The Tiger vs. Phil match was not good, but we don’t have to give up on the concept

There were two schools of thought on The Match entering Friday. You could either see this charade as an exclusive, transparent cash grab for two men who are already uber-mega rich, or a deserved and welcomed bout between two icons that have done more than their part in growing the sport internationally over the last quarter-century. The pictures of cash on the table seemed gauche, the forced social media bits were transparently forced.

It was all of that, but it also generated a tidal wave of interest for golf in late November, had a signature highlight from the greatest player of all time, and went four extra holes under the lights in Las Vegas. The finish and some notable back-and-forth exchanges late in the match slightly redeemed what felt like an unmitigated and irredeemable failure. The experiment was a failure but it cannot be dismissed out of hand.

I personally was far from high on The Match — it felt contrived and unnatural from the start. I’m also a golf writer with an Shubhankar Sharma obsession who stayed up to watch the Hong Kong Open last night. This was not designed for my tastes. That is fine. Not everything has to be for you, and if this is golf as packaged for a broader, newer audience, that’s totally fine.

With that said, let’s not mince words. It generated that wave of interest and brought in new viewers but was it really what will bring back a first-time viewer back? The Match was sanitized and boring. Drama was slow to develop. It was nap-worthy for the first two-and-a-half hours. We got some banter, but it felt a bit forced. The side bets were hard to follow and track. The broadcast, well, woof. B/R Live and Turner struggled with stream issues and forced some fans to miss the start. None of those factors help a one-on-one, pay-per-view, no-commercials golf event with a slim margin for error — even with the game’s biggest stars.

But the biggest reason Shadow Creek felt flat for at least half of Friday afternoon? The golf just wasn’t quality. We weren’t getting vintage Tiger, or vintage Phil — and the contrived side bets weren’t enough to save the show. Phil led 1-up through the front nine with both players hardly at their best. I, golf writer, was as bored as I’ve ever been watching a professional golf-like substance.

At some point — perhaps somewhere between the 12th tee and green, it looked like something had clicked. Something turned. We got far enough into the round where all the hype and pomp and circumstance and frivolous garbage pumped into this event for weeks drifted away, at least for the players. The forced conversation faded. We got notably less Samuel L. Jackson. It became about golf, and two guys who spent most of their careers adjudged against the other “trying to beat each other’s brains in,” to quote Tiger.

Both jockeyed ahead and behind through the back nine, with Tiger pulling ahead for the first time with six holes to play. Phil bounced back and took a 1-up lead at the 16th then walked to the par-3 17th with a chance to win the $9 million. And then, we got a moment that resembled something worth $19.99.

For that moment, things felt real — like we might get a worthwhile payoff for committing a Friday afternoon to this thing. That feeling would be fleeting.

That Big Cat chip-in pulled us level heading to the 18th, then we crashed back to our contrived reality on a contrived golf course that should be desert wasteland. Neither player could pull ahead on the final hole, or the replay of the 18th. Thus we ended with three consecutive 95-yard pitch-off challenges under flood lights in the dark.

Poetry is not always kind, but it is often just.

Phil won, and won lots of money. That part was forgettable. Here’s a few other takeaways from The Match — the good, the bad, and the really bad from Friday afternoon in Vegas.

Let’s be clear: Tiger and Phil had quite a bit of work to do to pick up a flat, disjointed broadcast. What little discussion we got from Tiger and Phil was talked over again, and again, and again. Handling mic’d up golfers is certainly new, but Ernie and Peter Jacobsen worked Twitter up into a frothing rage talking over the few soundbites we got from the two. We reached a head on the 16th, with Jake rambling over Phil and Tim Mickelson’s frame-by-frame breakdown of the Arizona State-Oregon finish.

The mixing-in of the ‘real’ broadcasters and Charles Barkley’s crew didn’t flow well. Shane Bacon inside the ropes with both players gave some great insight, but he ended up underutilized by the Turner team. It’s super, super hard to fill all the airtime at The Match with just two players and zero commercial breaks to lean on. This would’ve been a bad broadcast

Oh, and those aesthetic broadcast issues weren’t even close to the afternoon’s biggest mess.

Twitter was filled with complaints from those having trouble accessing a purchased broadcast early, so Turner just resolved it by giving the whole dang thing away for free. Good for viewers, I guess? Probably bad for someone at Turner who won’t have a great Monday.

Related to that, here is a clip from the broadcast presented without comment.

Very good.

I’ll again qualify that we’ve got constraints here. There are only so many locales that can host a professional golf event in late November on short notice, and perhaps fewer in such locales that are okay with the optics of high-stakes gambling on the course. Those things considered, Shadow Creek was a natural host for this.

For the uninitiated, Shadow Creek is an ultra-exclusive private club north of Las Vegas where celebs of all sorts hang out. It’s a Tom Fazio design that is far from the minimalist, classic architecture that’s en vogue today. It’s Vegas. It’s harsh, gauche, and exceptionally augmented. Just, like, look at this.

Not great!

Design complaints aside, aeration marks were still visible on the greens and conditions were soft and simple — looking more like a Hooters Tour setup than a major championship. Add to that the lack of atmosphere that came from tickets being unavailable to the public, and you’ve got a very meh venue for the whole thing. Sunday afternoon at Bellerive it was not.

Through 14 holes, one would be fair to have been ready to rip this showdown to shreds — we didn’t get much from the side betting action, the banter, the broadcast was flat, so on, and so forth. It was boring, and lots of people paid $19.99 for it when it was eventually given away for free.

But then the finish still delivered. We got four holes of solid finishing golf that we would rave about if it came in another tournament setting. The Tiger chip-in alone would circulate in highlights for years, even if it came at, say, the Barbasol Championship.

Bottom line? It’s exceptionally hard to create a golf broadcast off just two players. If you’ve ever watched the finale of the WGC-Match Play, you’ve probably felt it. Even in our era where Tiger is the needle and it seems like an entire event can focus on nothing but him, golf needs others. Golf needs depth. Broadcasts need the cutaway to Francesco Molinari making a run two holes ahead, and the check-ins on Jordan Spieth a couple of holes behind. Stars need supporting casts, and the majestic chaos of a major championship weekend comes from just exactly that. Especially on the front nine of a golf broadcast.

These one-off type showdown events are totally fine. Monday Night Golf was awesome, drew huge ratings in the early 2000s, and there’s likely still an appetite for that sort of alternate format. It’s just a lot to depend on only two players, no matter how big they are, to carry a four to five hour broadcast. There’s plenty of room for an undercard, or partners, or, you know, actual real galleries.

Golf shouldn’t stop doing new things. It shouldn’t stop trying to get the game into different consumable formats, and in front of different audiences. This was an attempt, and attempts to do different things should be honored. The Match had plenty of rough spots, but it also had lots of people talking about golf on a late November Friday. That’s not nothing.