Brandon Matthews stumbled at the start, taking a triple-bogey, 8 on the first hole, and never completely recovered, missing the cut in the final, regularly scheduled event of the PGA’s LOCALiQ Series.
Matthews was 5-over after 13 holes Wednesday and made it all the way back to even par at the end of play Thursday, but his 75-69—144 was still three strokes from making the cut in The Classic at Weston Hills in Florida.
The Pittston Area graduate made the cut in four of seven events, missing by a single shot twice. He played well enough throughout the series to rank 29th in the Race To the Bahamas point standings going into the final event, apparently putting him in position to be among the field of 78 for the season-ending, 72-hole event, which has been postponed and moved.
The PGA, which created the LOCALiQ Series to replace its International Tour events lost to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak this season, has moved the final event because of “health concerns and COVID-19 travel restriction-issues surrounding COVID-19.”
The LOCALiQ Series Championship will be played Nov. 17-20 at TPC Sugarloaf near Atlanta. Sugarloaf annually hosts the PGA Tour Champions’ Mitsubishi Electric Classic, which was canceled this year. It had hosted the PGA Tour’s AT&T Classics from 1997 to 2008.
“We certainly were looking forward to culminating our season in the Bahamas and anticipated a great week there,” PGA Tour senior vice president, International Tours Rob Ohno said in a press release. “This global pandemic has required so many changes in the sports world and we are pleased that we’ll still be able to contest the LOCALiQ Series’ final event of the 2020 season.”
