What Korn Ferry Tour players did during break from golf

The Korn Ferry Tour is back.

After a three-month break due to the unprecedented time navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tour returns this week with a new event at TPC Sawgrass.

While the schedule has been altered (there are four new tournaments set to be played over the next six weeks and the 2020-2021 seasons will be played as a wraparound) the objective remains the same: keep climbing up the Korn Ferry Tour Points List.

But with competitive golf returning this week, golfers on the Korn Ferry Tour spent the last three months doing different things. Some, of course, stayed close to home and worked on their games at golf courses that either never closed or closed only briefly (those in Florida, Texas, and Arizona fall into this category). Then there are guys like Alex Chiarella, who tells PGATOUR.COM that since he lives in California and there were strict shelter-in-place rules, he didn’t play a full 18-hole round until at least mid-May. At that point, he just bought a net and put it up in his backyard.

Others, like Erik Barnes, got other jobs. For Barnes, he began working at a local grocery store to help support his family. Bavik Phatel helped manage his parents’ California motel while his dad battled cancer.

Although the golf stopped on the Korn Ferry Tour these last three months, life most certainly did not.

How do you return to work when the world around you has been changed so dramatically?

Here are three more stories of life and love from the Korn Ferry Tour’s 2020 break.

WOLFE WORKS TO COMBAT COVID-19

Jared Wolfe won the second event of the year on the Korn Ferry Tour schedule, The Bahamas Great Abaco Classic at Baha Mar, and sits sixth on The 25. But the day after he got word the Korn Ferry Tour was going to go on a hiatus, he got a call from his friends at RevMed, and he was going to work – just not on the golf course.

While others across the golf world picked up odd jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, Wolfe began working as an account executive with the medical sales team at RevMed, It’s kind of ironic: the cause of the break was also the reason why Wolfe was able to make a little money these last three months.

Wolfe and his wife, Kelsey, talked about the plan to begin work (essentially Wolfe acted as a sales manager for the company, which offers ancillary medical services). It was about two weeks of back-and-forth before he decided to start. He also oversaw six other golfers – some of whom play on the Mackenzie Tour-PGA TOUR Canada and PGA TOUR Latinoamerica – who went to work as well.

“I’m good friends with the owners and that made it a little easier for them to give me a call. At first they were like, ‘hey sorry about all the golf stuff but what if we did something like this?’ they were good about it,” says Wolfe. “They were sensitive to the timeframe at least.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention passed a ruling in March that all COVID-19 testing would be processed through PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) and RevMed was helping to bring that kind of testing to numerous clinics in the southeastern United States.

Wolfe began working 2-3 days a week while playing and practicing the rest of the time. His ‘team’ would travel to Palm Coast, Titusville, and Lakeland in Florida while some would go up through Georgia and into Augusta. From 9 a.m. until about 4 p.m. every day he’d go to any clinic that dealt with infectious disease from a pediatrician to a dermatologist.

“We got into some doors that usually would be locked just by saying, ‘we have access for more (COVID-19) tests for you.’ At the time, the first month the virus was around there was a lot of talk about availability for tests,” says Wolfe.

This was only the second non-golf job Wolfe has ever had in his life, he says. A little while ago he had a skin tag taken off his neck and the doctor said he wasn’t able to sweat for three weeks, so Wolfe drove Uber and made food deliveries via UberEats (“What was I going to do? I hoped in the car and drove people around”). Other than that, it’s just been the life of a professional golfer.

Until life throws you a curveball.

Wolfe says he was compensated based on the number of new accounts he signed, and while the job’s timeline was originally just six weeks, it ended up being closer to 11.

But what about all those new accounts he did sign? Last week, it was time to get back to preparing for competition.

“I told (the new accounts) who I was and a lot of them laughed and said it was pretty ironic,” says Wolfe. “They were all good with it and last week I said I was going to be transitioning it to someone else. The timeline was great, and it helped the company out.”

PENDRITH POPS THE QUESTION

At the beginning of the COVID-19 break, Taylor Pendrith returned to Canada to be with his girlfriend, Meg Beirnes – a nurse at the Hamilton General Hospital.

Hamilton, about an hour from both Toronto and Buffalo, New York, was certainly not immune to the Coronavirus and Beirnes was on the front lines as a registered nurse in the hematology and stem cell transplant department.

Pendrith and Beirnes were rolling with whatever life gave them until April 30th, and then Pendrith gave Beirnes a rock.

The couple, who has been together for four years, got engaged during the break.

Pendrith says the original plan was for Beirnes to come watch him play the Savannah Golf Championship (on the schedule April 2-5, but since moved to Oct. 1-4) and then stay the week after where they would go to Charleston, South Carolina – where Pendrith used to live – and propose there.

That changed with COVID-19, as cross-border travel has been eliminated between the two countries. Instead Pendrith asked Beirnes – who is from the same town and is best friends with PGA TOUR winner Corey Conners’ wife Malory – to marry him in her apartment.

The power of love.

WEAVER BECOMES A DAD

Drew Weaver had planned it perfectly. He took the week of the El Bosque Mexico Championship by INNOVA off in order to be with his wife, Elizabeth, as she gave birth to their first child – Andrew Bills Weaver – on March 4. He’d be able to stay home for a couple of weeks before heading back out to Louisiana.

All that changed, of course, but Weaver ended up having a three-month “paternity” leave, he says, while Elizabeth was also off work.

“Everything shut down about 10 days after he was born. It was pretty much a no-brainer to not have to go and do anything,” says Weaver.

The 33-year-old retreated to his in-law’s beach out where they quarantined together with their newborn. Once they got about a month into the break and the TOUR communicated the re-start date, Weaver says he sat down with Elizabeth to make a plan.

“I had to dig back in and make sure too much rust doesn’t accumulate. She was great about it. You feel guilty. As a father you want to be there as much as possible but there’s not a ton you can actually do. I tried to take care of everything I could. I feed him when I could and gave him a bath and read some stories,” says Weaver. “We crave structure so I tried to find ways to help out – take care of as many logistics as I could to take some stress off Elizabeth. She was great about saying, ‘look, you go do what you need to do. If you need to take a trip where the golf courses are fully opened where we have family, go do that. Just get back to work.’”

Now that the three-month maternity leave is up for Elizabeth, she’s back to work in Atlanta while a pair of sisters’ tag-team as a nanny for baby Weaver. Weaver hasn’t quite been able to shake some lingering guilt, but he knows this is his job.

He wasn’t distracted, he says, while he prepared for this week at the Korn Ferry Challenge but rather he was encouraged to be efficient.

“You don’t want to waste your minutes. When you’re at home and you have time to spend time with your family and help out, you want to get your work done. That’s been my main focus – trying to maximize every hour of each day. Most people who have a child and play golf they go through the same thing,” says Weaver. “The world’s upside down right now, it’s a huge mess, but it’s been nice to turn the news off and spend some time off with my wife and my son.”