Golf

How to watch the Arnold Palmer Invitational live online, TV schedule, radio and more

Tiger skips another tournament he’s owned throughout his career, but Rory makes his first ever start at Arnie’s place. Here’s how to watch all week at Bay Hill.

by Brendan Porath

Mar 18, 2015, 11:03 PM UTC

Sam Greenwood/Getty Images

The Florida swing comes to an end this weekend with the annual stop at Bay Hill for Arnold Palmer’s little party. Bay Hill has become a fixture of the modern PGA Tour schedule, typically attracting the biggest names stateside. There have always been a group of international players who show up as well, getting in some work before the Masters in three weeks.

But despite the appeal, prestige, and the imprimatur of Arnold Palmer, the current world No. 1 and the sport’s headliner had never made an appearance. That will change this week when Rory McIlroy tees it up at Bay Hill. It’s still early in McIlroy’s career. He’s been around playing events in the States for a good five years, but we still don’t have a firm grasp of his annual schedule like we do Tiger Woods at this point.

McIlroy’s early season schedule has fluctuated in recent years. He usually plays the Honda Classic and Doral, the first two stops of the Florida swing, but after that his pre-Masters slate has varied. He’s played in Texas to get reps while his game was down. But despite those annual differences, he’d never once made it to Bay Hill. So McIlroy rectified that and said he showed up this week in part to “honor” Arnie.

McIlroy will be the main attraction this week with Tiger skipping the event for the second straight year. In 2014, an injury sidelined Woods. This year, however, his game just isn’t good enough or “tournament-ready” as he’s putting it these days. This course and this event were a staple of Tiger’s pre-Masters routine. He’s owned it like a handful of other regular venues on Tour -- Torrey Pines, Doral, Firestone. He’s got 8 wins at this event, including the one in 2012 that snapped an almost three-year winless streak.

Despite that comfortability with the course, Tiger would have had no chance this week. The accomplishment would not have been contending, but rather avoiding embarrassing himself, which is an indication of how far it’s fallen. And given early reports from the course this week, it sounds like the venue they will be playing is far from the typical track that Tiger dominated. The greens are apparently in awful shape.

Prominent caddie on state of Bay Hill's greens: "Awful. The grass is long, there are muddy spots. Some traditional pins cannot be used."
— Steve Elling (@EllingYelling) March 18, 2015

A pro told Alex Miceli of Golfweek that it looked like the greens had a “combover,” and that the tournament might struggle to find usable spots for the holes all four days.

Despite those unsettling course conditions, this tournament is still one of the marquee non-major, non-WGC events on the schedule. As such, it will get the expanded treatment from the Tour’s broadcast partners. NBC continues its coverage while Jim Nantz and friends call the NCAA Tournament until the Masters. This is typically one of NBC’s biggest events, thanks to Tiger. Rory will be a boost, but another Tiger-less API is a blow to NBC’s annual golf schedule.

With NBC and Golf Channel under the same Comcast umbrella, there’s plenty of cooperation between the networks that we don’t get when CBS has the weekend call. One benefit is Golf Channel putting their “spotlight coverage” in play. This is a concurrent broadcast that runs opposite the normal tournament coverage on NBC. It focuses on just three or four holes (this week, Bay Hill’s three finishing holes), while using ProTracer technology on each shot and peppering the screen with season-long stats, specific hole data from that day or week, TrackMan info, and any other number of analytics tools that are becoming a larger part of the game.

As usual with NBC/Golf Channel broadcasts, all coverage will be simulcast online via streams on their LiveExtra service. PGATour.com will also bring their “Live At” streams back after taking last week off at the Valspar Championship. There will be featured groups streams (players for Thurs/Fri listed below) in the mornings when there’s no TV coverage. So that’s how you can get your early fix when you’re stuck in the office at the end of the week. Then when the TV broadcast goes live, the PGATour.com stream will switch to a featured holes stream focusing mostly on the par-4 13th hole. This is an above-average tournament with a solid field, and the coverage, whether TV or online, should be strong all week.

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