The Outlaw Tour has become a good source of entertainment for golf fans amid the pandemic. The Arizona-based developmental tour has played on while the major professional tours remain sidelined, giving them an opportunity to take the spotlight.
The tour has taken advantage by offering live streaming of featured groups and making their tournaments available through DraftKings for daily fantasy golf games.
They've been having fun on their social media accounts, somewhat making light of being a mini-tour that suddenly has a lot of eyes on it and a lot of money riding on it (with payouts to punters worth more than the first-place checks to the players competing). One of the live streams recently didn't go as well as planned because the guy that was supposed to be streaming had a raging hangover. Look, that's reality on a free-wheeling tour.
So, it wasn't particularly surprising when the Outlaw Tour tweeted Monday that one of its players, Noah Hofman, was a no-show for his 6:32 a.m. local tee time for this week's Southern Dunes Classic. There are plenty of reasons to WD from a golf tournament.
However, DFS players and punters were upset to find out Hofman wasn't playing, in particular because he was the sixth-highest-owned player on DraftKings contests for the Monday opening round. (DraftKings contests for Outlaw Tour events are single-round showdowns instead of full-event affairs.)
As it turns out, Hofman had a good excuse for no-showing: He never entered the tournament.
Hofman responded to the Outlaw Tour's tweet about his no-show, clarifying he never registered.
Was never signed up to be in the tournament this week
— Noah Hofman (@noah_hofman) May 4, 2020
After some conversation with the tour, Hofman explained the situation on Twitter, saying it was an honest misunderstanding. This week's event was a make-good for a tournament previously canceled, and Hofman was in that field. He was carried over into this week's field, even though he wasn't set to play.
Just got off the phone with Mike O’Leary and it was just a misunderstanding and a refund is being issued
— Noah Hofman (@noah_hofman) May 4, 2020