As a self-certified golf sicko, I found myself a couple of weeks ago staying up late to watch the final stages last night of the Valspar Championship on the PGA Tour.
In case you haven’t been keeping up with the Tour’s various attempts to stave off the threat of player exodus to LIV, they now have a series of ‘Signature Events’ with huge purses, in which the best 50-60 players are almost guaranteed to be competing, theoretically creating a much more compelling product to watch.
The Valspar is emphatically not one of these elevated tournaments. It had a sprinkling of big names, but is mostly stacked with the so-called ‘mules’ of professional golf; the guys trying to break through, or just do enough to keep their playing rights for the following season.
In football terms, this event would be something like a mid-table Championship game with both teams on the fringes of the play-offs, as opposed to Man City vs. Arsenal.
Anyway, this is Peter Malnati, who won the Valspar tournament, celebrating with one of his young sons.
This was just Malnati’s second win in 259 PGA Tour events (the first was in 2015; golf is hard).
He is the archetypal journeyman pro, and this win clearly meant a lot to him and his family. It secures his playing status for the next couple of years and gets him into all the big events, along with $1.5 million. Properly life-changing stuff.
It got me thinking a bit about storytelling in golf, and what we look for as fans.
There seems to be an assumption among the people who run the sport that everyone only ever wants to see the biggest names slugging it out among themselves, repeatedly.
Of course there is a place for that; we all want to see the best players doing their thing and competing against each other regularly, and in the most important events they tend to rise to the top quite naturally.
But you can have too much of a good thing, and I don’t know if I would just want to be fed a constant diet of Rory, Scheffler, Spieth, JT, Cantlay etc…slugging it out amongst themselves. For the same reason that I wouldn’t want to see a European Super League in football and I have very little interest in LIV. Too much of anything just gets boring, and most sports really undervalue the idea of scarcity (it’s why the Ryder Cup, World Cup and Olympics always feel special).
Personally I love these events where it’s a bunch of mostly pretty ‘ordinary’ players (by Tour standards at least) battling it out amongst themselves for that elusive win, which can be life-changing in so many ways. These stories create genuine emotion and engagement with fans, even if the protagonist is someone even a hard-core golf fan like be has barely heard of. I think that’s part of the beauty of a game where up to 156 guys start the week, each with at least a slight chance of winning.
Dave McLean