Bohannan: Match play events a great test run for golf’s big return

The upcoming match play events could be an important test of what golf will look like with no fans.

When CBS didn’t have a live Masters tournament to televise in April, network officials made an interesting and telling decision.

In selecting two past final rounds to show that weekend, the network didn’t go with victories from Jordan Spieth or Patrick Reed or Sergio Garcia. It went with the time-tested appeal of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. CBS selected Mickelson’s 2004 victory and Woods’ 2019 victory to attract as many viewers as possible for a taped event.

So it’s no surprise that a live, televised golf event that also serves as a charity fundraiser for COVID-19 relief will feature Woods against Mickelson in a rematch of their November 2018 event played in Las Vegas.

In doing so, Woods and Mickelson will again be honoring a long history of televised golf events for just a handful of players, a tradition that dates back to the 1950s with venerable events like Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf.

And Turner Sports, which will televise the match on TNT, TBS, truTV and HLN, will be hoping a sports-starved country tunes in.

Larry Bohannan is the golf writer for the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, part of the USA Today Network.

As it turns out, the younger guns of the PGA Tour will get their chance to shine in a made-for-television event first. As networks and players scramble to get live golf back on the airwaves, it might be a nice test of the appeal of the younger players and a true golf format again the appeal of Hall of Famers with some celebrity golf added to the mix.

The first match will be the May 17 TaylorMade Driving Relief event featuring the game’s biggest players at the moment, Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson against Rickie Fowler and Matt Wolff in a skins format. There will be a fifth star that week, the rarely seen and legendary Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Fla.

Hall of Famers and quarterbacks

Woods and Mickelson take the stage a week later with Capital One’s The Match: Champions for Charity. Instead of the $9 million winner-take-all head-to-head match Woods and Mickelson played for television in Las Vegas, the two Hall of Famers will be paired this time with a couple of good players but non-golfers, quarterbacks Peyton Manning (with Woods) and Tom Brady (with Mickelson). The event should generate $10 million for virus relief.

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There will be those who will dismiss both events as not really being golf, as being nothing more than golf merely for some rich golfers to get a little richer, or at least helping their own image while raising money for charity. When Woods and Mickelson met in Las Vegas, there were plenty of critics. But some golf fans and some gambling fans did watch.

Toss in the idea that there hasn’t been any live golf for anyone to watch since the first round of the ill-fated Players Championship on March 26, and people should be tuning in to NBC/Golf Channel for the McIlroy-Johnson match and TNT/TBS for Woods and Mickelson to play.

The matches should include the usual needling – from McIlroy in the first match, likely from Manning and Mickelson in the second match – and some players going for some unlikely shots. Brady and Manning will probably provide at least one or two truly amateur shots for fans to roll their eyes over.

Ready for live sports again

But the matches will test two other important aspects of golf as it tries to become the first sport to reopen in the United States as the pandemic is hopefully flattened. First, just what is the appetite of television viewers for live golf? No, this won’t be a full-field official event for the PGA Tour. But everyone is betting that golf has its loyal following, and that non-golf fans will come along for the ride with no other sports to watch.

Second, this could be a pretty important test of what golf will look like with no fans. When the PGA Tour returns in June – assuming everything goes well for the next few weeks – and the LPGA returns in July, big galleries will definitely not be part of the plan.

Golf is one of the few sports that can be played comfortably without a big on-site crowd. If television viewers still tune in without fans on the fairways, something that might not happen for, say, college football, that could be great news for tournaments in the fall that have been rescheduled. That includes the ANA Inspiration in September in Rancho Mirage and the men’s U.S. Open later in September in New York.

Whatever happens, there will be a core group of fans who will tune in to watch Mickelson and Woods hit honest-to-goodness live golf shots, do a little trash-talking with Manning and Brady and give some hope to fans for the return of live sports across the country. That should be worth tuning in.

Larry Bohannan is the golf writer for the Palm Springs Desert Sun, part of the USA Today Network. He can be reached at larry.bohannan@desertsun.com. Follow him on Facebook or on Twitter at Sun.@Larry_Bohannan.

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