The bar was set pretty low, but this year’s coverage of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am has actually been an improvement over the usual abomination. Regular PGA Tour watchers tune in each year for the weekend coverage at Pebble expecting the worst.
How to watch the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro AM live online, TV coverage and more
Bill Murray! Jordan Spieth! The Pebble Pro Am is a different kind of PGA Tour event that doesn’t always yield the best broadcast.
Photo by Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images
We know it’s a deviation from every other event on Tour, with amateur hacks getting plenty of the coverage and often unheard of or washed up D-lists celebs overtaking the broadcast. Not much golf is shown between these celebrity inanities and the urge to show all the admittedly pretty scenery of the Monterey Peninsula area. A wider audience may like it and maybe that’s all CBS cares about, even if the panic and anger crescendoes on the corner of golf Twitter.
This Saturday, however, CBS did away with the set it usually has on the 17th tee at Pebble where the parade of celebs comes through, and Jim Nantz and Nick Faldo yuck it up and analyze some 15-handicapper’s swing. More golf was shown, and there was a strong leaderboard to feature, with Jordan Spieth as the headliner. The broadcast was not great, but it was a step up from what is annually the worst single day of coverage on the PGA Tour.
Sunday is another step up from Saturday because now the cut has been made and more time needs to be dedicated to the actual finish and deciding moments of the tournament. There’s a concurrent pro-am title up for grabs, but the usual Sunday coverage you’d get of the final round of the PGA Tour event is the priority and takes hold on CBS.
Spieth will start the final round a massive six shots ahead of everyone else, so it’s likely we get a nice little Sunday stroll to victory for the headliner in Monterey. That’s a huge boost for CBS and the Tour, which has gotten some young stars to show up and shine here early in the first quarter of the season.
Golf Channel will have the early round coverage, per usual, coming on the air at 1 p.m. ET. Spieth and Brandt Snedeker and their amateur partners will tee off just 10 minutes before GC goes live. CBS takes over for the finale and Nantz, who now lives at Pebble, will be in all his glory, especially with a guy like Spieth running away with it.
The Pebble Pro Am is notorious for interminable rounds, and a five-plus-hour round is budgeted in for Sunday too. CBS is scheduled to run past the usual 6 p.m. finish time and into 6:30 ET. If that final group is not done, then God help us because it will be nearing six hours. Robert Louis Stevenson called this “the most felicitous meeting of land and sea in creation” but even a course this beautiful isn’t meant to be played for six hours.
Here are all your media options for the final round:
Sunday’s final round coverage
Television:
1 to 2:30 p.m. ET — Golf Channel
3 to 6:30 p.m. ET — CBS
Online streams:
11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. ET -- PGA TOUR Live featured holes stream
1 to 2:30 p.m. ET — Golf Channel LiveExtra simulcast stream
2:30 to 6:30 p.m. ET — PGATour.com/CBS simulcast stream
Radio:
1 to 6:30 p.m. ET — PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 92/208 and streamed here)
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