U.S. Open, Masters Ratings Show Golf’s Post-Tiger Resilience
For the better part of a quarter-century, the size of the audience for the final round of a televised golf tournament has been directly proportional to the certainty that Tiger Woods would be stalking the grounds in his Sunday best. But as the 15-time major winner struggles to rebound from the 2021 car accident that nearly killed him, millions of fans seem eager to turn their attention to a new generation of stars.
NBC’s coverage of the concluding round of the 123rd U.S. Open averaged 6.22 million viewers, a turnout which includes an average-minute audience of 304,000 Peacock streamers, good for a 15% improvement versus last year’s deliveries. (Matt Fitzpatrick’s 2022 win in Brookline, Mass., averaged 5.27 million TV viewers and another 148,000 streamers.) In fending off a determined Rory McIlroy, relative newcomer Wyndham Clark helped serve up the Open’s most-watched round since the fourth frame of the 2019 tourney at Pebble Beach (7.31 million viewers).
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The 15% hike is particularly noteworthy in light of the fact that overall U.S. TV usage is down 11% compared to the year-ago period. Bear in mind that Sunday’s average encompasses NBC’s full nine-hour broadcast window. When pared back to the two hours of East Coast primetime coverage, Clark’s victory averaged 8.8 million viewers, peaking with 10.2 million in the deciding 9:30-9:45 p.m. EDT quarter-hour.
Clark, who arrived at the Los Angeles Country Club last week with a single PGA Tour victory under his belt, managed to stay one step ahead of McIlroy, who but for a bogey on 14 played flawless golf. After bogeying 15 and 16, Clark pulled himself together for the final two holes, parring out with a 70 that edged McIlroy by a single stroke.
When Clark sank the final one-footer to close out his big day, a surge of fans that had been poised at the edges of the fairway began pouring in from under the ropes, forming a wall of pastel polo shirts and lanyards. While many of these interlopers undoubtedly had been cheering for the wildly popular McIlroy to claim his fifth major—the last having arrived nine years ago at the PGA Championship—they celebrated Clark’s win as if recognizing that a new hero had emerged in their midst.
Sunday’s round came on the heels of a lackluster TV showing for the PGA Championship, which in turn followed a multi-year high at the Masters. According to Nielsen, while the final round of the May tourney eked out just 4.51 million viewers, making it the least-watched capper since 2008, CBS’s Masters coverage closed out with a sturdy 12.1 million viewers. Jon Rahm’s win at Augusta now stands as the top-rated golf broadcast in four years, while besting deliveries for the year-ago closer by 19%.
The final round of Woods’ improbable triumph at the 2019 Masters earned just shy of 15.4 million viewers, when CBS’s live coverage was combined with the impressions generated by a subsequent replay. (In a bid to avoid a patch of heavy weather, Augusta officials pushed the tee time for tourney leaders Woods, Francesco Molinari and Tony Finau to 9:20 a.m. EDT, a good six hours earlier than usual.)
In his prime, Woods was one of the sports world’s greatest draws, and whenever the conclusion of a major coincided with him prowling the fairways in his familiar scarlet-and-black get-up, the Nielsen dials went predictably bonkers. When he won his first major at Augusta way back in 1997, a record 20.3 million viewers tuned in to see history in the making. In 2001, on the same course, Woods served up another 19.2 million fanatics.
If golf is still coming to terms with the notion that the Tiger Woods era is now receding in the rearview mirror, the return to pre-pandemic viewership levels suggests that there’s still plenty to root for on the tour. People who were already Rory enthusiasts before the whole PGA-LIV farce are hanging on his every move, as the self-described “sacrificial lamb” looks to show the guardians of the Saudi Public Investment Fund who’s boss.
Along with a horde of his peers—guys like Clark and Jordan Spieth and Scottie Scheffler and even Brooks Koepka, who since defecting to LIV has been all but twirling an invisible mustache like he’s Billy Zane in Titanic—McIlroy is one of golf’s most compelling figures. Ratings will follow him any Sunday he’s hitting greens with metronomic regularity.
The days when golf could draw upward of 20 million viewers are probably long gone, but the new ratings reality is still pretty sweet. Sunday’s results and the numbers from Augusta suggest that there’s a lot of life left in the centuries-old game.
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