The Boring Game
Courtesy: progolferdigest.com
What's the matter with golf today? I ask that question after reading an opinion piece on the current state of the professional game with which I find myself agreeing almost completely.
John Huggan is a Scottish golf writer who pens his material for The Scotsman newspaper. His latest lament is over how boring professional golf has become. Week after week, he argues, we are subjected to the same kind of tournaments with the same kinds of shots being hit and the same kinds of outcomes.
There's nothing exciting, anymore, he bemoans. I agree. That's why I wrote last month that I was looking forward greatly to the Ryder Cup because it offered up exciting golf at a time when all the majors were finished and all that was left was the Fed Ex Cup conclusion.
The Fed Ex Cup has never been and will never be exciting golf. Total points earned over a season and then handicapped for the final six tournaments is a heavy-handed failure of an attempt to "create" excitement.
Golf's excitement is in the playing of the damn game. Not in predicting points outcomes.
Huggan offers some alternatives. My own alternatives might involve making the weekly tour stops tougher. Grow the rough longer, narrow the fairways, shave the greens, turn off the water for two days. Or perhaps play every other week on some of the best courses in America.
It's about bringing the inherent challenge of maneuvering a golf ball over natural terrain back into the game.
I think the solution couldn’t possibly be as difficult as it is made out to be. Greens with contours, monstrous rough and rewarding skill over distance are I guess the main principles that need to be applied to get in place a course that can make it ‘not boring’. Why is the 17th at TPCsawgrass such a loved hole? It teases the mind more than testing their ability to launch a ball with a 25th century club into outer space.
As for the format of play, well a lot more work has to be done on that front to ensure that as the season reaches its fag end, the viewers are still glued in. The playoffs need to be scrapped, at least‘reformatted’ to bring in some level of entertainment. Ironically the most loved shot maker in the game is today recuperating in a hospital.
But one bit that I do find interesting in John Huggan’s piece is something that is really worth considering. Transform strokeplay into matchplay on a Sunday afternoon. Could that be done?
Here is one radical suggestion that definitely will not go down well with the connoisseurs of the game but it will sure as hell make it interesting. Identify a hole on the front nine on the final day, keep an attractive spot prize in play, like the closest to the pin and give the winner a two stroke jump on the leaderboard? It’s silly, but it’s radical and is definitely not boring!
Rob – Some great ideas! If all professional sport is really sports entertainment (and isn’t it?, then anything that “ups the ante” will also increase the entertainment quotient immensely. Your comment about why the 17th green at TPC Sawgrass is so challenging is dead accurate. And your remark about the greatest shotmaker ever is as accurate. His tumour is cancerous and in a difficult part of the brain to reach, apparently. Let’s hope a higher force guides the hands of the surgeons once again…