Tiger and Charlie Woods at the PNC Championship.
Getty Images
Welcome back to the Monday Finish, where after a lengthy offseason (Four months long! Unless you include the FedEx Fall, the Presidents Cup, the Hero, the Grant Thornton, the PNC Championship, the Showdown…) we’re finally back, gang. PGA Tour season has arrived. To the news!
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GOLF STUFF I LIKE
Golf’s image makeover.
As we’ve arrived at the end of 2024 I’ve read plenty about how, big-picture, this was a bad year for professional golf. While I don’t think that’s true on a micro level — there was so much good stuff, like Scottie Scheffler‘s entire season, Xander Schauffele‘s major breakthrough, Lydia Ko‘s fairy tale, Nelly Korda‘s dominance, Bryson DeChambeau‘s star rise — I understand the point. Ratings are stagnant at best, golf fans are somewhere between “annoyed by” and “apathetic to” the ongoing division between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour, and the divide continues to distract and detract from the on-course action with no clear end in sight. Not good.
But let’s set that aside for a moment and consider a completely different narrative, one largely removed from the professional golf sliver of the game. Golf, on the whole, has completely remade its image. People like golf now. Before, they didn’t. Seriously.
New research from the National Golf Foundation (NGF) sheds light on this phenomenon thanks to a “Perceptions of Golf” study (here) it has conducted several times over the past decade. The findings? A clear decline in Americans describing golf negatively. In 2013 a whopping 57 percent of respondents described golf negatively. The NGF’s research found common descriptors like boring, stale, pretentious, intimidating. Anybody who has spent time around golf is familiar with this country-club stigma and the sense that the game is too exclusive and unwelcoming and, even if you do decide to play, too slow.
But the NGF’s data shows that that perception was already changing before the Covid golf boom. In 2019 47 percent used negative descriptors. By 2022? Just 37 percent. And in 2024 that number dipped to 31 percent. That’s a massive swing, cutting the negativity in half. That’s huge for golf. It’s huge for people who love golf. And it’s a sign that something has worked — even if it’s not clear exactly what that something is. It can sound a bit like a USGA focus-group fever dream but the NGF highlights words like fun, exciting, engaging and cool.
NGF
Over that same time period, there has been a “massive” increase in golf participation, which means 15 percent of Americans now play on- or off-course golf (think TopGolf, etc. for “off-course”), up from 10 percent. But that’s still a tiny sliver of the population, which means that non-golfers must be feeling much better about the game, too. Specifically, that 26 percent shift in negativity translates to 70-80 million people feeling better about golf. It may not solve the PGA Tour-LIV divide. But as someone who likes golf and wants other people to feel the same way? More people like golf now. That’s golf stuff I like.
4. Scottie Scheffler finished T5. It was his first top-five finish of the season; he’d wind up with 15 of ’em in 21 events, including nine wins. Yowza.
5. Chris Kirk won. It was his only top-five finish of the season, though he threw down two other top-10s and made it all the way to the Tour Championship. Big week ahead — somebody’s gonna make it count.
ONE SWING THOUGHT
From Xander Schauffele.
Don’t let a pre-round shank get you down.
So says Xander Schauffele, this week’s pre-tournament favorite, the World No. 2 and my latest guest on Warming Up, a delightful driving-range interview show that I encourage you to watch here or below.
“I used to shank it a lot. Warming up in college, for some reason,” Schauffele said. “Not a lot, but like, there were probably four tournaments in a row where I hoseled it, and it kind of helped me understand how insignificant a warm-up is. It was a big learning lesson for me then.”
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ONE BIG QUESTION
Where will Hovland land next?
If the answer was “on his feet,” well, that just got a little bit tougher. But the plot thickens for our Scandinavian hero, who was arguably the hottest golfer in the world at the end of 2023 but recorded just two top 10s in 2024 as he shuffled swings and swing coaches. To some extent this was always the plan; we talked in 2023 about his responsibility to be the CEO of Viktor Hovland the company and his desire to use coaches as resources; he’s never wanted to be overly dependent.
Hovland told Norsk Golf that he and Joe Mayo split about a month ago; I don’t trust my Norwegian enough to provide an exact translation but it’s clear they didn’t agree on the way forward for Hovland. Here we’ll lean on Google Translate:
“I feel like I’ve learned so much now and have so much expertise, that I don’t need anyone holding my hand anymore. It’s always good to have someone who can watch what I’m doing, check out the steps I’m taking. So I send some videos to another coach, but he’s more of a consultant.”
One lesson Hovland took from last season: he can compete even when he doesn’t have his best stuff. Last year he finished T3 at the PGA Championship, after all, in the midst of a semi-slump. That bodes well for his 2025, even if he’s getting off on the wrong foot. So even though he’s feeling sluggish from a Norwegian winter break, rusty off a four-month competitive hiatus and now a broken toe on the toughest walk of the PGA Tour season?
“But golf is a strange sport,” Hovland told Norsk. “I could suddenly find something that works.”
ONE THING TO WATCH
Happy Gilmore 2.
Adam Sandler‘s back. Christopher McDonald‘s back. Julie Bowen‘s back. And now we have a cast that includes Bryson DeChambeau, Scottie Scheffler and… Travis Kelce? Here comes Happy Gilmore 2. In an era of hit-or-miss sequels, here’s hoping we’re glad to reboot this one.
