It’s early morning Thursday on the East Coast. Anticipation has been building all week to finally watch real golf shots at the 89th Masters Tournament. We’ve already gorged ourselves with endless hours of Live From on Golf Channel throughout the week. We’ve seen any number of guys getting dialed in at the tournament practice area, and maybe even peeked at the newly available driving range data present on Masters.com. Heck, we probably even begrudgingly watched some of the Par 3 Contest on Wednesday, just to get a mere morsel of competition at Augusta National Golf Club.
But now, on Thursday morning, when real meaningful golf is being played, our options to watch the action are limited. In fact, viewers will have to wait over seven hours after the first tee shot of this year’s Masters Tournament was hit before getting any sort of true soup-to-nuts coverage.
The main broadcast feed during the first and second rounds of the Masters doesn’t begin until 3 p.m. ET on ESPN. Until then, fans are forced to flip around between featured groups or select holes in order to get their fix.
That used to be the norm in early-round golf coverage, but not anymore. These days, golf sickos are able to flip on PGA Tour Live, sometimes before 7 a.m. ET, every single week on Tour, and watch a main feed of the tournament action, no matter how prestigious the event. Want to watch early first round coverage of the Mexico Open? PGA Tour Live has you covered. Up early on Friday and want to watch the Cognizant Classic? Full coverage is available right at your fingertips.
But for golf’s most prestigious tournament of the year, when the most eyeballs are on the sport, fans are left struggling to figure out how to actually follow the action.
Get a load of this. The first grouping teed off at 7:40 a.m. ET on Thursday morning, with subsequent groups teeing off every 11 minutes after. But fans weren’t able to see a single golf shot from any of those groups’ first three holes. Coverage of holes 4, 5, and 6 began at 8:45 a.m. ET on ESPN+ and the Masters App. If fans wanted earlier coverage, they could’ve gotten about 15 minutes of it, with Masters on the Range beginning at 8:30 a.m. ET on the widely-available CBS Sports Network, but don’t expect any live golf shots from that show.
Featured group coverage picked up about an hour later with Collin Morikawa’s group at 9:47 a.m. ET. Of course, that coverage is only good if you want to follow just a select few golfers. If you want to know what’s happening on the rest of the course, good luck.
At 10:45 a.m. ET, Amen Corner coverage opens up. Then at 11:45 a.m. ET, fans can watch holes 15 and 16. God forbid fans are able to watch holes 1-3, 7-10, 14, or 17 and 18.
Why can’t we just have a main broadcast feed. One that hops around the course, regardless of what hole, and follows the most interesting stories, golfers, and golf shots? You know, like golf fans get every single week on the PGA Tour? Why is half the course off limits until 3 p.m. ET? It’s completely ridiculous, and a disservice to the sport’s most loyal viewers.
Golf fans are getting a convoluted and confusing viewing experience where it’s necessary to flip between several different feeds just to get an idea of what’s happening from a big picture perspective. Call me an entitled golf viewer, but that’s no way to live in the year 2025!
But this isn’t just about the golf nut, it’s about the casual fan who tunes into the sport once a year. How do we expect them to know how to navigate such a fragmented broadcast experience? It’s certainly no way to “grow the game.”
Simplify the experience. Offer a main broadcast feed in the mornings. It’s really not that difficult. You can still have the alternate feeds for viewers that want to follow a specific group, or watch Amen Corner coverage for an hour. But there’s no excuse for limiting viewers’ choices in this day and age.
It’s time for Augusta National Golf Club to get with the times.
