For some of us, this is the saddest time of the year—the looming end of the golf season. Within a few weeks, the northern tier of the nation will be ungolfable by any reasonably constituted human being, and the equally harsh reality is that the PGA Tour calendar already has ended and will not resume for another four months.
There’s one big reason the Tour now shuts down in August, and it’s the same 800-pound gorilla that overpowers all sports in America: football. Professional golf, a niche sport now bereft of Tiger Woods and hobbled by its mismanagement of the LIV mess, has all it can handle at the moment simply to regain the TV audience it had a decade ago, let alone try to compete on a fall weekend with the juggernaut that has replaced baseball as America’s pastime. Last year, 93 of the 100 highest-rated programs on U.S. television were football games, led by the Super Bowl with a viewership of 123.4 million. That’s 113.8 million more people than tuned in for golf’s biggest draw, the final round of the Masters. Heck, this year’s mid-week telecast of the NFL draft attracted more viewers than every event on the PGA Tour. By far.
But let us not whine or mope. Let us instead embrace the fact that golf actually has some football-like appeal. This fall, as you settle in front of the tube for that classic NCAA matchup or NFL clash of the titans, consider the similarities between what you’re watching and the game you love to play.
Both games begin the same way, by placing a ball on a tee. In each sport, the idea is to advance that ball as efficiently as possible toward a target, whether through the air or along the ground, using a combination of power and grace. And just as most golf is played on holes with a par of four, most football is played in segments of four downs. Progress in both games is measured in yards—field position—and careful management, both of the ball itself and the strategy of attack, is paramount.
To that latter point, consider that some of the most dramatic moments, whether you’re watching football or playing golf, arise when everything is down to the last few yards, when the game’s score or your own score hinges on an ability to cover that final short stretch. In football, it’s called the “red zone.”
In the same way, every golf hole has a red zone, and the best holes conjure a true goal-line stand where the resistance is so stern and intimidating that only something special will overcome it. The equivalent of a simple fullback plunge up the middle won’t work, you’ll have to summon a more creative strategy and then execute it deftly. When you do that—and it brings you the score you were after—the feeling of satisfaction is sublime.
But here’s where football and golf part company. On the gridiron, the defense is composed of 11 large and powerfully built men, and the closer their backs get to their own goal line the more tightly they gather in proximity to the soon-to-be hiked ball, forming a thick wall that argues persuasively against the notion of a fullback plunge. In golf, on the other hand, the defensive team is limited to just two: the course architect and Mother Nature. But my what formidable opponents those two can be.
Now, just to maintain the analogy a wee bit longer, let’s agree that the red zone on a golf hole begins, as it does on a football field, 20 yards short of the goal, in this case the hole location. Within that final stretch, the most common defenses are bunkers and water hazards, but they aren’t the only ones, and often a more insidious parry comes from the subtle contours at the entrance to the green—the ball-deflecting humps and bumps of the native terrain or the false front conceived by the designer. And sometimes the intimidation can be simply the green itself—a fast and severely sloped surface with a daunting pin position.
Consider the game’s most iconic holes: Every one of them has a pulsating red zone. Three that come quickly to mind are the 12th at Augusta, along with its big brothers, 13 and 15. Water is in each case the most menacing opponent, but adding hugely to the threat are the steep and closely shaved banks that gather even slightly misplayed shots. The same sort of one-two punch comes at the 18th holes of Torrey Pines, Quail Hollow, Bay Hill, and Doral.
The Old Course at St. Andrews serves up a series of goal-line defenses so infamous they have names, from the Swilcan Burn at the first hole to the Road Bunker at 17 and the Valley of Sin at 18, each of which has brought literally millions of golfers to grief. The truth is, well over half of the holes on the Old seem to serve up a vexing gambit of one sort or another at the gateway to the green, whether it’s a buried elephant (holes 2, 4, and 14), a swallowing swale (5, 10, and 12), or a ravenous bunker (3, 7, 11).
Occasionally a single extraordinary expanse of sand, through its size, shape, and placement, dominates not just the red zone but the entire hole. A prime example is the 20-foot-deep chasm that guards the par-five 16th hole at Pete Dye’s TPC Stadium Course at PGA West, aptly nicknamed the San Andreas Fault. A similar wall of sand cautions anyone hoping to drive the short par-four 6th at Pacific Dunes. And perhaps the most sinister of all is the Devil’s A**hole, the tiny pit of perdition that greets everyone who is fortunate enough to step to the tee of the short par-three 10th at famed Pine Valley.
Consider that some of the most dramatic moments, whether you’re watching football or playing golf, arise when everything is down to the last few yards, when the game’s score or your own score hinges on an ability to cover that final short stretch. In football, it’s called the red zone. In the same way, every golf hole has a red zone.
More often than not, however, there isn’t a single Mean Joe Green or Lawrence Taylor standing on the other side of the ball; it’s a broader defense, a green complex that glares back and says, “don’t mess.”
I’m thinking now of the endlessly vexing 10th at Riviera, the perilously perched 11th at Shinnecock Hills, the fiercely sloped 18th at Olympic, the Biarritz-on-steroids 9th at Yale, the downright zany 16th at North Berwick, and more than half of the holes at both Pinehurst No. 2, where you’ll face several choices around the green and invariably make the wrong one, and Winged Foot West, where a three-putt can be cause for celebration.
Red-zone play is arguably both the most exciting and excruciating aspect of golf competition, and I must say, anyone who is actually entertained by watching the pros struggle to save pars and bogeys betrays a measure of sadism, schadenfreude, or some other psychological dysfunction that scares me, largely because I am one of those people.
Indeed, the more I think about all this, the happier I am to be taking a few weeks off to watch those last few yards be fought over by 22 brutes wearing cleats, pads, and helmets.
