By Katie Kieffer
Image credit: The Green Blazer blog
Want to embarrass yourself on the golf course? Whiff, whiff and whiff away. Fail to make contact with the ball and you’ll tee yourself up for a tense round of ridicule from your golfing partners.
Golf may have just whiffed itself into a potentially embarrassing situation during the 2016 Olympics – by participating in the Olympics. Rio de Janeiro is not a great golf town (Chicago is, no thanks to the First Couple), and Rio de Janeiro is where golf will debut as an Olympic sport. Here’s the story of golf’s unhealthy relationship with the Olympics:
Thanks to pressure from Tiger Woods, on Oct. 9, 2009, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted to include golf and rugby in the 2016 Olympic Games.
Sound exciting? It’s only exciting if you like to keep your game in the sand bunkers and water hazards.
There are more than a few things to question about golf’s push for inclusion in the Olympic Games. They all stem from the fact that the success of golf as an Olympic sport depended on the integrity of one man who fell hard, Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods pushed the IOC to include golf in the Games, arguing that the Olympics is “the grandest of stages,” and golf is a “global” and “honorable game.”
Throughout the history of the Games, the IOC has never had a vested interest in golf. Logically so: “sports in which the gold medal is not the ultimate prize are never quite as riveting as the other competitions. And there isn’t a tennis player alive who wouldn’t rather win the Wimbledon silver cup and plate, or a golfer the Masters green jacket,” Mark Starr with GlobalPost points out.
Meanwhile, the selection process for the new game of Olympic golf is sketchy at best, but Tiger-approved.
Gold medals image: Getty Images.
So what explains the IOC’s sudden interest and acceptance of golf? The IOC was betting on Tiger’s celebrity status to extraordinarily boost Olympic sponsors and TV rights-holders during a time when sports sponsors are increasingly hard to attain.
Woods’ motivation appeared to be a new platform to garner sponsorships and international acclaim. Tiger would turn 40 in 2016, and a gold medal in the Olympics would be a perfect crown to retire his laurels on. Pre-affair leak, Tiger committed to playing in the Olympics if he doesn’t retire first.
While fans might still enjoy watching Tiger take on the Olympic gold at age forty, Tiger does not draw a crowd like he used to. Including golf in the Olympics appears to be a short-sighted vision of the sport of golf and golf fans.
Baseball’s lack of celebrity player participation motivated the IOC to drop baseball from the Olympics after the 2008 Beijing Games and now the MLB plays continuously through the Olympic Games. Currently, hockey is in a similar situation. Frustrated with the suspension of regular season play for the Vancouver Olympic Games, NHL Commissioner, Gary Bettman, has indicated this may not continue going forward. So who’s Tiger to say that golf won’t suffer the same predicament now that his dirty laundry is out to dry?
Who could benefit from golf’s inclusion in the Olympics? Certainly not fans, sponsors or players. They have already tuned out from watching golf and in six years they will be far less likely to tune in. In the wake of Tiger’s admitted affairs, the PGA Tour has seen a noticeable dip in America’s interest in playing and sponsoring golf as well as a continued dip in viewership. The IOC stands to benefit the most.
Tiger had an impeccable image of a devoted husband, father, philanthropist and athlete. He was the badge of honor in golf. As former vice president of programing for CBS Sports, Jay Rosenstein put it, “Tiger Woods is golf. The concern is that for a sport whose identity is so closely tied to the idea of honor, what he’s gone through has to be incredibly damaging.”
The IOC essentially based the sport of golf’s inclusion on the honor, integrity and talent of one athlete, Tiger Woods. This is called throwing all your eggs in one basket. It’s a foolish risk to take, especially if you don’t have insurance on the basket if it breaks. The Olympics will lose their appeal if the IOC continues to make political moves to garner sponsorships and base the inclusion of an entire sport on one celebrity athlete within that sport.
