How to watch 2014 WGC Bridgestone Invitational online, TV schedule and more

It’s still July, but the PGA Tour regular season is almost over. The Tour’s biggest remaining event will tee off Thursday morning in Northeast Ohio at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. The most important event of the year is, of course, next week’s major, but that’s technically not a PGA Tour event. So the fourth and final WGC title of the season will be one last marquee showcase before the PGA Championship and FedExCup take over.

A WGC event always draws a loaded field, but the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational may be the most prestigious of all four (Doral a close second). With the PGA Championship the subsequent week, this event always gets the top players from all over the globe to jet in to the States. The full top 100 in the world are expected at Valhalla next week, but this is just about the next best thing.

Like the other WGC titles, this is a limited-field no-cut event, so everyone is guaranteed four rounds and a nice paycheck. Before the four majors all hiked up their purses, the WGC tournaments often had the largest payouts on the PGA Tour schedule, aside from the Players. This year’s purse will be $9M, with the winner getting slightly more than $1.5 million and the last place finisher gets more than $41,000 just for showing up. There’s an argument to be made that the exclusivity of these WGC events only walls off the top of the world rankings more, given the amount of money and rankings points that are automatic with no cut.

This annual stop and Firestone, and then the PGA Championship, mark the high point of the summer for CBS golf. The Masters is obviously its biggest week of the year, but these next 10 days are their biggest stretch of the season. But as usual, they won’t join the coverage until the weekend, ceding the floor to Golf Channel for the first two rounds. Golf Channel has expanded their typical coverage window from three hours to five hours on Thursday and Friday, so you should be able to see most of Tiger Woods’ first 36 holes.

Tiger will play in the afternoon wave on Thursday, going off in the penultimate tee time at 2:20 p.m. ET. The smaller field allows the Tour to send them off in twosomes, and Woods will be with Players and U.S. Open champion Martin Kaymer through the first two rounds. The afternoon tee time puts Tiger’s entire round in the Golf Channel coverage window, and given that we might only see the game’s top draw for two more weeks this year, expect the broadcast to feature his every shot. There won’t be a Tiger-cam like ESPN set up for the Open, but there will be an online stream simulcasting the Tiger-heavy TV coverage and a second “featured holes” stream setup on PGATour.com.

Here are all your media options for the first round. All times Eastern:

1:30 to 6:30 p.m. - Golf Channel

9 a.m. to 6 p.m. - PGATour.com featured holes stream (par-5 No. 2, with supplemental coverage of Nos. 15, 18)

1:30 to 6:30 p.m. - Golf Channel simulcast stream

1 to 7 p.m. - PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 93/208)