Get ready to read about much lower ratings for this weekend’s Players Championship compared to last year. In 2013, a certain player named Tiger Woods won the title.
Of course, no Tiger this year. Don’t think casual fans will be as excited about Martin Kaymer’s 63 yesterday.
Earlier this week, I did a piece for Awful Announcing analyzing the impact of Tiger-less tournament on golf.
Here is an excerpt:
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The initial returns from a Tiger-less Masters suggest a major tune-out is on the way, with ratings plunging. The final round did a 6.8 rating, down 28 percent from 2013 when Woods was in contention. To be fair, there wasn’t much in the way of drama on that Sunday.
Nevertheless, put those numbers in the context of what happened to the NBA in the post-Jordan era, and they are right in line. When you have transcendent athletes like Jordan and Woods, whose reach goes far beyond the traditional followers of their sports, you are going to have a potential huge spike in the ratings. When they go away, the spike also disappears. Things revert back to a more normal level.
NBC’s Dan Hicks said it best of post-Tiger golf on TV: “I believe we’re in for a correction.”
“Tiger has given us some unbelievable golf,” Hicks said. “It’s not just the unmatched highlights. It’s also the way he wins golf tournaments. You can talk about (Jack Nicklaus), but nobody comes close to doing what Tiger did. When that goes away, that’s not going to be replaced.”
CBS’ Peter Kostis suggests that Woods presence has inflated expectations for golf. It isn’t possible for the game to sustain the lofty levels that were achieved during Woods’ peak.
“I think the golf community got duped into thinking that golf was going to become a major sport when Tiger came along,” Kostis said. “Golf has always been a niche sport, and in my opinion it’s always going to be a niche sport. When Tiger came along, maybe viewership went up on certain broadcasts and so on and so forth, but it never really translated into more golfers going to the golf course. It hasn’t translated into an appreciable increase in minorities playing, and now they’re talking about how many billions of dollars golf is going to lose because Tiger is injured. I don’t see that.”
“I just think that golf is golf, and it’s not going to be baseball, it’s not going to be basketball, it’s certainly not going to be football. You know, we’re going to settle back into golf’s reality and not the fantasy that people thought it might become when Tiger came along,” Kostis added.
Kostis is right. Golf is golf. Baseball is baseball. Football is football, etc. Frankly, I don’t miss Tiger. I covered the PGA tour in the 1970s with Nicklaus, Palmer, Player, Miller, Watson and Trevino. The tour doesn’t have a cast like that today, even with Tiger. But there are a lot of young players who have the potential to reinvent the game. However, Rose and Scott and Speith and Henley and the others–to this point–lack the charisma that the 1970s group had. In fact, listening to Miller in his TV analyst’s role is more exciting than listening to a post-round interview. But how many professional athletes in any sport are any better?