Hostile, yes, but Phoenix masses are still a big plus

Asked to name the sports event with the highest attendance figure over the weekend, most people would probably look towards the super Bowl, one of the six Nations fixtures or the football at Old Trafford.

As it turns out, none came close. Indeed, you would need to add up the totals seen in Manchester, at the rugby in Cardiff and the American football showpiece in Minneapolis to squeeze ahead of the 209,000 people who showed up in scottsdale, Arizona, on saturday for the third round of the Waste Management Phoenix Open.

how do they do it? Normally, golf events do not want to go anywhere near big Us footie matches for fear of being buried and, yet, here is one prospering on super Bowl weekend, as the Phoenix Open broke its own attendance record for any golf tournament, with a weekly figure of 709,000 paying customers.

Now, yes, it’s true, some of the behaviour was decidedly un-golf-like and a lot of the comments downright hostile — particularly on that crowded saturday. Woe betide anyone who missed the green at the infamous par-three 16th, for example, with its stadium setting housing 30,000 people alone. Fans queued at 5am and started drinking not long after, so what did they expect?

Yet golf cannot afford to turn its nose up, as so many do, when the conversation switches to the Phoenix Open masses. rather, the starting point should be how we emulate on a more regular basis all that the tournament gets right rather than be sniffy over what it gets wrong.