Part III of Brian Sommer’s four-part essay on what the World Cup, Shinnecock Hills, and the Long Island Crowd Exposed
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By Brian Sommer
Golf has mistaken participation for spectacle. Those are not the same thing. In fact, they often move in opposite directions. The modern game behaves as though the highest compliment one can pay golf is to call it “great television.” I increasingly suspect the opposite. Golf is not extraordinary because millions watch it. Golf is extraordinary because one person plays it. That distinction changes everything.
The great mistake of modern golf has been trying to convert an intensely private experience into mass entertainment without acknowledging how much is lost in translation. Consider what actually happens during a golf shot. A player stands over the ball. He feels the wind against his face. He notices the firmness beneath his feet. He studies the slope. He recalls the previous hole. He quiets an unnecessary thought. He commits to a target. His entire body begins organizing around an intention that no television camera can capture. Then the club moves. The ball flies. To the player, the experience is enormous.
To the viewer, it lasts less than two seconds. Everything that made the shot meaningful happened before impact. None of it is visible. This is why golf broadcasting so often becomes an exercise in translation. The commentators are not merely describing events. They are explaining why the events should matter. The audience must be told that this bunker shot is difficult. That this green is terrifying. That this angle is demanding. That this seven-foot putt carries enormous pressure. The broadcasters are usually correct. The difficulty is real. The pressure is real. But the necessity of explanation reveals something important.
Golf’s drama is largely invisible. Contrast that with the World Cup. Nobody needs to explain why a penalty kick matters. Nobody whispers that the crowd should appreciate the significance of a ninety-third minute equalizer. The event announces itself. The urgency is immediately apparent. The stakes are collectively understood. The atmosphere carries much of the narrative before the commentators utter a single word.
Golf asks the broadcaster to create atmosphere. Soccer arrives with atmosphere already built in. That difference is not trivial. It is structural. Golf is one of the few sports whose deepest experiences occur almost entirely inside the participant. The casual viewer is not seeing what the golfer is seeing. Nor could they. Much of golf’s beauty is experiential rather than visual. It must be lived before it can be appreciated. That is not a defect. It is simply the nature of the game.
Ironically, golf itself once understood this. For generations, the game’s highest aspiration was not to create spectators. It was to create golfers. The greatest compliment one could pay a course was not that it looked beautiful on television. It was that it asked beautiful questions. Can you shape this shot? Can you remain patient? Can you recognize what the wind is actually doing rather than what you fear it might do? Can you see what is there instead of what you hope is there?
Course architecture existed to challenge perception. Not produce drone footage. Modern broadcasting has quietly inverted that relationship. Courses are now discussed in terms of visual presentation. How will the holes photograph? How dramatic will the closing stretch appear? Where should grandstands sit? How will the aerial shots look? These are understandable questions. Television requires pictures. But they are not golf questions. They are production questions. The game itself remains stubbornly indifferent. Perhaps this explains why golf periodically becomes insecure. It keeps searching for solutions to a problem that may not actually exist. Speed the game up. Increase the music. Add personalities. Create teams. Invent rivalries. Mic the players. Encourage celebrations. Build content. Expand the audience. Modernize the product.
Notice the assumption beneath every proposal. Golf is treated as though it were an entertainment property in need of optimization. Rarely does anyone ask the opposite question. What if golf’s greatest strength is precisely the thing television cannot fully capture? What if the game’s value has always resided less in being watched than in being experienced? That possibility seems almost heretical to modern sport. We increasingly judge activities by the sizes of their audiences rather than the quality of the experiences they produce.
Participation becomes secondary. Viewership becomes primary. Golf has slowly adopted the same assumption. The consequences are subtle. Courses become stages. Players become content. Championships become products. Fans become consumers. Everything begins orbiting around attention. Yet the shot itself remains unchanged. A player still stands over one golf ball. The wind still blows. The lie still matters. The decision still belongs to one person alone.
Nothing about that moment becomes richer because five million people are watching instead of five thousand. In fact, one might argue the opposite. The essence of golf has always been profoundly indifferent to spectators. The game asks only one question. Not “who is watching?” But “what are you aware of now?” That question cannot be televised. It cannot be marketed. It cannot be expanded into a global entertainment strategy. It can only be answered by the person holding the club. And perhaps that is why golf continues to matter so deeply to those who play it while remaining, quite naturally, a narrower spectacle than those who govern it would like to believe.
The game’s greatness was never created by a galley of spectators. It was created by the player standing inside the shot
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