Tiger Woods and Japan Skins Game Could Be Golf’s All-Star Game

Last November, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson played in a heads-up skins game.

Remember that? Yeah, what a train-wreck. It didn’t start off as a train-wreck. When the match was announced it was seen as an innovative re-kindling of one of golf’s most famous past-times. From the 1960s through the early 2000s, matches like that between Tiger Woods and Mickelson were commonplace as part of the challenge series Sell’s Wonderful World of Golf and its successor, Monday Night Golf.

Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf played more than 130 matches in over 40 countries drawing players like Nicklaus, Palmer, Player, Snead, Hogan, Ballesteros, and Watson. Released as a one-hour special on Sunday afternoons, the series was equal parts final round of a major championship and Parts Unknown.

The series offered unprecedented access inside the ropes conducting on-course interviews with the players as they strolled up and down the fairways. As well, Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf highlighted the beauty of its host countries. Places like Aruba, Malaysia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Argentina and many more offered a transcendental backdrop to the very best players on the planet.

In theory, the series should have lasted forever (probably ditching Shell at some point because big oil is bad). It combined everything that makes golf the third-best sport on the planet (1. Basketball 2. Baseball 4. College Football 58. Lacrosse 59. NFL), and best of all, it was only an hour! Even in the 1960s TV executives knew that their audience wouldn’t accept watching three-plus hours of golfers walking without clubs in their hand.

More from Pro Golf Now

• Golf Rumors: LIV set to sign Masters Champion in stunning deal
• Fantasy Golf: Grant Thornton Invitational DFS Player Selections
• Brutal return leaves Will Zalatoris looking towards 2024
• Stars You Know at World Champions Cup Starts Thursday at Concession
• Fantasy Golf: An Early Look at the 2024 Masters Tournament

But, like a fish in the Gulf of Mexico, Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf  was cancelled in 2003. The main reason for its death was that ABC entered the challenge match game and signed an exclusive deal with Tiger Woods to star in it in 1999. Unlike SSWOG, Monday Night Golf was broadcast in its entirety – a full four hour program.

Peaking in 2000 with the match between Woods and Sergio Garcia, the ratings tanked every year thereafter until the series was halted in 2005. Monday Night Golf returned for one last hoorah in 2012 when Woods was defeated by Rory McIlroy. Shortly after, the Tiger Woods injury saga began which ended MNG  for good.

After six years, and notably during Woods’ first full season returned, Bleacher Report announced Tiger vs. Phil. The sponsors of this event couldn’t have hoped for a better run-up. Just two months prior to the match, Woods had won his first tournament in nearly five years at the Tour Championship.

At that point, the $19.99 pay-per-view charge didn’t seem high enough to watch Tiger Woods play golf again. Also at that point, the match should have been canceled.

Excitement soured over the next two months. Why would anyone pay $20 to watch a four-hour broadcast of two players who are being grossly over-compensated for an inconsequential round of golf? That’s right, because one of them is Tiger Woods.

Luckily, on the day of the match, the pay-per-view system was either botched by an incompetent IT intern or deliberately sabotaged by a true American hero. The match was free to stream, but nobody who watched it will ever get that time back.

Mickelson and Woods played as if they had already split the money. Just because they bet hundreds of thousands of dollars to make an eagle doesn’t mean either of them did (or a birdie for that matter). Just because they bet the same amount on closest-to-the-pin challenges doesn’t mean either of them were actually close (Woods was 41ft., Mickelson was 40ft. Riveting).

As if fans hadn’t seen enough, the match went to extra holes. Mickelson finally won the match on the 22nd hole, mercifully crashing the train into a small village. But at least it stopped.

Everything about the match was wrong. It was played in Las Vegas, but not at one of the cool-looking desert courses. If the location of the match wasn’t stapled to every advertisement Bleacher Report produced, one might have thought it was being played in Virginia at the Generic Golf Club.

The purse was too high to make the match fun (imagine trying to chat as your standing over a five-footer that’s worth $9 million), but not high enough to have incentivized Woods to touch a golf club during the previous two months. Without any kind of gimmick to keep the audience on its toes, the match was boring, and it was boring for a long time.

There is a tried and true formula to make a challenge match series stick: Pick an exotic course and either condense the broadcast, or make the golf entertaining enough to justify stealing four hours of our lives. Tiger vs. Phil did none of the above.

GOLFTV’s Japan Skins Game

Coming later this month, however, GOLFTV will try its hand at a challenge series when Woods, McIlroy, Jason Day, and Hideki Matsuyama compete in a skins game in Japan. That the match is in Japan and will be played for only $300,000 (only…), is an encouraging indication that the game will be different from Tiger vs. Phil. More encouraging is the, albeit limited, details that have been released about the game.

Alex Kaplan is the president of Discovery’s golf division, which owns GOLFTV, and is on the record stating that the game is an opportunity to think outside the box while putting players in situations they are not accustomed to. Specific details about the game have been limited, but Kaplan’s rhetoric is reminiscent of an event that already occurs in all other major professional sports: an All-Star Game.

All-Star Games and, specifically, All-Star Weekends, are the only time when sports aren’t actually sports. Baseball isn’t actually baseball during the home-run derby, just as a dunk contest isn’t actually basketball. Lest we forget the drone-drop at the Pro-bowl isn’t exactly football.

But golf has the unique opportunity to incorporate these kinds of gimmicks of an All-Star Weekend into the game itself. The participants of the Japan Skins already make it an all-star game, but that still isn’t exciting enough, especially if the broadcast is the full four-hours. GOLFTV truly needs to think outside the box which means obliterating the rules of golf. Rory McIlroy has proven that he can drive it 330 yards – we see him do it every week. But can he putt blindfolded?

We know Tiger Woods can shoot 65, but can he do it while playing the seventh hole with just a five-iron? What’s great about All-Star weekends is that fans get to see their favorite players do things they don’t normally get to do in regular games. Pete Alonso isn’t getting 70mph fastballs down the middle during the regular season. Just like Zach Lavine isn’t able to toss it off the side of the backboard for a between-the-legs dunk. But that is what makes people watch.

Make the contestants in Japan have to double-hit one shot. It’s not even illegal. Have a wheel of fortune at every tee doling out insane tasks for the players to complete on that hole. Make them hit left-handed and finish a hole in three minutes or less. Invite the top-10 players in the world and take them to the quirkiest courses in the world. Just make it fun and aesthetically pleasing in high-definition.

Golf already has enough golf. Some might say there’s too much golf (I mean, these September/October events are just golf’s version of a welfare program right? Who even plays in them?) For one week a year, let the players have a little fun on the golf course, especially Brooks Koepka – he’s always mad about something. Bring Shaq, Kenny, and Charles and let them ride around in a golf cart interviewing players. Have Brandel Chamblee hit a shot for Woods.

Just think about this: GOLTV’s parent company, Discovery, is the same network that has brought the world Naked and Afraid, and the even bolder, Naked and Afraid XL. Discovery is obviously willing to push the boundaries of entertainment.

Imagine that production meeting: Here’s an idea, and I’m just spit-balling, what if we put people in the wild, wait for it…and they were naked? …Get the camera, ditch the clothes, we’re going to the South Pacific! It doesn’t seem like a stretch to then have Matsuyama play a hole wearing 11 jackets.

Having signed a 12-year $2 billion deal with the PGA Tour, GOLFTV has the flexibility to pioneer a truly sport-changing event. It’s great the Woods has also signed a deal with GOLFTV to produce training videos and other golf content, but I think the world is good on golf tips (I get it, there’s a million different ways to hit a chip shot. I don’t need to hear or watch all of them).

If the world wants to watch these players play real golf, it can do so just a few days later at the Zozo Championship, and literally every week of the year. So don’t have them play actual golf. Have them play something that loosely resembles golf. It’s not like their swings will be ruined.

One more thing: Don’t charge us $19.99 to watch this Japan skins game. The price of all these streaming services is out of hand and it’s totally less efficient than cable. In fact, it’s actually embarrassing consciously choosing to watch some of the low-quality content these services create.