Here’s a breaking news bulletin for you: Tiger Woods is good for golf ratings.
That might be an odd thing to say about someone who before the weekend was the 898th ranked golfer in the world. It might also be an odd thing to say about someone who hadn’t played in an official event since August 2015 and missed the cut in the last three majors that he played.
But this is still golf and this is still Tiger Woods. Nobody has ever had a bigger impact on the popularity of their sport than Tiger Woods, especially when it comes to television ratings.
Tiger finally made his long-awaited return to competitive golf at his own tournament, the Hero World Challenge. And while the special postseason event in the Bahamas may not have the place to make the splashiest return, it certainly got more people than usual to tune in.
Geoff Shackelford has the full breakdown of the ratings increase from the tournament and it’s staggering.
Thursday: .86 rating, up 190% versus last year, most watched first round since the British Open in July
Friday: .45 rating, up 200% versus last year
Saturday: 1.59 rating, up 92% versus last year
Sunday: 1.08 rating, up 54% versus last year
And while those Saturday and Sunday numbers on NBC weren’t up as dramatically as the weekday coverage on Golf Channel was, it only tells half the story. With Woods not at the top of the leaderboard throughout the tournament but playing fairly well, Golf Channel’s weekend lead-in coverage also saw ratings skyrocket, up 162% and 126% respectively.
Perhaps the only thing more encouraging for the sport and its TV partners than the ratings was how Woods played, at least through the first three-and-a-half rounds before finishing with a 40 on his final nine holes. This wasn’t the Tiger Woods we saw in 2015 struggling competitively and suffering from the chipping yips. Woods made 24 birdies throughout the tournament to lead the field, showing some signs of the vintage Tiger. He also made plenty of double bogeys in knocking the rust off and that’s why he finished 15th out of 17 golfers.
If Woods can compete with the game’s new top stars in McIlroy, Spieth, and Day at the majors in 2017, those tournaments can pull in huge numbers. As long as Tiger can remain healthy and even come back to at least 50% of his old self, it’ll be the best thing to happen to golf in a long time and the sport will be set up for a huge 2017.
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