Japan Skins: The best and worst of The Challenge from Accordia Narashino

The Challenge: Japan Skins presented by MGM Resorts and GOLFTV went off with a lot of sizzle but not a lot of steak while most of us were sleeping. Here’s the best and worst from Accordia Golf Narashino Country Club.

If you happen to find yourself in most of the western hemisphere of this great planet, then you did one of a few things when you found out that MGM Resorts The Challenge: Japan Skins would be taking place either late Sunday night or very early Monday morning. You might have brewed a pot of coffee and made a valiant attempt at a college all-nighter (bad call). If you’re somewhere a little more morning-friendly, perhaps you played a bit of hooky from your work obligations, or better yet, snuck some viewing fun in on your phone or tablet.

Whichever viewing choice you made, you got to witness what had the potential to be an incredibly entertaining exhibition between four of golf’s top stars, including a mostly healthy Tiger Woods. How it turned out? Well, that’s what I’m here to break down for you.

GOLFTV’s first major foray into live golf broadcasting had plenty of challenges, both on the course and in production. But it certainly wasn’t all bad, especially when you think about what they had to work with. Always one to give credit where it’s due – but also not letting the bad stuff slide – that brings us to the best and worst of The Challenge: Japan Skins.

Before we dive in – if you like this format and want to see it come back throughout the PGA TOUR season, do us a favor and give it a share on social media. It’s obviously a lot easier to do for a one-day event than a four-day tournament, but we’re here for golf fans all year, and we’re always open to trying new things.

Best/Worst: Players mic’d up for action

If you’re a recreational player, you know that one of the things that makes a day on the golf course fun is the ability to endlessly needle your buddies for every minor miscue that comes up. Even if you’re not playing for money, the ability to give and take some trash talk is always a recipe for a good time, and you don’t really need to work hard to find that skill in this week’s lineup.

Tiger Woods is probably one of the best trash-talkers in golf history. Rory McIlroy and Jason Day are a little more subtle and biting when they let it go, and Hideki Matsuyama is apparently more than capable of holding his own, with bonus points for throwing some jabs out there in Japanese when his playing partners can’t understand it. Leave ’em shaking their heads, Hideki.

And while there were some solid one-liners throughout the day, the reality was that so much of what we heard on the Japan Skins was pretty sanitized stuff. I’m not saying I needed these guys to make Golf Channel assign ten production assistants to the dump button, but it was a lot of standard fare, with little gamesmanship. There was much more potential here, but it just didn’t live up to the hype.

Best: Bringing golf to a major, emerging market

Japan doesn’t always get a lot of credit as being a hotbed of golf here in the west, thanks in part to the relative lack of big-time stars they’ve gotten to the PGA TOUR. Hideki Matsuyama is an icon in his home country, but it’s been a while since anybody has reached his level of stardom. Isao Aoki is in the World Golf Hall of Fame – Class of 2004 – but he won just once on the PGA TOUR, and is best remembered for finishing second to Jack Nicklaus at the 1980 U.S. Open.

Shigeki Maruyama won three times on the PGA TOUR between 2001 and 2003, and he went 5-0-0 for the International team in the 1998 Presidents Cup, but he lost full-time member status in 2008, returning to Japan and not returning to his previous heights since. A decade ago, Ryo Ishikawa was a teenage phenom, and while he earned his PGA TOUR membership between 2013 and 2016, he last played on TOUR in the 2017 Wyndham Championship, finishing that season 175th in the FedEx Cup.

Still, Japan is clearly a country that loves golf, and perhaps even more importantly, they love the stars of the game. It doesn’t hurt whenever you can attach the Tiger Woods brand to an event of any kind, but I would say that the overall turnout for this event, including the days leading up to it, have been better than expected. We’ll certainly see that carry over into the ZOZO Championship on Thursday, with the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo just around the corner.

Worst: Production values

I don’t want to sound too harsh here, but I expected a whole lot more from the actual broadcast production of the Japan Skins, especially considering how many resources GOLFTV poured into it.

First, I understand that GOLFTV works outside the U.S., so I’m a little biased here, but in what world did putting on the super-hyped Japan Skins at midnight Eastern seem like a good idea? There’s nothing inherently wrong with starting a round of golf at 1 P.M. local time in Japan, except for the fact that they still needed golf carts and spotlights to finish the final two holes. Tiger said it on the first hole while he was walking with Jason Day – it gets dark fast there, and the sun didn’t just dip, it crashed.

So why not start the round at 8 or 9 A.M. local? You’re going to lose a big chunk of your European audience that has to work Monday morning either way, considering it was 5 o’clock GMT when action began. But you gain basically the entire U.S. market. Perhaps Golf Channel, owned by NBC Universal, didn’t want anything competing with the Sunday Night Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles (the football ended almost perfectly 15 minutes before the Skins began), but again, that could have been planned well in advance.

On the course, the camera work was shaky and the audio wasn’t always crisp. I’ll chalk that up to a crew that was likely working together for the first time, but it simply wasn’t the polished presentation we’ve become accustomed to week in and week out on the PGA and European Tours. On the seventh hole, Henni Zuel was doing her best to explain the two-man scramble rules, but the mic’d up players were talking to their rugby-star partners, and the audio was a mess. Not the fault of the folks on the course, but surely they should have had time for the meet and greet before the round, not in the middle of the dang thing.

Best: Charity Challenges

I’ll admit it – I was a sucker for some of the charity challenges they rolled out at the Japan Skins. While “The Match” between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson last year wound up feeling cheesy and contrived for what was supposed to be a heads-up golf duel between two of the greats of the last 25 years, these twists fit in pretty seamlessly to the Skins game, which lends itself perfectly to arbitrary side action.

The first challenge of the Japan Skins, on the fourth hole, saw players given the ability to choose which of the two greens they would play to, at any point during the hole. While the par-4 hole lent itself to players choosing which flag they would target on approach, I tweeted that it would be funny if a player either split the greens, or decided to just play over one to the other on their third shot. Sure enough, Tiger split them down the middle. Day asked him which one he was aiming at, and Woods fired back that Day should “play his own game”. Mild, but one of the funnier moments of the day/night.

Going back to the poorly-organized scramble on the seventh hole, while most Americans surely had no idea who any of these rugby players were, it was nice to see that some of them actually have some pretty solid action on their swings. They were obviously nervous to step in front of the cameras, with none of their tee shots besting their pro partners. But when Rory’s partner, Ireland’s Brian O’Driscoll, nailed a birdie putt to tie the hole, that moment alone made the oddball challenge a worthwhile addition.

I’ll be honest, I couldn’t stay awake until the one-club challenge watching live (see the previous entry on this list), but watching it back, it was yet another great decision in a tough-to-produce event. Rory talked about going with 5-wood, planning on making the green in two “if I’m really confident”, then using the fairway wood to putt out. When the rest of the group voiced their support for the decision, though, he was quickly talked out of it. Should have tried some reverse psychology.

Jason Day hit the shot of the day out of a greenside bunker with a wide open long-iron. By this point, he was clearly playing some of the best golf in the field, and doing it literally wearing Tiger’s own sweater vest. Early on in the chilly afternoon, TW pulled out the long sleeves after discussing wardrobe choices with the Aussie star. I have to say, he wore it quite well, even if the navy-coral combination might not have been the best overall pairing.

Worst, with future potential: The actual golf

I hate to end on a negative note, but I’d be lying if I said that the golf that I watched at the Japan Skins was anything nearing “good”, especially considering the caliber of talent that was on display here. You’ve got a GOAT candidate, his four-time major champion heir apparent, another former World No. 1, and the home nation’s biggest star who still clearly has major-winning potential. It’s hard to go wrong, right?

Well, not in this case. Maybe it was a long break from competition for some of these guys, especially Tiger. Maybe it was playing on Monday with the “real” tournament coming up on Thursday. Heck, the money that was up for grabs was literally less than a third of what a single PGA TOUR winner’s purse is these days. These guys barely get out of bed for $10,000, much less worrying about bringing their A-game. It sounds awful to say it, but it’s true.

Two holes were won with pars on the day. Shots were pulled, pushed, sliced and hooked even on short par-3’s. Heck, Tiger won a par-3 with par because McIlroy, Day and Matsuyama all put their tee shots in the drink. The first 9 or 10 holes were mostly won by attrition, and it wasn’t until after the turn when most of the players seemed truly warmed up. If you made it that long watching live, I commend you, but it wasn’t like things improved greatly even then.

Between scheduling and the lack of anything resembling “real money” at stake here, it would have taken a Herculean effort on the part of the four players to truly make this an interesting match. Earlier in the day and with an extra zero added to the purse, maybe we’re on to something. But hey, there’s always next time, and hopefully the good folks at GOLFTV will make some changes ahead of Japan Skins 2, or whatever special may come next.