When you come to think of it that is the secret of most of the great holes all over the world. They all have some kind of a twist. C.B. MACDONALD
The numbers over the first two days suggest a huge Tiger bump, especially considering day one was a Thursday telecast.
VIEWERSHIP: RD1 of @ValsparChamp on @GolfChannel earned a .63 Overnight rating. Becomes highest-rated early RD telecast at this event (2007-‘18) & highest RD1 telecast on Golf Channel (excluding majors & The Players) since 2015 Waste Management. Coverage peaked (.74, 5-530p ET) pic.twitter.com/FdOQ9D8SUf
— Golf Channel PR (@GolfChannelPR) March 9, 2018
Friday's telecast did not feature live golf from Woods, but still drew well:
VIEWERSHIP: (.59) Overnight rating for RD2 coverage of @ValsparChamp on @GolfChannel yesterday is highest-rated RD2 telecast at this event (2007-‘18), & just -6% vs RD1. Coverage peaked from 4:30-4:45p ET (.66). RD3 coverage begins at 1p ET (Golf Channel), continues at 3p (NBC) pic.twitter.com/Fc6apYG2mh
— Golf Channel PR (@GolfChannelPR) March 10, 2018
ESPN.com's Bob Harig lists some fairly staggering numbers reflecting Tiger's longevity, consistency and reinforcing the intrigue level as he seeks his 80th PGA Tour win Sunday.
Tiger downplayed the win possibilities given the many names in contention, writes GolfChannel.com's Rex Hoggard.
Tiger Tracker rounds up his thoughts from the day, including the 14 of 18 greens performance.
Your tee times and final round TV info from Golfweek.
Joe LaCava says Tiger's 67 in front of massive crowds felt like old times, and other insights from Woods' bagman as reported by Will Gray.
Tiger's extended highlights include a nice chip-in at No. 9, followed by the overall round 4 highlights from PGA Tour Entertainment.
SUBSCRIBE to PGA TOUR now: http://pgat.us/vBxcZSh In the third round of the 2018 Valspar Championship, Tiger Woods climbed up the leaderboard with a strong performance to tie for second place heading into the final round. These highlights are delivered by PGA TOUR LIVE.
SUBSCRIBE to PGA TOUR now: http://pgat.us/vBxcZSh In the third round of the 2018 Valspar Championship, Corey Conners is the leader heading into the final round over a trio in second, including Tiger Woods. Check out all the scores and highlights from Round 2/3/4 at http://bit.ly/2oWMf7K The Valspar Championship is held at the Copperhead Course at Innisbrook Resort and Golf Club in Palm Harbor, Florida.
Nice opening 70 at Innisbrook on a cool, swirling-wind day that produced some high scores, as Dan Kilbridge notes at Golfweek.com.
ESPN.com's Bob Harig noted there was some pain from the recovery shot but hopefully nothing more.
But this, this is so unnecessary!
Doug Ferguson talks to Bill Haas about the tragic events of his Los Angeles stay last month that ended abruptly after a car crash. The accident claimed the life of Haas's Genesis Open host for the week and the car's driver, retired businessman and golfer Mark Gibello.
Haas returns to this week's Valspar Championship with a heavy heart.
Along with leaning on his wife and his family, he has spent time with a therapist to cope with the wide range of emotions and the lingering questions.
"I don't know that I won't have recurring images and thoughts and feelings about that night," he said. "Why was he taken and I wasn't? I ask, `Why?' all the time. From the people who have reached out to me and the advice I've been given, you can't ask, `Why?' in life. Life happens in ways you can't explain. There's no point in asking. It won't solve anything, and it only brings more questions."
A stacked leaderboard, dreadful weather in most parts of the U.S. and the Phil Mickelson factor helped the 2018 WGC Mexico City climb 21% Sunday.
VIEWERSHIP: Final RD coverage of the @WGCMexico on @NBCSports earned a 2.89 Overnight rating (2-630p ET), +21% vs 2017. Coverage peaked (4.51) from 6-6:30p ET during the playoff won by Phil Mickelson over Justin Thomas. pic.twitter.com/y11cN3gZj4
— Golf Channel PR (@GolfChannelPR) March 5, 2018
The already compelling Masters picture got more interesting with Phil Mickelson breaking a stubborn winless drought at the WGC Mexico City.
According to Doug Ferguson's game story, Phil Mickelson's win over Justin Thomas in sudden death means more to Phil than we'll ever know.
Phil feels he has a little less work to do to make the Ryder Cup team, writes Rex Hoggard.
After win No. 43, the 47-year-old is still hoping to get to 50 PGA Tour wins, writes Brentley Romine.
Nick Menta with some of the key social and video highlights from a topsy-turvy final round.
The winner's bag, which included a new fairway wood at Mexico City.
For a roundup of all the week's action, check out the March 5 Golfweek digital edition.
SUBSCRIBE to PGA TOUR now: http://pgat.us/vBxcZSh In the final round of the 2018 World Golf Championships - Mexico Championship 8, players kept things exciting as Phil Mickelson marched to the top of the leaderboard for the win. The WGC - Mexico Championship returns to Club de Golf Chapultepec in Mexico City, Mexico.
Thomas’s approach shot hole-out at 18:
SUBSCRIBE to PGA TOUR now: http://pgat.us/vBxcZSh In the final round of the 2018 World Golf Championships - Mexico Championship 2018, Justin Thomas holes a 119-yard approach shot for eagle on the par-4 18th hole. The WGC - Mexico Championship returns to Club de Golf Chapultepec in Mexico City, Mexico.
The WGC Mexico City final round is the rare limited field event with a deep leaderboard and a wide range of final round storylines. While the list of top players two back of 21-year-old Shubhankar Sharma would be enough to keep things fun, many more lurk should the leader falter.
As for Sharma, Rex Hoggard writes that most of his peers know little about the two-time European Tour winner and current Race To Dubai leader, who holds a two-stroke lead.
Who is Shubhankar Sharma?
For those who will find themselves asking the question on Sunday, take heart that the soft-spoken player from India is obscure even among the game’s play-for-pay set.
“I don't know, other than he's young. He's like 21, right?" laughed 24-year-old Justin Thomas. "Man, kids,”
Even those who may have crossed paths with Sharma on the European Tour, which he qualified for with his victory in December at the Joburg Open, had only a passing knowledge.
Sharma only introduced himself to one player this week: Phil Mickelson. And Lefty tried to shoo the non-scribbler away. Hoggard writes in a GolfChannel.com item devoted to this gem:
Me and my caddie went up to [Mickelson]. He thought we were media and he said, ‘Not right now, after the round,’” Sharma laughed. “Then he just realized and said, ‘So sorry, I thought you were media.’ He said ‘hi.’ I said ‘hi.’ Then he made a few putts and he came back to me and said, ‘Have a good day.’ It was nice.”
Poor Phil, it's been so long since a media member even wanted to chat that he forgot what we look like!
Earlier in the week, AP's Doug Ferguson profiled Sharma and how he found the game through his families ties to Anirban Lahiri.
Sharma and Anirban Lahiri -- the player he replaced as India's No. 1 -- are both Army brats. Retired Col. Mohan Sharma was stationed at the same post as Lahiri's father, a gynecologist, when Sharma's younger sister was born.
Final round tee times and TV Times courtesy of Golfweek.
Round three highlights from PGA Tour Entertainment:
With news that Tiger Woods has added the Valspar Championship at Innisbrook, G.R. Team at GolfChannel.com shares a spectacular photo from Tiger's fall, 1996 appearance there.
You must go to the link to enjoy the outfits in all of their splendor, especially tournament partner Kelli Kuehne's Sunday red shirt and black pants.
It's also a reminder of what we are missing now having a mixed team event annually and/or every four years at the Olympics.
In the years following the car crash, Ben Hogan played a limited schedule, most notably in 1953 when he entered just six official events in his three-major-win season. Tiger Woods has played three tour events this year and with the Arnold Palmer Invitational his likely next and last start before the Masters, many feel he needs to play more.
As the entry deadline looms, Bob Harig at ESPN.com makes the case for Woods to add the Valspar in Tampa next week.
David Duval is also in that camp.
“I think it’s imperative that he should go play Valspar, (with the assumption that he’ll) more than likely play Bay Hill,” Duval said. “But I think he’ll play Valspar. It’s a good place to work on all parts of your game. And you don’t have to drive it a ton there. You’ve got to deal with swirling winds, elevation changes. So I think it would be a very good thing for him to go play Valspar. It looks like it’s about reps and about exposure, putting yourself under the gun and seeing how you perform and how your golf swing holds up. A couple more opportunities to do that would be very beneficial.”
Looking at the stats analyzed by Alex Myers now that Woods is officially eligible for PGA Tour rankings, he's clearly rusty, as evidenced by his par-5 play.
Woods ranks a dismal 208th in par-5 scoring, a stat he used to dominate, with a 4.87 average. World No. 1 Dustin Johnson leads that category at 4.33, meaning that if a course has four par 5s, he's picking up two shots per round on Woods on just those holes. Woods' inability to take advantage of these longer holes has kept him to making only 3.6 birdies per round, which ranks 97th, and he has yet to make an eagle.
USA Today's Steve DiMeglio talks to players and caddies about distance adjustments they're making for this week's WGC Mexico City and they've settled on a solid 15% or more bump in distance.
The story is of particular note given that we are not far from hearing pros howl about the awful adjustment period should the governing bodies ever roll out a distance rollback. But here they are all on the record about Trackman and the relatively easy process of adjusting thanks to launch monitors.
“I think this is going to be the best week for (Trackman’s) branding, for sure, versus any other week,” said Justin Thomas, who won his seventh title in his last 30 PGA Tour starts last week in the Honda Classic. “It's very, very dependent on the shot you're hitting and the club you're hitting, but when you hit those drivers up in the air, they go pretty far.”
And there was this...
Chez Reavie was in full mathematician mode Tuesday on the range in his first trip to the tournament. For 2 hours, 30 minutes, he and his caddie, Justin York, went to work with numbers spinning around in their heads.
“We jumped on the Trackman to get numbers,” Reavie said. “I hit 10 balls with every club to find a median number each ball was carrying. And we found about a 15-18% difference. We have all the clubs plotted now and from there we’ll rely on feel. But at least we have a ballpark figure now.”
That's all you need! Of course, players will tell us that a Masters ball would be impossible because of the long adjustment period.
The WGC Mexico City arrives Thursday and once again interrupts the Florida swing. With 45 of the world's top 50 and a guaranteed $50k payment (plus charter flights), no one should feel sorry for this event.
So should anyone be excited with a no-cut points and cash grab on a tight, tired-looking venue by modern standards but with robust support from its creators? Probably not, even as it's a WGC venturing outside of the U.S.
But a week after a lively Honda Classic that followed a strong West Coast swing, the event sits in a tough spot.
Rex Hoggard at GolfChannel.com makes a strong case that we should root for this event and with a likely spot between LA and Florida next year, theoretically it'll be a better fit. Theoretically...
The dramatic makeover of the Tour schedule beginning with the 2018-19 season will feature the WGC-Mexico Championship moving to the back end of the West Coast swing, but with fields in California and Arizona enjoying a renaissance in recent years, a post-Los Angeles date likely won't be a dramatic improvement over the event’s current date.
As the Tour schedule compacts to prepare for a pre-football season finale in 2019 and beyond, finding prime real-estate will be a challenge, but Mexico should be first in line for an upgrade, particularly with officials like Salinas talking in terms of a 20- or 30-year commitment.
The championship deserves better. Salinas deserves better. And the opportunity to truly grow the game on an international stage certainly deserves better.
I do take this issue seriously, as today's Alternate Shot discussion suggests. There will be moments when losers are wagering and decide to interfere with a golf tournament outcome and if not addressed with ejections, golf tournaments will only get more unruly and even unsafe.
However, in the spirit of trying to help losers who need attention, I'm offering a simple guide to determining if you have the kind of loser tendencies that could lead you to act in unfortunate fashion while watching a golf tournament.
I’ve worked with players, caddies, officials and other observers to develop this list. Certainly I’ve missed other signs, but I think in the spirit of Justin Thomas walking back his frustration with hecklers in the face of new losers threatening to make his life miserable, this guide could be useful.
You may have serious loser tendencies if…
The Honda Classic overnights have been finalized and the ratings were even higher, as The Forecaddie notes, with Golf Channel also scoring huge audience sizes for lead-in audiences compared to non-Tiger tour events. There were also some big wins for the golf against stiff competition.
The early season boost delivered by Woods has prompted AP's Doug Ferguson to suggest, for now anyway, Tiger is actually bigger than ever.
Golf is in a different place than when Woods picked up his 79th victory on the PGA Tour in August 2013, his most recent victory. Thomas had just turned pro. Jordan Spieth had just earned a full PGA Tour card. Jon Rahm was going into his sophomore year at Arizona State. Since then, five players have taken turns at No. 1 in the world.
During his longest stretch out of golf with his bad back, the refrain was that golf needed Tiger Woods. When he was on the verge of returning at the end of 2016, the talk was that golf was in a good spot and Woods could only make it that much better.
For the first few tournaments of his return, it has become Woods and everyone else.
CBS drew a 2.9 overnight rating for the 3:15-6 pm ET block of Sunday’s 2018 Honda Classic, that’s up 38% over Rickie Fowler’s 2017 win on NBC according to SBD. The Tiger effect played an incredible role given the competition in that window that included NASCAR (3.1), Winter Olympics (2.2) and NBA (Spurs-Cavs) on ABC (2.3).
For those wondering about a strong lead-in from Michigan State-Wisconsin running long, the Big-10 matchup drew a 1.4 in its 1-3:15 pm ET window.
Saturday’s Honda Classic third round drew a 1.8 on CBS, with a .8 lead-in audience from Louisville-Virginia Tech.
It amazes me that more and more people attend a golf tournament to get in a few taunts, lame comments or mashed potato screams, but as we've seen the last few weeks the stupidity has taken on an edge that even tolerant players are sick of.
There is a key distinction here: the offending comment came on the way to the tee, not post tee shot as some outlets reported in suggesting Thomas was soft.
Ryan Lavner has Thomas's explanation for GolfChannel.com, and anyone who knows golf will appreciate why he was annoyed. It's a problem that if not stopped, will spiral out of control into golfers becoming subject to regular heckling.
While walking up to the 16th tee, tied for the lead, Thomas heard a fan yell in his direction: “I hope you hit it in the water!”
Thomas looked back at the spectator but didn’t say anything.
After Thomas ripped a long iron into the fairway, the same fan began shouting for the shot to get into the bunker.
“I was like, OK, I’ve had enough,” Thomas said afterward. “I just turned around and asked who it was, and he didn’t want to say anything, now that I had actually acknowledged him. So he got to leave a couple holes early.
The offending moment, but again, without the pre-tee shot comment:
A fan yelled “Get in the bunker!” after Justin Thomas’s shot so Thomas quickly had him kicked out and told him to “Enjoy your day buddy” 👀 pic.twitter.com/0NxACneAzT
— High & Outside Sports (@HighandOutside_) February 26, 2018
Thomas went on to win his 7th title in 31 starts, and as Brian Wacker writes for GolfDigest.com, concerns about a post-Player of the Year slump seem unnecessary.
Full round highlights from the 2018 Honda Classic where Thomas had to apologize after the round for an F-bomb.
SUBSCRIBE to PGA TOUR now: http://pgat.us/vBxcZSh In the final of The Honda Classic 2018, Justin Thomas shoots 68 to get to 8-under and force a playoff with Luke List. Thomas would go on to claim his eighth PGA TOUR victory with a birdie on the first playoff hole.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
