Part ! of Brian Sommer’s four-part essay on what the World Cup, Shinnecock Hills, and the Long Island Crowd Exposed
By Brian Sommer
Golf has a self-importance problem. That is not the same as saying golf is unimportant. Nor is it to deny its difficulty. Golf is one of the more demanding games ever devised. Every shot contains wind, lie, slope, firmness, strategy, memory, fear, expectation, ego, and consequence. The player confronts not only the landscape but himself or herself. Few sports expose vanity and uncertainty with such relentless honesty.
But there is a difference between something being profound to the participant and compelling to the public.
Professional golf increasingly forgets that distinction.
World Cup (FIFA)
The 2026 U.S. Open provided nearly every ingredient the game claims are necessary to become great theatre. It was not an anonymous tournament played at a corporate resort with hospitality tents masquerading as history. It was the U.S. Open. It was played at Shinnecock Hills one of the sacred shrines of American golf, a place spoken of with a reverence normally reserved for constitutional conventions, ancient cathedrals, and battlefields.
Everything was in place. The venue possessed mythology. The setup was severe. The purse was enormous.
And then reality arrived.
Placed beside the FIFA World Cup, the U.S. Open looked less like one of the world’s defining sporting events and more like what it has quietly become an exceptionally successful niche property with an inflated opinion of its place in modern culture. That is not an insult. It is a proportion. The ratings themselves were perfectly respectable. The final round averaged approximately 5.5 million viewers. Saturday drew roughly 3.7 million. Friday’s second round averaged around 2.5 million. Those are healthy numbers by golf standards, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
During the very same period, ordinary World Cup match windows attracted were audiences comparable to – or substantially – larger than the final round of one of golf’s four major championships. Through that weekend, Fox Sports averaged roughly 5.9 million viewers per World Cup window, while Spanish-language coverage on Telemundo added millions more. In other words, the climax of America’s national championship in golf was performing roughly like an average afternoon at the World Cup. Not the final. Not a semifinal. Not a once-in-a-generation national occasion. An ordinary match window.
The comparison became even more uncomfortable on Friday. While the U.S. Open’s second round attracted around 2.5 million viewers, the United States’ World Cup match against Australia drew more than 16 million viewers on Fox alone – and more than twenty million once Spanish-language broadcasts were included. Pause for a moment and consider what that means. Golf was not losing to the National Football League. It was not competing against the Super Bowl, March Madness, or the NBA Finals.
It was being overwhelmed by group-stage soccer matches in a country that still insists, with charming confidence, that soccer is not one of its sports. That is not merely competition. It is perspective. And perspective is precisely what golf has spent decades trying to avoid.
For years, professional golf golf has spoken of itself as though it occupies a privileged place within the American sporting imagination. It wraps itself in solemnity. It invokes honor, patience, tradition, character, etiquette, legacy, and greatness with such frequency that one begins to suspect it mistakes repetition for proof.
The public, inconveniently, has never entirely agreed. Ratings do not tell us what is beautiful. They do not tell us what is meaningful. They certainly do not tell us what is worthwhile. But they do reveal something more modest and, perhaps, more valuable. They expose the distance between how an institution sees itself and how the wider culture sees it.
Professional golf likes to imagine itself as one of the great public theatres of human drama. The evidence suggests something rather different. It is an extraordinary participatory activity with a comparatively modest audience. There should be no shame in that. There is, however, considerable embarrassment in pretending otherwise. Part of golf’s confusion lies in mistaking exclusivity for significance.
Because its greatest clubs are difficult to access, it assumes they must therefore be culturally important. Because its etiquette is elaborate, it assumes it possesses superior moral refinement. Because its history is long, it assumes the wider public shares its reverence. None of those conclusions follows. Difficulty does not guarantee drama. Exclusivity does not guarantee importance. History does not guarantee relevance. And a legendary golf course does not automatically produce compelling television.
Shinnecock Hills proved precisely that. If the championship had been staged at some anonymous modern venue, defenders could have blamed the architecture. They could have argued that the course lacked soul, history, or identity. But this was Shinnecock. One of the game’s chosen cathedrals. If even Shinnecock cannot transform golf into a mass spectacle, then perhaps the problem is not architecture. Perhaps the problem is expectation. Because the golfer and the casual viewer are watching entirely different events.
To the golfer, Shinnecock is a living puzzle. Every contour matters. Every angle has consequence. The wind changes strategy. The firmness of the greens punishes imprecision. A miss above the hole can become catastrophe. Every shot is shaped as much by the ground as by the air.
But while the golfer sees architecture, the the casual viewer sees landscaping. The golfer sees uncertainty. The casual viewer sees delay. The golfer understands why a seven-foot putt can feel impossible. The casual viewer sees a man walking around a hole before striking a stationary ball. This is not because the public lacks intelligence. It is because golf requires initiation. Its drama is largely invisible until one has lived it. That is a serious limitation for any activity seeking mass appeal.
The World Cup requires no such apprenticeship. A ball moves toward a goal. A nation rises or falls. The urgency is visible. The emotion is audible. The crowd is not decoration. It is part of the event itself. One need not understand pressing systems, inverted fullbacks, or tactical rotations to recognize that something significant is unfolding.
Professional golf, by contrast, often requires explanation before it becomes interesting. That is not a criticism of golf. It is a description of its nature. And it points toward a larger misunderstanding that extends far beyond television ratings. Golf has spent years trying to become a great spectator sport. The more interesting question is, whether it was ever meant to be one.
Part II Coming June 28: The Spectator Problem Golf Pretends Not to Have