Nothing against Australian golfer Marcus Fraser, who seems like a great guy and who led the field for the first half of the men’s individual stroke play competition in Rio de Janeiro. But for anyone who cares about preserving the future of golf in the Olympics, it was disconcerting to see a golfing no-name shoot to the top of the leaderboard with a first-round 63. It wasn’t easy getting golf into the Olympics for the first time in 112 years. What the sport didn’t need was the world’s 90th-ranked golfer, a reserve player slotted into the games only after Australia’s best players refused to come, taking the gold.
By Sunday afternoon, thankfully, the tournament had shaped into a surprisingly strong competition—about as good as it could have been considering the shallowness of the field. Great Britain’s Justin Rose and Sweden’s Henrik Stenson, two of the planet’s best, dueled in a front-nine shootout and a back-nine grind that wasn’t decided until the pair’s respective third shots into the 18th green. Stenson, already the champion golfer of the year, hit a tepid approach to about 20 feet, while Rose skipped his to a near tap-in. Rose birdied and took the gold, while Stenson will contribute a silver to Sweden’s haul. The only one of the four American entries whose game was in proper shape heading into the Olympics, Matt Kuchar, was able to lunge into bronze position with a Sunday 63.
Phew. Expectations for Olympic golf had gotten so low in the run-up to the tournament that it seemed like the likeliest possible outcome was that dozens of C-list golfers would get swarmed by mosquitoes, then jump into the jaws off caimans for the sweet release of death. Instead, we got to see two of the world’s premier talents vie for gold. Interest among spectators seemed to pick up, too, by the weekend, as thousands of additional Olympics patrons lined the fairways of Gil Hanse’s brand new, delightfully quirky course. During the first couple of days of the tournament, it had seemed as if curious capybaras and dozing caimans might outnumber humans on the golf course.
The least-represented local species throughout the event seemed to be the Aedes aegypti. Few golfers, or athletes Olympics-wide, have run into the dreaded Zika-bearing mosquito that was poised to spoil the XXXI Olympiad. If one of the goals of the weekend was to make the Zika-blaming likes of Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, and Adam Scott regret their decisions not to come to Brazil, the showdown between Rose and Stenson, and the ecstasy on Rose’s face after he holed his final birdie, may well have done the trick. Rose, Stenson, and Kuchar all clearly cared about winning the competition and felt the nerves coming down the stretch. McIlroy, the brattiest of all the holdouts—he had said he wouldn’t even watch the golf, and that his Olympics viewing diet would instead consist of “the stuff that matters”—did end up watching the golf. So did Spieth, who in his congratulatory tweet said he would strive for inclusion on the American squad for Tokyo.
Golf will be in the program at the Tokyo Games, but its long-run status in the Olympics will be determined much sooner. The IOC will decide on the competitions for the 2024 Olympics about one year from now. Will the surprisingly gripping drama of Rose’s duel with Stenson prove strong enough to secure the sport’s Olympic future?
The game’s ambassadors to the IOC will have a strong case to make if they focus on improvement. Look at how wrong everything went with Rio, they can say, and how well it turned out anyway! It was a nightmarish effort first to get the golf course built and ready and then to put on a strong competition without the world’s top four golfers participating. And yet this was still a very good golf tournament. Without the scapegoat of the tropical mosquito to blame, the top players will no longer be able to dodge Olympics conscription with health as their excuse—it’s possible they may not even want to dodge it. And not every Olympics will require the pricey construction of a new course: In Tokyo, for example, designer Tom Fazio is simply rejiggering an existing country club layout. The competition should draw plenty of fans, too. Japan is a serious golf nation and home to one of the game’s ascendant players, Hideki Matsuyama.
The game would also do well to offer more bang for the buck and include additional formats for 2020 and beyond.
Individual stroke play is the format golf enthusiasts might appreciate best, but it’s not the most exciting on a hole-to-hole basis and comes up short as a means to “grow the game,” which theoretically is what this golf-in-the-Olympics business is all about. And even though the cream rose to the top in Rio, a bunch of scrubs could ride into Tokyo with the hot hand and sharply curb viewer interest.
A four-ball match-play team competition would slot into the Olympics mix nicely. They have the golf course for two weeks; they might as well maximize its use. While the men’s individual stroke play happens the first week, the women could simultaneously use the course for their team event; and vice versa for the second week. Team match play is both an exciting format for casual or new viewers and a hedge against the individual stroke play playing out like a snoozer.
This format—in which countries would compete head to head to determine once and for all which is the best golfing country in the world, Norway or South Africa—is one of those used in the Ryder and Presidents Cups, the biennial competitions most successful at eliciting golfers’ (and spectators’) nationalistic emotions. If golf wants not just to stay in the Olympics, but to become one of the games’ prized events, a team event is the best way forward, particularly one in which players embarrass themselves with chest bumps and war cries.
