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The sports highlight of February has been hockey’s 4 Nations Face-Off, a week-long exhibition that gathered NHL players from Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Finland during what would normally be the All-Star break. Played to record TV audiences, the games have been electric—emotional, occasionally bloody, with minimal money and mostly national pride at stake. There were three fights in the first nine seconds of the U.S.-Canada game last Saturday. On Monday night, with his team already assured a spot in the finals, the American star Brady Tkachuk was forced to leave the game early after charging full speed into a goal post.
As someone who had skates on long before setting foot on a putting green, the raw energy of the 4 Nations represents everything I love about hockey. It also underscores the nagging problem at the core of professional golf.
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See if you can tell what’s missing from marketing pitches of the various new iterations of golf. LIV Golf has touted a party atmosphere and alternate format. TGL marries high-tech indoor golf and chatty interplay between golf superstars. Similarly, The Match and the recent Showdown, both produced by Golf Digest’s corporate cousins at TNT, draw you in on the promise of unfiltered A-listers tussling over briefcases full of cash. This is not where I argue these efforts are misguided. They all have their moments. It’s just that none of these new concepts are straining to convince you how much the athletes involved genuinely care.
For his forthcoming book, Playing Dirty, my colleague Joel Beall traveled to Scotland to compare the chaotic state of elite golf to the modest game most of us play. The principal motivation for this is the insurgent LIV’s rattling of the golf establishment: from human rights concerns about its Saudi Arabian owners, to its aggressive poaching of top players, to the scrambling efforts of the PGA Tour to elevate purses and preserve its turf. All have contributed to what Joel calls “the growing void between golf’s glittering professional façade and its beating heart.” Joel smartly sought out that heartbeat in the game’s ancestral home, where there are more golf courses per capita than any country, and where almost all of the highest-end private clubs are open in some form to the public. But Scotland was just a fitting contrast: The subtext is that golf is immersed in an existential crisis, and none of the characters at its core love the game as much as you do.
This part isn’t talked about enough. We understand that sports is big business, and can even accept that pro golfers are long past teeing it up just for the fun of it. But the most compelling part of spectator sports isn’t absurd talent or oversized checks. There’s a reason the Ryder Cup has become the spectacle it is, just as there’s a reason there are YouTube golf stars with imperfect golf swings who draw bigger audiences than some pro tours. It’s because they all project the game’s irresistible mix of excitement, joy and uncertainty, which is more recognizable to golfers than backspin on a wedge.
The flaw in the efforts to reinvent golf is not in innovation or format, or in wanting to get a stodgy game to loosen up, all valid conversations. But none of it is worthwhile if you can’t convince me it means something to the players hitting the shots. We don’t need golfers to bloody their knuckles the way hockey players do. Hell, we don’t even need fist pumps after sinking a big putt. Outward emotion is the easiest to see, but there are ways to signal you are invested in the outcome enough for us to be invested, too.
Pro golf has always subsisted on an implicit connection between the stars of the game and those of us obsessed with incremental improvement. Their versions of golf can look way different on the outside, as long as we believe the game occupies a familiar place in their hearts.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
