Golf should not matter in December. It barely registers during the last month of the year. There are a handful of silly season games, but nothing that really counts on either the PGA Tour or European Tour. The game is supposed to recede, go away and be quiet until the new year. But here’s Tiger Woods putting it on the map during a busy football weekend.
Hero World Challenge 2016: Time, live TV schedule for Tiger Woods and the field on Sunday
Tiger will play his last first and last Sunday round of 2016 on NBC.
Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images
Tiger is always going to push golf events beyond their normal audience, casting a wider net. But his first event after being away for 466 days amplifies that draw and we’ve seen that this week at an event that should be relatively meaningless. The stakes are low for the other 16 players in the field, but Tiger was still under immense pressure in his first start since August of 2015.
Do not conflate the pressure with high expectations. They were relatively low. We were just bracing for a potential disaster, and maybe that was somewhere in the back of Tiger’s mind. Woods has exceeded all expectations and it’s hard to see something on Sunday changing that overall takeaway from the week. His game has looked perfectly capable of hanging with the best in the world. There have been rough stretches, most notably with the driver. But this has been a fantastic first test run and Tiger knows it too.
Woods will get 18 more holes of reps on Sunday and Golf Channel and NBC will be there to chronicle it. It takes a lot for golf to make its way onto network TV in December, but Tiger will do that. Dan Hicks and David Feherty will have the call for the end of the final round, coming on the air at 1 p.m. for a three-hour broadcast.
Tiger will tee off at 11:31 a.m. ET with things moved up slightly for the final round. These twosomes are playing rounds in under four hours, so expect Tiger to be done around 3:15 or so, giving you plenty of time to flip back over and watch the end of another underwhelming NFL game.
Here are all your media options and schedule for the final round in the Bahamas:
Sunday’s final round coverage
Television:
11 a.m. to 1 p.m. -- Golf Channel
1 to 4 p.m. -- NBC
Replayed from 5 to 10 p.m. on Golf Channel
Online streams:
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. -- Golf Channel/NBC Sports LiveExtra simulcast stream
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