What the Solheim Cup and Tour Championship TV ratings say about the present and the future of golf
The premier team event in women's golf went head to head with the season finale on the PGA Tour, but the winners and the losers were far from clear.
At around 5pm EST on Sunday, September 5th 2021, a live and public experiment was taking place in the world of professional golf.
On one side of the fence, the finale of the (men’s) PGA Tour season-ending Tour Championship was going down to the wire between the two most in-form players in world golf.
World number 1, Spain’s Jon Rahm, was bidding to cap off his breakthrough season with victory in the FedEx Cup and bag the prize money of $15 million in the process, and Patrick Cantlay, the quiet American who recovered from an early season blip of four missed cuts in five events (including the Masters and the Players Championship) to rise to a career high number 4 in the world and two victories (and three more top 15 finishes) in seven tournaments.
While that was getting the living room reach of NBC television coverage in the US, on the other side Day 2 of the (women’s) Solheim Cup was coming to a conclusion, with hot favourites USA trying to recover from Saturday’s snail slow start in the Sunday afternoon fourballs session and reduce the deficit to defending champions Europe ahead of the concluding 12 singles matches on Monday, which was Labor Day in the US.
On the face of it, the Tour Championship (branded, in a shouty and sort of ludicrous way, but right on-par for the PGA Tour’s form, as the “TOUR Championship”), had everything going for it: the two best players duelling it out over the last nine on Sunday; the inestimable benefits of mainstream television coverage; the fact that it was drawing towards its climax while the women at the Solheim Cup were still 24 hours from theirs; the insatiable lure of the lucre that has slowly, then suddenly, come to represent, more than anything else, the upper echelons of the professional men’s game; and perhaps the biggest factor of all, the traditional and, many would think, unbreakable appeal of men versus women in a game of golf.
Let’s not consider that grand old courses like Portmarnock in Ireland have only recently opened the doors to women members or that Augusta National has perhaps as few as six women members, all of them bringing backgrounds from corridors of power, to remind ourselves of the chasm between men and women in golf we just need to look at the prize money on offer.
Earnings of $15 million for Cantlay at East Lake in Atlanta, George meant he would make more in a single week than many of the top women’s players earned across their entire career. (Not incidentally, perhaps, East Lake is a course where membership comes in at $125,000 along with a “suggested” additional donation of $200,000 to the club’s charitable foundation; that word “suggested” being, in the language of private course annual fees, the rich old white guy equivalent of holding a suspect’s head under water till he’s ready to sing like a canary).
If money talks, men’s pro golf screams from the rafters (often with cap in hand in the direction of oil-rich, cash-rich Saudi Arabia), while the women’s equivalent is a whisper in the back pew of church.
And yet…
As events in Georgia and Ohio unfolded on Sunday evening, something interesting and nuanced was beginning to unfold.
It was happening in how these two events were being greeted by the great unwashed out there in the world’s sitting rooms and bar-stools and, especially, on the social media feeds.
The trend appeared to be undeniable: the public was all-in on the Solheim Cup, and all-out on the Tour Championship.
The first thing to note is that it’s ALWAYS a dangerous thing to treat Twitter as a representative cross-section of the public at large.
For every tweeter double-screening the Sunday evening sport and joining the online chorus line blasting the pin position at the 12th, there’s a handful or a hundred old-schoolers slouching on sofas with remote control in hand.
So there are undoubtedly biases baked into the Twitter data.
That is borne out by a look at the TV ratings, which tell us that the suggestion that a majority of golf fans were quickly becoming pro-Solheim Cup and pro-women’s game sentiment was overblown.
According to Nielsen rating figures, the Tour Championship attracted just shy of 4 million viewers at its peak (around 3pm EST), compared to a high of just 878,000 for the Solheim Cup (on NBC at around noon).
That 4:1+ ratio was hardly unexpected, but even more dispiriting for the Solheim Cup was that its Monday finish — when theoretically it should have had a captive audience, with the holiday Labor Day in the US and no other golf on TV — attracted an average audience of just 588,000. Peak figures for Monday are not yet available (they will come in the next few days) but it’s unlikely that its high will have surpassed 1 million viewers at any stage on Monday.
Compared to the previous Solheim Cup on US soil, that is even more deflating for those who would wish to demonstrate a growing interest in the women’s game.
Back then, in 2017, the Solheim Cup was up against a stacked golf schedule, its Sunday climax (which was on NBC’s main channel) competing against both the PGA Tour’s Wyndham Championship on CBS and the US Amateur Championship on Fox. Despite that competition, it managed to draw peak viewership figures of 968,000 on Saturday afternoon and 946,000 on Sunday, so at best the appeal of the Solheim Cup appears flat between 2017 and this year.
Wait a sec
A couple of caveats, though.
Firstly, the tournament might have come to a dramatic end on Labor Day, with that theoretical captive audience, but while the Tour Championship got the standard PGA Tour network television treatment, making it accessible to all and sundry, the Solheim Cup was housed away in the dim lights of the Golf Channel, where, yeah, only golf fans come to watch.
Secondly, those raw figures should not necessarily be viewed as solid evidence that the men’s game is in rude health when it comes to the watching public.
For example, TV figures for the Tour Championship over the past four editions have been trending in the wrong direction.
Even ignoring the outlier of 2018 — when a resurgent Tiger Woods lifted the Championship, giving the numbers the normal Tiger Bump — peak viewing numbers have been falling, painting this year’s high of lower than 4 million in a new light.
What about those ratings?
Nielsen’s ratings system, a software-enabled representative panel of American households, is itself a source of some controversy.
Firstly, by its own admission, Nielsen only tracks “much” of what comes through smartphones or other Internet devices (which, let’s face it, are the conduit for much of the video content everyone now consumes).
And secondly, the system’s audio recognition software is neutered when the panel member is using headphones.
While as a company Nielsen has clearly been working hard to keep pace with the mass fragmentation of the media landscape, the truth is that its figures should always be taken with a helping of salt.
It appears inevitable that it tends to over-represent the old-schoolers and baby-boomers whose viewing and listening habits are easier to monitor, and under-represent the millennials and Gen Xers who are increasingly finding, building and inhabiting entire online media worlds that did not exist a year or two ago and may evolve into something entirely new a year or two hence.
In short, Nielsen ratings, rather than a scientific study, are at most a best guess of what’s being watched (or listened to) at any given time.
All of this serves to highlight the growing divide between old media (as exemplified by, say, NBC’s served-to-you broadcast and the way Nielsen calculates its ratings), and new media (Twitter and video-on-demand streaming services — legal or otherwise).
Glossing over all that nuance around ratings, and glossing over the scheduling which saw the men’s game on primetime network TV and the women’s housed away on cable, if we just look at the bare numbers, the men’s tournament seems still to be at least 4x more appealing to viewers than the women on the evidence of the weekend just gone.
But drill down a little and we can deduce a couple of things with some degree of safety, if not certainty:
Quantitatively, the men’s game appears to be losing a little ground, and the women’s game is at least maintaining its position
Hazards of judging too much from tiny datasets aside, the women’s game seems to be increasing share of the overall golf TV market
That overall golf TV market may be losing a little interest, due to a range of factors including the proliferation of viewing options across a host of devices and the ongoing absence of Tiger
Qualitatively, the sentiment and commentary on Twitter over the past week was generally positive on the women’s game and generally negative on the men’s
Last word, though.
Golf has always been a game of personality rather than ideology.
And in the likes of Nelly Korda, Leona Maguire, Danielle Kang and Maddy Sagstrom, women’s golf has some of the brightest and most steely-eyed young stars in the game, whatever gender their ID cards might say.
Whether that translates in a closing of the cash gap, well, that’s for another day or another decade to say.
But after a week when Twitter, at least, found itself won over to their appeal, the signs are not bad.
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