No crowds allowed viewers to hear players at Match II
It was entertaining to listen in on golfers’ one-upping asides, Sally Jenkins writes.
For all that the Match II was a lame artificial setup, a madefor-tv event between four branding titans with personal logos stamped all over their golf carts, it had a strangely revealing charm.
The audience learned things it didn’t know about Tiger Woods-peyton Manning and Phil Mickelson-tom Brady, starting with the fact that Brady can find as many trees on a golf course as you or me, and rip his breeches just as badly doing it.
The Match series originated as an experiment in new platforming and revenue for Mickelson-woods and TNT, but the fact that Sunday’s foursome contest was for coronavirus charity gave it a playful tolerance, and that mattered.
So did the presence of the always-amusing Charles Barkley, and PGA champion Justin Thomas, who has a future with a microphone whenever he tires of winning majors.
Celebrity golf with its forced banter can be painfully strained viewing, but there was something so laughably genuine about Brady’s plunge headfirst from his pedestal as a six-time Super Bowl champion — and about the exuberant crowing and teasing that came with it — that it was irresistible.
Turns out Tom Brady doesn’t trust himself to hit a driver any more than you do. How much pleasure did it give you to learn that? He’s no better under a press bet, either. Rain-soaked, water dripping off his cap, out of his element on the Medallist course and under increasingly intense mocking from Barkley and Brooks Koepka, who upped the stakes with a financial pledge of US$100,000, he couldn’t find fairway.
Instead, it was nothing but hardpan and sand hills.
“I’m about 70 yards away from him, and I thought I might be in danger,” Thomas said on No. 3.
“That’ll be in the fairway — on seven,” Woods said.
The rains shorted out the microphones at times, which made for some dead silences, especially given that there were no crowds. And let’s face it: Cartcam is not exactly as thrilling as a Daytona in-car camera. And I’m sorry, men look like little boys in shorts — no matter who they are — or how much Mickelson “activates” the shapely calves he so enjoys flexing.
Still, it was tremendously entertaining to listen to the one-upping asides, and to watch the interplay between four men who have been famously buttoned-up competitors and who normally save their exhibitionism for marketing campaigns.
Manning turns out to be every bit as droll in person as he is in his commercials or his bits for ESPN, with an easy reflexive wit that is so opposite to the control-freakism with which he played football. “Pretty good putt, considering the crowd noise I was having to deal with,” Manning said at one point, legitimately cracking up his companions.
The amiable chemistry between Brady and Manning was an interesting sideshow. “Doing pretty good in the rain; I’m impressed,” Brady said of Manning. “He’s more of a dome quarterback.”
So too was watching how their athleticism and personalities transferred from football to golf. Manning, the retiree, was of course the better, looser player; Brady is still too actively obsessed with football to spend much time on the links. You couldn’t help noticing how meticulously uptight Brady was and how he watched his language around the mikes and cameras, too, even in the midst of the front-nine disaster. “Oh darn,” he kept saying or, “Oh my goodness.” But then came that triumphant moment when he holed out a 100-yarder from the fairway on No. 7, when his self-restraint collapsed.
“Take a suck on that, Chuck,” he said.
As for the real golfers, it was hard to tell much about the actual state of their games, between the rain and playing to the cameras.
You did learn that Woods’ tricky back was solid enough to hit every fairway, and to beat Mickelson one-up on a very challenging layout. But because the Medallist is also Woods’ home course, it’s probably best not to make too much of that. More interestingly, you learned that even in a goofy-golf situation, and unshaven, Woods remains a fairly laconic and methodical personality.
Mickelson, on the other hand, showed the audience a couple of truly revelatory qualities. It was no surprise that he was as much of a go-for-broker in a charity exhibition as he is in a major. But you hadn’t ever seen quite this much effusiveness from him, with his pure love of a “tasty” contest on every hole. His ability to explain and instruct the game — and his clear enthusiasm for doing so — led to the highlight of the entire event.
From off the green on the second hole, Mickelson illustrated in detail how he planned to hit a 60-degree wedge into an upslope, and exactly where he wanted to land it by reading the colours of the grass. The grain and the slope would normally kill the shot, he explained, but because conditions were so wet the ball would “skim” in the water and release to the hole.
Then he perfectly executed the skidding shot he had just described, including “the delayed sauce,” as he called it. It was fascinating for anyone who cares about shotmaking.
Barkley teased him as a chatty know-it-all for the performance — “Everyone’s got an annoying friend,” he said — but it was something you’d like to have heard a lot more of. Mickelson, too, has a future as a commentator whenever he wants it.
All in all, the event left you primed for the return of real PGA Tour golf on June 11, which based on this seems feasibly safe.
It also left you hopeful that golf during a pandemic might be a more intimate affair, with no galleries roped off and shouting crowds drowning out the crosstalk.
It was nice, wasn’t it, to feel a little closer to competitors, and to get a glimpse of their real and more appealing selves?
The Washington Post