Golf

Jordan Spieth’s leading the Masters, and you probably can’t watch him Friday

The Masters are, literally, a hard thing to watch.

by Alex Kirshner

Apr 6, 2018, 1:40 PM UTC

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Jordan Spieth shot a 6-under 66 and leads the Masters by two strokes after Thursday’s opening round. But because Spieth’s tee time is 10:53 a.m. on Friday and he’s not one of the featured groups available for streaming at Masters.com, you can’t watch his round unless you’re one of the patrons on hand at Augusta National. If his group takes more than four hours, seven minutes to play 18 holes, you’ll be able to catch his last few shots, maybe.

The two morning featured groups are Fred Couples, Haotong Li, and Joaquin Nieman (9:14 a.m. ET tee-off) and Phil Mickelson, Rickie Fowler, and Matt Kuchar (10:31). Those are good groups, but they’re not groups with Spieth, a 24-year-old superstar going for his second Green Jacket at a course fraught with personal history both good and bad.

The Masters is the most difficult major championship to watch.

That’s not a commentary on the quality of the play or the beautiful scenery at Augusta. It’s a point about how the club that hosts the first major of the year handles broadcasting rights.

You can’t watch a live TV broadcast of Masters action until 3 p.m. ET on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. That time moves up to 2 p.m. on Sunday, but even then, most of the field is already off the course by the time the TV broadcast starts. It’s not a huge deal for most viewers on the weekend, because the leaders start late enough that television audiences can watch almost the entirety of their rounds, but it’s still a point of frustration.

The reason things are this way is not that ESPN and CBS, which broadcast the first two and last two rounds, respectively, want it that way.

Those networks would love to broadcast every waking second of the Masters, just like we’d all love to watch them. The Masters don’t arrive on your TV until the afternoon because Augusta says it can’t be, and that’s that.

It’s been a longstanding worry of the club’s that commercializing the tournament too much — including via more TV cameras and broadcast time — might cause the club and its flagship event to lose some of the mystical aura that surround them. You might think that’s silly, and you’d be right, but that’s why the Masters is so primitive about TV.

While the tournament makes a lot of money, the club has been fine with not maxing out on TV dollars. It runs close to commercial-free during the hours it’s on TV, and Augusta has left a lot of revenue streams untapped. Golf Channel reported on its TV dealings in 2015:

This is the 60th consecutive year CBS has broadcast the Masters on a one-year contract, an arrangement that began in 1956. ESPN has had the weekday cable rights since 2008 on the same basis. “The way the Masters TV deal is constructed is still shrouded in mystery,” says a source in the broadcasting business. “The deal changed a little bit when Billy came in as chairman, bringing in a small rights fee, but neither CBS nor Augusta National makes money on the deal.”

Augusta’s leadership fears what might happen if the Masters are on TV for too much time. This is an odd fear. All of the infrastructure that’s required to broadcast the Masters is already set up on the course, and it’s not like anyone expects anything that happens on that course this weekend to be kept secret. The only people who lose when the Masters stay behind a TV curtain are golf fans and people who might become golf fans if they got to watch more of the best golf in the world. Denying people the chance to watch Spieth (and a bunch of others) on the Masters stage doesn’t do the sport any good at all.