It wasn’t as good as the real thing, but nothing ever is.
There was live golf on television last weekend with The Match: Champions for Charity, where Tiger Woods and Peyton Manning defeated the team of Phil Mickelson and Tom Brady. And I watched all of the back nine.
It turns out a lot of other sports-deprived sports fans watched it also. Turner Sports says the telecast attracted an average of 5.8 million viewers across four of its networks. Turner says it was the most-watched golf telecast in cable TV history.
It said the previous record was 4.9 million viewers on ESPN at the 2010 Masters, the year Tiger Woods returned to golf for the first time since the scandal in his personal life.
The sports world is less void than it was a month ago, and some networks are figuring out how to fill it. First, ESPN moved up its 10-part Michael Jordan series “The Last Dance” to April and then Turner Sports made its move.
The premiere of “The Last Dance” was the first taste of anything resembling fresh sports on TV in more than a month after the COVID-19 shutdown. That it was a decades-old story with a known outcome didn’t matter. It drew an average of 5.6 million live viewers for 10 episodes over a five-week run. The first episode that aired on April 19 drew 6.3 million viewers, which smashed ESPN’s previous record for a documentary held by 2012’s “30 for 30” Bo Jackson feature “You Don’t Know Bo,” which drew 3.6 million viewers.
The star power on Sunday was huge — as big as it gets in sports. But those numbers are still staggering for a casual competition with no real stakes attached.
When the PGA Tour announced that professional golf, real golf, will return without fans at Colonial in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 11-14, to be followed by a weekly run of tour events through Thanksgiving (with at least the first four to be staged without galleries). That’s a move that has some of us hopeful.
But this won’t be easy, especially since this deadly virus appears to be going nowhere anytime soon.
How will the tour navigate travel restrictions to help the dozens of players and caddies who live outside the United States? How often will tournament participants (not just the players) be tested for COVID-19 on site during an average week?
There are more questions than answers at this point.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, sports across the country have been canceled and people have suffered from not being able to watch their favorite athletes compete. Sports serve as amain source of entertainment for millions of Americans and its absence has been difficult to ignore.
nContact Bill Burrus at 581-7237 or bburrus@gwcommonwealth.com.
