Golf

How to watch the American Century Championship live online, TV schedule, and more

The annual celebrity event on Lake Tahoe with some of the biggest stars in sports is more of a party and less of a golf tournament.

by Brendan Porath

Jul 13, 2017, 7:30 PM UTC

Is July the best month for watching golf? I am here to tell you, yes. The Masters may get the biggest ratings and the most hype. The U.S. Open might have the fancy FOX coverage and billion-dollar deal. And there’s nothing like the Ryder Cup, the dynamic TV event that lets us get a little carried away rooting for our country.

But looking at a holistic start-to-finish view, July is just a barrage of interesting golf to watch while hiding in the air-conditioned indoors.

There’s the oldest major championship in golf. There are LPGA majors. And there are Senior majors. There’s a strong European Tour stretch. And there’s a reliable PGA Tour stable of events — a final stretch where players elbow for position in the FedExCup rankings or try to keep their status before the end of the regular season.

There is just always golf on, and it’s usually pretty entertaining or “important” golf. You often wish they’d stagger it better, as Geoff Shackelford pointed out recently during a Sunday when a Senior major, LPGA major, and the PGA Tour all overlapped and competed for eyeballs.

This week is the latest example of why July is so good for golf watching. We’ve got the Scottish Open, the deepest non-major European Tour event of the year. It draws players from all over the globe, including some notable Americans, to Scotland for some links prep the week before The Open.

There’s the U.S. Women’s Open, which is, simply put, the biggest event in the women’s game. There’s the Senior Players, a major for the 50-and-over crowd. And the PGA Tour’s John Deere Classic, the annual stop in the heartland where players can go super low, provides a good opportunity to watch some of the up-and-comers.

This will do.

But this week also brings us the American Century Championship, which may be the best alternative of them all if you can’t decide among the pros playing golf. This is more of a party with some golf shots intervening. It’s at Edgewood Tahoe, which is just about the most beautiful place for a mid-July golf event in this here country. It features some legit, actual, real celebrities and sports stars — not some of the D-listers and fringe pros who can fill out the ranks of the occasional celeb golf event. This one is worth putting on TV.

Stephen Curry, Tony Romo, Justin Timberlake, Aaron Rodgers, Charles Barkley, and Jerry Rice are just a few of the headliners. This is not a pro-am either, so there aren’t pros playing alongside the celebs for serious money or career livelihood. We don’t have to have hush signs and marshals telling everyone to stand perfectly still. That makes it more of a lakeside party with interludes throughout that annually seem to yield something that your friends will share on your Facebook feed.

And then there’s also Sir Charles trying to swing a golf club, which has a car-crash, must-watch appeal to it. Barkley is 6,000 to 1 to win the event this week, while Romo, a scratch player, is the favorite. SB Nation will be on-scene in Tahoe running live shows on both Friday and Saturday before NBC takes over with the actual golf coverage.