The challenge of telling a story that never ends, PLAYERS Championship viewing figures and the looming judgment day
A BBC writer is the latest to try to tell an ever-evolving story in a permanent format, and how rising prize money does nothing to prevent falling viewership figures.
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In this week’s newsletter:
Looming judgment day amid TV golf’s sliding viewing figures
Golf’s never-ending story and the future of books
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In a divided game, is it any wonder the fans are switching off?
Some interesting recent figures from US armchairs and sofas.
World Number 1 Scottie Scheffler has now won back-to-back PGA Tour events — a Sunday afternoon stroll at the Arnold Palmer Invitational followed by the PLAYERS Championship (his second successive win at Sawgrass) in a nailbiter.
For the second time in his still young career, Scheffler is on a Tiger-like early season rampage.
Not that the TV viewers seem to care.
Despite the dramatic nature of Sunday at Sawgrass, when Scottie’s final round blitz gave him a one-shot win from 2023 Major breakthrough winners Wyndham Clark and Brian Harman and repeat bridesmaid Xander Schauffele, armchair golf fans voted with their remote control streaming service.
NBC drew a peak of 3.5 million viewers for Sunday’s final round, a number which only becomes meaningful with further context.
The figure was down 600,000 viewers on the PLAYERS final round of 2023, when Scheffler also won out.
But 2023 was a drama-free Sunday stroll — the official report described it thus: “Scheffler ran off five straight birdies in the middle of his round, built a six-shot lead and left all the drama to everyone else”.
So it’s stark that the numbers collapsed — a 15% fall in viewership in a year is a collapse — even though, on the face of it, there was much more reason to tune in this year with four US Ryder Cup stars dueling it out.
We might here engage in some idle speculation about the true appeal of these stars.
One Australian golf writer wrote a piece about the PLAYERS with a particularly scathing headline, Harman and Clark’s Major breakthroughs set pulses racing in the wrist of nobody without the surname Harman or Clark, and Schauffele might make milk lukewarm.
And the lack of star power is obviously a factor.
When Tiger isn’t there, as he almost certainly will not be again, and when Rory crashes and burns, as he almost certainly will, who will appeal to the armchair viewer?
Jon Rahm was the obvious heir to that throne, but we all know where he is these days.
Bryson DeChambeau, Cam Smith and Dustin Johnson also have some sort of X-factor, but we know where they are too.
All this to say is that for rank-and-file tournaments on the PGA Tour, a lot of weight falls on the likes of Viktor Hovland, Justin Thomas and Max Homa, but Hovland hasn’t had a PGA Tour Top 10 since the TOUR Championship and Thomas — whose 2021 PLAYERS win was watched by 7 million fans — seems to be dicing with the cut-line most weeks in a worryingly long decline.
Which leaves Homa, who warmed the cockles of many an American armchair golf fan with his own Patriot Act at the Ryder Cup.
Homa’s breakthrough to golf’s top table is not just hoped for. It’s desperately needed by golf execs if the slide in viewing figures is to be corrected.
The suspicion, though, is that the goose is cooked.
The slide is not just a one-off.
The 2024 PLAYERS was, in TV terms, the worst performing Sawgrass Sunday since 2014.
The 2011 US Masters, the one where Rory started the day with a four-stroke lead, attracted more than 15 million viewers, but figures have hovered around the 10-12 million mark for the past few years as the post-Tiger effect kicks in.
As many as 3.3m watched Kurt Kitayama win the Arnold Palmer Invitational a year ago. A million fewer people tuned in to see Scheffler win this year.
Tiger’s in semi-retirement and too many of the big dogs from the next generation are now playing on a competing tour — which some would describe as a form of semi-retirement too.
Nine months on from last June’s framework agreement between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, golf reunification still looks some way away.
Without reunification, though, the terminal slide in viewing figures each week can only be expected to continue.
All of which must lead to some difficult conversations in those corridors of power where golf execs and corporate sponsorship types meet to chat about the anticipated returns on newly — and vastly — inflated prize purses.
In no other industry would one expect to see a huge investment of capital bring with a huge deflation of interest.
At least, not without consequences.
Those consequences might not come this month, or next, but judgment day waits for everyone, especially the man with the bad investments.
Golf’s never-ending story and the future of books
For more than two years now, the P__ T___ and L__ G___ clash has dominated headlines in professional golf.
It’s a story that almost everyone in golf wants to follow — but there’s a problem.
As Quentin Tarantino knows, every story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, just not necessarily in that order.
And that’s the problem with the PGA/LIV divide. It’s effectively impossible to tell a compelling story when you don’t know the end.
Most readers considered that 2023’s LIV and Let Die: The Inside Story of the War Between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, by Firepit Collective writer Alan Shipnuck, did a fine job — although one of the more memorable Amazon reviews, “Reading this book changed my life”, didn’t have much at all to do with the main story.
A new book by the BBC journalist Iain Carter, Golf Wars: LIV and Golf's Bitter Battle for Power and Identity is published by Bloomsbury on April 11th.
And the neverending nature of the story at hand prompted some agile editorial decision-making during the months it took to get the finished book to print.
Speaking to the National Club Golfer (NCG) Podcast this week, Carter said (our emphasis throughout):
“It was a fascinating process, really. Doing my correspondent role on the radio involves me going on the radio for a minute at a time or 20 seconds sometimes, as little as that. Huge developments happen in the game and you haven’t got very long to explain them.
I think it sparked so much curiosity, not just in golf fans but in sports fans, the implications are far and wide. Tennis is wrestling with the whole Saudi issue now as well. I really wanted to chart the story.
This is a story of how it started, where it came from, and what happened. And of course the big challenge of it was while I was writing it, I had no idea how it was going to end.
That was the first thing I sat down and thought about: How am I going to do this? Where is the endpoint? To me it made sense that the endpoint was the Ryder Cup Because the Ryder Cup is the biggest thing in golf.
How was this new environment in which the game was being played affecting the biggest show in golf?
That provided me with the arc, and the endpoint was the Ryder Cup.
The book was supposed to have an index. However, subsequent to the Ryder Cup Jon Rahm decided to go to LIV, and so an epilogue was put in there instead of an index. Because there were only a certain number of pages. That’s why there’s no index.
Literally up to the final, final, final deadline, which was only about three or four weeks ago, I was updating it because the SSG thing happened as well. I’d got that in, but it wasn’t official at that stage, but then it was made official.
So it’s as up to date as any book can be, because ultimately it has to be printed and it has a publication date.
What I hope is that when people read it, when subsequent events happen they’ll have a reasonable idea of why we got to that stage.”
…
What'I’d like to do is somewhere down the line, once things are settled, is to then go back and look at the whole thing and pick it apart and try to put together some kind of inside story on that. At the moment it’s so febrile, there’s so much going on, there’s so much need for confidentiality and all that, it’s very difficult to drill down on motives … but I’ve spoken to a lot of people around the story and getting their takes on what has happened here and trying to build a kind of consensus on what has happened here was really interesting.
I’ve found it a fascinating story from start to finish, or from start to where we are now, because we’re nowhere near the finish.
All of which brings a series of (perhaps too philosophical) questions to mind:
What’s the future for publishers with long editorial and print processes?
Does a book have to be printed for it to be a book?
Why does any particular book exist?
What, actually, is a book?
In our hyper-speed world, all these publishing process begin to look like an anachronism.
When everyone interested will just go immediately to YouTube and TikTok (or … wink-wink … your nearest Substack), does anyone really care enough to wait for 3-4 months for the writers, editors and legal advisers to limp through their decades-old systems?
On the flip side, the old Special Operations motto comes to mind.
“Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”
Between the rattle and hum of the always-on Internet Content Machine, and the slow growth of the master craftsman, there is perhaps a sweet spot to be found.
With books, it feels like 1-4 weeks might be that sweet spot.
Short enough to tap into a topical spike of interest, but long enough to do the subject matter justice.
And that (tapping into timely interest while maintaining standards of excellence) should be the target for writers, editors and publishers — no matter what form their “book” will eventually take.
All that said, wishing the very best of luck to Iain Carter and the Bloomsbury bean-counters, whose choice of UK publication date — April 11th — coincides perfectly with golf’s unofficial New Year’s Day, Day 1 of the Masters.
(Strangely, according to the Amazon listing at least, the hardback will not be available in the US for a further month. Luckily, Kindles are a thing now.)
Thank you for being here. The Wedge is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy these articles and would like to support independent media focused on the business, money and mystique of the world’s greatest game, please consider a monthly or annual subscription or gift a subscription to someone who might value this content.