How's Golf doing?.....

In 2000 the purse for the PGA Championship was $5,000,000 with the winner receiving $900,000. This years PGA Championship purse is $11,000,000 with the winner receiving close to $2,000,000,,,,,Not bad for a weeks work. If my son was starting out in sport I think golf is definitely worth thinking about now.....Not to mention that golf might be the only big time sport on TV for a while. With all the high profile athletes playing golf as a secondary sport …..do you think that golf is on the right track or should they go the route of Top golf and make it more of an entertainment niche….I personal think that golf is just fine and prospering.

Floundering at best would by my view.

The size of purses going up is certainly a huge positive and is testament to the work that the PGA Tour did to harness the Tiger effect. That is not going to last forever, especially with Tiger being so hit and miss now. It is clear that regardless of how he plays the networks will show more of his shots than they don’t and there will be weeks when he has it (as a huge fan, I really hope that he does) but they are going to be outnumbered by the weeks that he doesn’t or simply isn’t fit enough to be there at all. How long can the Tour and Golf harness ever increasing prizes to a golfer who is well into the Back 9 of his career? Beyond Tiger, whilst there are some great and well known names amongst golf fans the, closest name that we have to transcending sport is Rory and how well known is he? His extremely brief cameo in the latest Nike advert which covers all sports would tend to suggest not as much as we might think.

Added into that, is the increasingly poor presentation of the product which is being provided by the PGA Tour and the host networks at a time where there are more options than ever for the viewer. There needs to be huge overhaul of how they are presenting their product to get more eyes onto it. At this moment in time it seems that rather than focusing on increasing the number of viewers and in turn making their advertising slots more expensive, they seem forced to shove that advertising down our throats because they are so beholden to their advertisers. I mean honestly, does anyone at Tour HQ really believe that viewers on a Thursday morning care that player X would move from 114 to a projected 103 in the FedEx Cup standings if he manages to stay in the same tie for 2nd? Surely they don’t but the need to shoehorn in any mention of the FedEx Cup that they can to give value to their sponsors. If things keep on going the way that they do, they will need to do even more of that as viewers will increasingly turn off or more over to something where they aren’t bombarded with the same corporate message over and over again.

Everything that is good eventually turns to crap when the suits take over.

i hope my kids play golf and love the game as I do. Do I want to push them into it because I think they’ll be on the pga tour, no. The odds of making a real career out of golf is astronomically low. You really have to be ranked in the top 125 in the world to make good money. The guys on the Korn Ferry aren’t making squat outside of maybe the top 3 guys. My buddy that played on that tour said it used to cost him about $60k a year just to compete.

I've got a niece coming in a few weeks.. she will be holding a club asap. Future LPGA tour star, :)

You'd actually be much better off directing your kids towards other sports if going pro and making it big is the goal. Statistically speaking golf would be one of the hardest to make it.

LOL!.....absolutely correct! I think I'm becoming numb to the constant hype of the FedEx Cup. The tour has been squeezing every ounce of the Tiger effect for the past twenty years with no end in sight. The cash is pretty good in golf now days....

Tiger’s been hit and miss for a decade. The broadcasters and sponsors priced that in long ago.

This weekend's PGA Championship will tell us a lot from a ratings standpoint...If TW is in the hunt on the weekend they will draw well, because its TW and he drives the market, also there is little to no competition, NBA and MLB ratings are in the crapper, now we just need Harding Park to show us a venue worth a major

Yep.....Golf is in a good situation because it's one of best sports for social distancing. Hopefully they'll take advantage and put on a good exciting show.

"The game of golf" or professional golf? They are two different things in my opinion.

How is baseball doing? The MLB players (stars) get payed a ton. Owners aren't going hungry. But yet the game of baseball participation is going down. And from the friends of mine own mouth's, the level of competition is being watered down at the youth level. Park leagues are less competitive due to travel leagues. Travel leagues are less competitive due to increasingly more "decent" players playing on travel teams. Travel team coaches/manager and tournament directors can make a fair amount of money from a weekend tournament though.

^Similar comparisons in my opinion.

Golf the game is fine. My home course is semi private. We play a good bit of public play. This year we’ve cleared enough to completely pay for new cartpath on all 18 ( asphalt ) and a practice chipping green is finally in the works. Covid has caused an explosion of players. And we’ve signed up 12 more new members than this time last year. In SC golf is booming. You can’t get a tee time on the weekend the day before. Luckily members have a blocked section. But before you Could walk in Saturday morning with no time and get out before 10 no problem. They turn folks away now. Booked until 4/5 at least.

Just listened to Nick Faldo endorsing some shoe, while claiming that they will help the viewer gain distance........Golf will hype anything with the distance claim. Once again golf sells distance and next they'll claim that new head covers will give you an extra five yards....LOL!

PRO golf is doing okay, when TW plays ratings are off the hook, when he doesn't nobody watches. Just look at the ratings for "The Match 2", off the charts. The problem is that TW isn't going to be around forever and there's really nobody to replace him.

GOLF the sport is doing fine, lots of people picking up clubs for the first time during Corona. Some will stick with it, overall golf as a sport is seeing more new blood than any time since the Tiger Slam days.

Brooks Keopka pick up another Major the golf world will have something to hype to no ends because people either love him or hate him.....that will be very interesting.

That’s my point. If Tiger moves the needle so much even when he is a regular a non-factor, what are they going to do when he is a complete non factor. That time is going to come soon enough when it comes to even just playing never mind competing for wins. If the Tour keeps going the way that it has been with television coverage, it is simply going to result in even more sponsorship and ads being shoved down our throats making the broadcast even more unwatchable and the cycle continues...

More ads is an issue independent of Tiger. They’ll run as many as ads and sell as many sponsorships as they can get away with - as do all broadcasters in all sports (except CBS during the Masters).

Tiger was a complete non factor from 2015-2017. The networks that recently re-upped know his age and injury history. Nobody is expecting him to carry the sport into the 2020s.

I don't know how to get this question out without it sounding racist as it deals with race, but is the Tiger Effect due to Tiger's race(s)? Or at this point in Tiger's career is it about the records?

Early on I could see pretty clearly that it was (maybe mostly) due to how Tiger played and how he won. Now he is not driving it past many or hitting 2 iron stingers or lapping the field. What's moving the needle now?

What are we replacing exactly?

I disagree, I think that the Tour and broadcasters will continue to flog Tiger for as long as they possible can. The more he is front and centre, the more eyeballs are on the sport and the happier the sponsors and advertisers will be. Take him out of the equation and those parties will be looking for something else to get the “value” out of their investment.

Golf doing good. I played 9 holes this morning, the first 4 in "tropical storm conditions" then the sun came out.

I can say I shot a 37 amid Isaiasaisis.

You only live once.

casual golf fans, those who move the ratings. are still much more interested in watching golf when TW is in the mix or even just playing at all.

Put it this way, for most of us on the forum, we will watch when TW is not on.

But for the millions of more casual fan to whom golf is between “ehhh” and flat out boring, they will only tune in if TW is on.

Thats just how it is.

Yeah but why? What is the draw? I get "It's Tiger" but Tiger 2020 isn't Tiger 1999-2000. Really young golf fans weren't even born when he was truly dominant and one's much older were probably wearing superhero underpants at that time.

Insert Tiger into a tournament today and I don't see what makes it go from flat out boring to must tune in tv. When he is T16 how or why does that move the needle?

This old f$rt particularly enjoys watching Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Brooks Koepka and many others. I'm OK if Tiger retires.

Look at U2.

The stink for decades but still millions still go see them. I don’t know, maybe they think they will do one more great version of “Bad” or something ; )

I like watching the featured groups coverage the most. So long as there are good groups, and I like a lot of golfers, then I will tune it to watch on the app. But I find it super annoying that there isn't a featured groups pm on the weekends. I haven't figured out how to watch the end of the tournaments, lol. I don't have cable so I can't watch the regular coverage on tv.

It'd be much easier to watch if I didn't have to hear Jim Nantz anymore. I can't stand him. Always trying to create a "story line" instead of just talking golf. Always has to get a final round quote in for the highlight reels.

Of course they’ll take full advantage of him when they can.

But the new TV deals run 2022-30. The guys who made those deals know that anything Tiger does in his late 40s and beyond is a bonus.

They'll be a reckoning coming for all spectator sports - spectator sports without spectators.

Professional sports has been gone for decades. It's simply a business, an industry, now. Sports is what you have as a kid, in school, but after high school, it's just an entertainment business. College sports is a business.

Maybe we'll discover that sports doesn't really bring a society together for fun like it did a generation of two ago. It's no longer something to take our minds off the real world because the real world will still be affecting the event.

Golf is no different than other athletic entertainment now. The suits owning the media and the monopoly franchises make bushel baskets of money, the players milk it, the fans get nothing but manipulated into cheering from a team or person who doesn't know you exist. It's like cheering for random lottery winners. What's it got to do with you?

Millions of dollars to hit a ball with a stick, bounce a basketball and run up and down a field. GPD drops 33%, but sports salaries are through the roof.

Buy your tickets, order your 15$ hot dog and beer, wait in lines forever, buy hats, shirts, blankets, keychains, mugs, glasses and other trinkets, put stickers on your car and watch beer commercials all day long. What's the event got to do with you? Nothing. You're just an ATM machine for the media and owners.

Since you won't be going to stadiums or courses, they'll figure a way to get you to pay extra to watch it on TV, in addition to all of the commercials. Something like minimal coverage (one camera on a crane with Jim Nantz crooning into the mic), but extra $X for premium coverage which generally includes women and lots of chattering and meaningless statistics.

Why? Because you'll do it. Because maybe this time, one of the players will send you some of the money he made in the mail as gratitude to you for being a "fan."

(I know you're going to flame me. I'm just acting like the media and creating controversy... because you like that. It will be interesting to read people defending their lemmingness. I think I just made a new word?)

"Hello CactusGolf. Jim Nantz here along side Sir Nick Faldo in Butler Cabin."

On that subject, do you know if it is possible to get Sky Sports in the US? After watching their coverage of the F1 race this past weekend, it is very evident that they understand they make an entertainment product rather than a product to sell advertising that we get from US golf productions.