His advice could bring the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow to a sudden stop

Stewart Williams had been keeping an eye on his computer screen, watching radar returns of a rain shower forming just north of Quail Hollow Club in south Charlotte.

But he quickly switched into urgency mode after noticing lightning being detected near the shower cell.

Williams picked up a remote radio and called for Kerry Haigh, the PGA’s Chief Championships Officer.

Haigh is, essentially, the PGA Tour’s buck-stops-here person when it comes to running a golf tournament.

Within a minute, Haigh joined Williams inside a trailer near the Quail Hollow clubhouse.

“I don’t think it’s going to hit us, but I wanted you to be aware of it,” Williams told Haigh.

After watching the radar return for a minute, Haigh decided that practice rounds for this week’s PGA Championship could continue.

“I think we’re safe,” Haigh said.

The power to stop play

It takes thousands of people to stage the PGA Championship, which runs Thursday through Sunday at Quail Hollow. But it takes only two people — Williams and Haigh — to stop the event.

Williams, a High Point native, is a meteorologist with DTN Weather, a meteorological company contracted by the PGA to provide live weather reports at all of its tournaments.

He advises golfers on wind direction and speed, provides forecasts for tournament officials, and watches for development of thunderstorms, which bring golf tournaments to a halt when lightning is detected.

A short time after giving an all-clear from the first cell detected Tuesday, another storm formed over York County and roared into south Charlotte. Haigh, with information supplied by Williams, halted practice rounds at Quail Hollow and ordered fans, officials and players to seek shelter.

“We error on the side of safety,” said Williams, who earned his meteorology degree from UNC Asheville. “We would rather stop play and be cautious, rather than have a storm throw a lightning bolt into the area.”

Williams, one of several meteorologists on the DTN staff, said he has dealt with all kinds of weather issues in his 30 years of working at golf tournaments.

“One time, we had 2 inches of snow at a tournament in Tucson,” he said. “By afternoon, it had melted, and we started play.”

He has dealt with hurricanes and tropical storms, flooding rain, and localized weather phenomena like mountain thunderstorms and ocean fog.

The toughest problem

The toughest, he said, are summer thunderstorms — especially the so-called “pop-up” storms that form quickly in unstable hot, humid conditions and grow quickly.

“It’s a lot easier when the storm is 30 miles away,” Williams said. “But when it forms quickly near the golf course, you’ve got to be right on top of it, ready to make a call.”

He is able to press a button on his computer and activate weather warning information on the large video boards at Quail Hollow and other golf venues.

Sometimes, though, his advice is not readily apparent to the public.

“Our forecasts are used by officials in things like pin placement and tee placement,” he said. “In a tournament like this week’s, with 156 golfers, you want to make the course tough — but not so tough that it causes a backlog of players.”

Wind forecasts allow officials to decide where those tees and holes will be placed.

He arrives for work between 5 and 6 a.m. and doesn’t leave until early evening. He works 26 tournaments a year and has every other week off.

Where’s the snow?

Williams said many meteorologists he knows were attracted to the profession by big weather events — tornadoes or hurricanes, mostly. For him, it was snow days.

“When I was a kid and they forecast snow in High Point, I got really excited,” he said. “When the snow didn’t materialize, I wanted to know why. That’s how I got into this.”

In his senior year at UNC Asheville, he got an internship with Mike McClellan, then a meteorologist at WXII-TV in Winston-Salem.

“I figured I’d get into TV and do weather there,” he said.

But McClellan was hired to provide weather information for a golf tournament in Winston-Salem and decided to form a company. He hired Williams and a few other meteorologists, and the rest was history. The business of providing weather forecasts for golf tournaments began in North Carolina.

Williams moved to DTN Weather in 2005 and has worked with the company since.

After several days of heavy rain and fast-developing thunderstorms, Williams has good news for fans headed to Quail Hollow for the four rounds of the PGA Championship.

“I think things will settle down for the rest of the week,” he said.

“It definitely will get hot,” Williams added. “But storm chances will be lower.”

He said a cold front could trigger a few thunderstorms Saturday but added, “We still have a lot to work out on that.”

If anything should develop, Williams said, fans will know in a hurry.

“We don’t mess around with safety,” he said. “People’s lives are too important for that.”