Golfpocalypse is a meandering collection of words about golf (professional and otherwise) that sometimes, but not always, has a point. Reach out with your questions or comments on absolutely anything at shane.spr8@gmail.com. We’ll publish the best emails here.
I have to give credit where it’s due here, so shout out to my colleague Joel Beall, who put it this way in our work Slack just before I yoinked the idea: “silly season golf can work if it’s actually silly, and not just a hit-n-giggle that looks very much like the golf we see the rest of the year, only with players getting paid handsomely for it.”
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Yes! Perfectly put. Perfect to steal. The only bad part is that I realized it would mean I had to write the word “silly” about a thousand times, which makes me feel like a British children’s cartoon character. Not ideal.
Anyway, we were speaking in the aftermath of Wednesday night’s “Golf Channel Games,” which was the kind of idea that the more cynical among us (me) greet with a heavy sigh, but which turned out to be pretty fun. In particular, the relay race portion was a massive success, highlighted by Team Rory’s 28-second birdie. Why was it so fun? Beyond the format, which has succeeded in viral videos in the past, it was just funny to watch players like Keegan Bradley and Scottie Scheffler have to sprint to their ball and forgo their usual routines to play quickly. They didn’t have time to look cool, and they’re all so competitive that they weren’t about to go less than 100%, so the end result was guys running around the fairways and greens and shouting to (and at) each other. It was stupid, and terrific.
The relay worked better than some of the other gimmicks, but the underlying point is that when you take the players out of their comfort zones, things get really watchable. You can take that same lesson from the other silly season events we’ve seen in the past couple years. The Match, installments one through whatever? Mostly fun when the shit-talking starts. Ditto for the Skins Game. The Showdown, that one-time night golf PGA vs. LIV clash, was a bit of a dud because it was mostly just some guys playing golf. TGL is at its best when the weird novelties pop up, like bizarre hole designs and sudden death chip-offs (though I’m not sure I need another Gil Hanse walk-out). When it’s just golf by a different name, though, this stuff all gets a little boring because there are no stakes. For me, the PNC Father-Son and the Hero World Challenge and offseason events like that all fun under the “missable offseason content” umbrella.
RELATED: Hold on, the prize money for the next Internet Invitational will be how much??
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The thing is, you can’t artificially insert stakes into any of this stuff. The last golf event to spring up out of nowhere and manage to make people care about the winner immediately was the Masters, and that took a ton of money, the best golfer in the world and a full-bore media seduction campaign in an historical time when there was space to fill. Maybe the Players Championship qualified too, despite its growing pains. But even an exhibition like the Presidents Cup is only starting to get real juice, and that started 30 years ago. The saturated media environment has only made launching these new franchises harder, but paradoxically it feels like there are more of them than ever. That’s a bad combination—it’s harder than ever to stick out in the first place, yet somehow you still have more competitors.
Bottom line, you can’t make us care. Not about the result, and certainly not about the money (LIV is paying people 900 trillionty dollars to play, and they still can’t get anyone to watch). But the Golf Channel Games managed to find a loophole by leaning into the goofy side of things. Even better, it forced the players to be goofy by the nature of the format. Professional golfers are not comedians, and while you may get a little bit of solid banter between them on a good day, you can’t count on it. What you can count on is the raw entertainment value of making them run around the fairways and hit strange shots and generally just commit to the weird bits you create for them.
There’s room for so much more of this stuff, too. Have you ever seen those Japanese game shows where the entire premise is making the contestants fall into water or slide down greased up hills or get whacked by giant foam balls? That should be the silly season golf model. Maybe not quite to that extent, but definitely in that general direction. You’re only doing this kind of thing once per year, the players seem to like it, so why not learn from the relay race and heighten the insanity? We have plenty of time to watch Scheffler and Rory hit high-pressure shots on great courses in the normal season. After October, I want to see guys taking 100-yard approach shots where, if they miss the green, they get dunked in water. I want to see them try to make par on a short par-5 while wearing a sumo outfit. I want to see them play a hole Tin Cup-style, using baseball bats and pool cues and shovels to hit the ball.
Go for broke! People are going to love it! The players will probably love it. Nobody wants to look like an idiot, but it’s in good fun and you’ve got a bunch of them in on it, they’ll buy in. The Golf Channel Games didn’t go all the way to full absurdity, but it was entertaining, and a great model for where this kind of thing can go.
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In short: Get goofy. Get dumb. Get weird. If you’re not getting silly in the silly season, you’re doing something wrong.
Previously on Golfpocalypse:
Will a teenager ever win a men’s golf major again?Justin Thomas’ comments on the Bethpage greens only highlight Keegan Bradley’s failureThe Internet Invitational was a story about fathers: Good, bad, and toxicI’ve arrived at the brutal crossroads of the mediocre recreational golferNone of LIV Golf’s format ideas ever mattered, and they won’t start nowPlaying golf in bad weather is a mental paradiseWhy don’t we care when a journeyman or no-name wins on Tour?I hate that I am riveted by Bryson DeChambeau’s ping pong challengeLet me teach you where to stand on the tee box to not annoy peopleI turned down two free rounds at the best course in the world because I’m weird about golfI don’t want your gimme putt, palI will no longer be entering nine-hole rounds, GHIN, and you can’t make meI will abandon my friends during a round. Does this make me a bad person?Did I dishonor the game via handicap shenanigans?Rory’s Masters win was the ultimate “dudes crying” moment in golfI want to be a draw alpha, not a fade betaIf you had to give up golf or sex for the rest of your life, which would it be?I am the recent victim of golf snobbery, and I’m madShould the Tour just move to an F1 style schedule and be done with it?I was the world’s most annoying teenage golf maintenance workerCan golf still be a spiritual experience in 2024?There is nothing stranger than a golfer’s brain…just ask usI have the dumbest golf pet peeve, but I can’t shake itIf you talk about politics on the course, please, for God’s sake, stopLoving Golf in 2024 is about finding where the money isn’tI believed in the magic of Tiger Woods when I was a kid, but I’m a cynic nowIf you can enjoy playing golf alone, you have achieved NirvanaI took 12 stitches to the head for golf before I even loved itAn annual ‘Friends Ryder Cup’ trip is the greatest thing in golfMarshals at public golf courses need to get way meanerI, and I alone, have the genius tweak to fix the Tour ChampionshipIt cannot be fun to play golf when you’re egregiously badConfession: I break clubs when I’m madPlaying golf in bad weather makes me feel aliveCaring what other people think of your golf game is annoying to other peopleSympathize with Rory, because choking sucks
