Part IV of Brian Sommer’s four-part essay on what the World Cup, Shinnecock Hills, and the Long Island Crowd Exposed
By Brian Sommer
The game of golf has spent the better part of two decades chasing the approval of an audience that was never under any obligation to provide it.
It has searched for relevance in ratings; legitimacy in television contracts; cultural importance in social media engagement; proof of vitality in demographic charts.
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Golf has behaved like an aging aristocrat convinced that popularity and dignity are interchangeable. They are not. Golf’s greatness has never depended upon becoming the center of American sport. Nor should it. Not everything valuable must become mass entertainment. Indeed, some of the more meaningful human activities become less meaningful the moment they are redesigned for spectators.
No one expects meditation to compete with the Super Bowl. No one asks whether mountaineering should attract NBA-sized television audiences. No one concludes that chess has somehow failed because more people watch the World Cup. Only golf seems to believe that a smaller audience constitutes a cultural embarrassment. It should not. There is a peculiar modern assumption that if millions are not watching, something must be wrong.
The assumption is rarely questioned – but it should be. Popularity measures attention. It does not measure depth. Some experiences become richer precisely because they resist becoming spectacles. Golf belongs in that category. The game’s essential drama has always been internal. A golfer does not compete primarily against another golfer. He competes against uncertainty. Against distraction. Against imagination. Against the temptation to substitute memory for observation and prediction for awareness.
That is why the game has survived for centuries. Not because it is endlessly entertaining to watch. But because it remains endlessly revealing to play. This is where golf’s governing institutions – and much of its media – have quietly mistaken the nature of their own product. They have assumed that the purpose of golf is to generate spectators.
Historically, it never was. The purpose of golf was to produce golfers. Everything else followedfrom that. Courses were built not as television sets but as places where human beings encountered uncertainty. Architects did not ask whether the fourth hole would trend on social media. They asked whether it would reward perception over habit. Whether it would tempt arrogance. Whether it would expose impatience. Whether it would ask questions rather than provide answers. That is a profoundly different ambition.
One creates content. The other creates experience. Golf increasingly confuses the two. This confusion extends beyond broadcasting. It has crept into instruction. Into equipment. Into architecture. Into administration. Even into the language of improvement itself. Players are told to optimize. To manage. To control. To systematize. To eliminate variables. To remove uncertainty wherever possible. Yet uncertainty is not an unfortunate defect within golf.
It is the game. The same mistake appears everywhere. Courses become more standardized. Instruction becomes more prescriptive. Equipment becomes more corrective. Broadcasts become more explanatory. Everything moves toward reducing ambiguity. Everything, that is, except the shot itself. Reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate. The wind still changes. The lie still surprises. The bounce still deceives. The body still responds differently from one day to the next. No amount of technology has abolished the simple fact that golf is played in an ever-changing world by imperfect human beings.
That is precisely why it remains fascinating. Not because uncertainty has been eliminated. Because it cannot be. Perhaps this is what golf has been trying so hard to escape. Uncertainty makes poor marketing. It refuses guarantees. It resists formulas. It cannot promise identical outcomes. It does not scale neatly. Participation, however, thrives on uncertainty.
Every memorable round of golf contains moments that no launch monitor predicted. Every unforgettable shot begins with a situation no instructional manual could completely prescribe.
Golf has always been richer than its systems. The tragedy is that the industry often behaves as though the opposite were true. Which brings us back, finally, to Shinnecock Hills.
The championship did not fail. The crowd did not fail. The ratings did not fail. Reality merely interrupted a comforting story. Golf discovered that one of its greatest championships occupies a smaller place in the wider culture than many inside the game had imagined. It discovered that ordinary sports fans behave like ordinary sports fans. And it discovered that participation remains considerably more compelling than observation.
None of these should be alarming. They should be liberating. Golf does not need to become football. It does not need to imitate the World Cup. It does not need louder music, manufactured rivalries, influencer campaigns, or increasingly desperate attempts to persuade the public that every major championship is a civilization-defining event.
The game already possesses something more enduring. It asks a question very few modern activities still ask. Can you meet reality without demanding that reality become something else?
That question confronts every golfer. It cannot be delegated to a coach. It cannot be solved by equipment. It cannot be answered by commentators. It certainly cannot be settled by television ratings. It must be answered one shot at a time.
That is why golf matters. Not because millions gather to watch. But because one person stands over one golf ball, in one field, under one sky, and for a brief moment has nowhere to hide from what is actually there.
The public is under no obligation to find that compelling. Nor should it. The value of golf has never depended upon universal admiration. Its greatness has always been intensely personal.
The World Cup is watched because the world is watching. Golf is watched because golfers are watching. There is no shame in that. The shame lies only in pretending otherwise.
Credit: BOOM Photography