Olympic Golf After The Winter Olympics

Suffering from Vancouver Olympic withdrawals tonight, I was forced to consider what made the last two weeks so special. And while the many storylines were wonderful and set up quite beautifully by NBC for a mass audience, it's those once-every-four-years thrills provided by various unique competitions that has me more convinced than ever that barring a complete re-imagining of its format, golf in the 2016 Olympic games will be a complete and utter failure.

Oh I know, because of Olympic golf, governments are funding the sport, Jack Nicklaus will litter China with more signature designs and children across the globe will be introduced to the game through robot-breeding ground academies.

Yet when the world tunes in to those 2016 golf telecasts (if they can find them buried in some odd time slot on some remote channel), they'll watch another 72-hole stroke play event consisting of a world golf ranking-padded field (no 100-shooting qualifiers from Kenya), they'll be asking why golf was added to the Olympic games in the first place.

Without a team competition, most nations will not take an interest.

And without a fresh, once-every-four-years format, no one who follows golf nor anyone under the age of 50 will watch.

But hey, Tiger got on board because of the, uh, lure, of the 72-hole individual stroke play format. So glad golf put all of its Olympic eggs in that basket.