PGA Tour begins a new era with drug testing
The hallway in the clubhouse at Congressional winds past photos of presidents who belonged to the club, newspaper clippings of Ken Venturi's courageous victory in the 1964 U.S. Open, magazine articles of Fred Couples and Ken Venturi winning their first PGA Tour events.
It leads to an elevator, which takes players to the third floor to be tested for drugs.
"It's taken 150 years to test us for drugs," Robert Allenby said. "Because of baseball and a lot of other sports, they really pushed it toward us because of all their mistakes. Hopefully, we can show how clean our sport is."
The PGA Tour reluctantly joined the modern era of sports at the AT&T National when its anti-doping program took effect, featuring random testing for some 500 players on its three circuits and sanctions that include a lifetime ban for the third offense.
The tour will not say who gets tested and when, although it had its first customer Wednesday morning — PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, who had his executive staff also go through the process.
"I don't view it as anything meaningful from a symbolism standpoint," said Finchem, adding that the process took just under 10 minutes. "I just think it's important that we understand the detail of it. We have every reason to be optimistic that we're not going to have logistical problems, that it's not going to be a big disruption."
The banned substances closely follow the World Anti-Doping Agency's prohibited list minus two classes of substances that golf executives say will not enhance a golfer's performance — Glucocorticosteroids and Beta-2-Agonists.
Tiger Woods remains eligible for testing even though he had season-ending surgery on his left knee last week. Woods said he has tested himself twice, the second time because he changed the brand of the amino acid in his nutritional program. He said both tests came back clean.
"All we have to test is one guy," Steve Stricker said, alluding to Woods. "Because we can't beat him, anyway."
Finchem has said for most of this decade that he does not know of a performance-enhancing drug for golf, but the sport came under increasing pressure in the wake of scandals in baseball, cycling and Olympic sports.
Plus, it must have an anti-doping program in place if it wants to be part of the Olympic program in 2016.
"I don't think our sport needs it," Kenny Perry said. "But if they feel like we need to be like baseball and all the other sports, that's fine with me. I don't think you'll see any problems on our tour. I haven't seen any in my 22 years out here. Maybe somebody did take steroids or whatever, but I don't think you'll see it as an issue."
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