who are so excited to have a chance to be back in the Olympics,” Phelps said. “You could probably argue that some of these guys probably think the Masters, the rest of the majors, are bigger than what the Olympics is. In reality, the Olympics is the largest level in athletics in the world. There’s no higher level of competition.”

The scheduling nightmare that Scott and the world’s other top golfers are expected to sleepwalk through so that the sport may field its Dream Team in Rio comes into sharp relief when you consider this: Between the United States swimming trials, where Phelps is expected to qualify for his fifth Olympic team, and his next competitive start, in Rio, the golfers will contest two majors (the British Open and the PGA Championship) and a World Golf Championships event.

If the power brokers in golf had taken care to carve out room in the schedule for the Olympics instead of shoehorning them into the calendar, “it definitely could have” changed Scott’s decision, he said. But in their courtship of the IOC, the top golf officials were like the ardent suitor who gives little consideration to the future beyond the presentation of the attention-grabbing engagement ring.

Rory McIlroy, who will defend his title this week at the Wells Fargo Championship, will represent Ireland in Rio. McIlroy, the third-ranked golfer in the world, said, “I feel like the officials were patting themselves on the back for getting golf in,” instead of treating the sport’s inclusion in the Olympics as the first step in a marathon of planning.

Golf’s ruling bodies had seven years to smooth over the ruffled feathers of sponsors or tournament officials whose events could have been sacrificed this year for the greater good of the game. They also could have fought for a mixed-gender event — which Scott said “would have been a great platform,” or a team format at the Olympics. Instead they took the path of least resistance, a stroke-play event that guaranteed a maximum star presence and a minimum overall impact.

The powers-that-be whiffed. And because they would not make the tough calls, the players are left to wrestle with the difficult decision on whether to opt out of the Olympics. The recent withdrawals of players like Scott, the South Africans Louis Oosthuizen and Charl Schwartzel and the Fijian Vijay Singh, who have won a combined six major titles, will surely be followed by others before the Olympic rosters for the 60-player men’s and women’s fields are made final on July 11.

Peter Dawson, the president of the International Golf Federation, called the withdrawals “regrettable,” as if he were an innocent bystander and not an architect of the design flaw that is causing so many high-profile recalls. Three top-25 players’ bypassing the Olympics gives golf a black eye.

The players have yet to be subjected to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s drug-testing programme, which includes unannounced out-of-competition retrieval of blood and urine samples. They officially enter the testing pool on Friday. Given that one player in the world top 20 said his understanding was that random testing came with 24-hour advance notice, more fireworks may ensue.

McIlroy’s concern is that golf will be banished from the Olympic family after the 2020 Games.

“I’m not sure if we’re going to have another opportunity to win a gold medal after that,” he said, adding: “It’s off to a rocky start. If we don’t do something to change the narrative and get people excited about it, I’m worried what will happen.”

Maybe most golfers do not covet an Olympic gold medal the way they do a Masters green jacket or the British Open’s claret jug. But in time their attitudes could change. McIlroy, a four-time major champion, said he was willing to get his vaccinations for the Zika virus and other potential diseases, leave his fiancée, Erica Stoll, at home as a health precaution, and give the Olympics a whirl.

“Go play four rounds really competitively and try and win a gold medal,” McIlroy said. “And if you do, I don’t know how that will stack up against the other things that I’ve done in my career now, but maybe I might look back in 20 years’ time and a gold medal might be one of my crowning achievements in the game.”