With Rory, Bryson and Scottie as its leads, golf is finally ready for the spotlight

Sports

add

They shook hands like gentlemen, exchanged a few kind words and patted each other on the back. From there on out, Rory McIlroy and Bryson DeChambeau did not speak again for four hours.

Masters Sunday. Final pairing. A duel so perfectly scripted that some suggested it to be the most anticipated final round in 25 years. On one side, 14 years of deeply-seeded pressure and torment. On the other, one of the tormentors. LIV vs. PGA Tour. Rory vs. Bryson for the green jacket. It did not get better than this.

No, it did not turn out to be the historic duel we expected. After a riveting first hour in which they exchanged leads multiple times, DeChambeau shot a 75 to fall down the leaderboard to fifth. The overall day, though, did live up to its billing as an all-time Masters Sunday. As McIlroy prepared for a sudden-death playoff with Justin Rose, DeChambeau’s day was over. He stood in front of a microphone to speak to his disappointment and was also asked how his counterpart seemed at a pivotal moment of the afternoon.

“No idea. Didn’t talk to me once all day.”

Did you try to initiate conversation?

“He wouldn’t talk to me.”

Even removing the melodrama — DeChambeau and McIlroy are perceived to be friendly but not friends, not all that different from Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson — something is happening underneath the surface of McIlroy’s epic, emotional Masters win to complete the career Grand Slam. The pieces are all on the board. The stars are at their best. The narratives are fully formed. Major championship golf has the opportunity to reach a new zenith as the sport — perhaps accidentally — concocts its greatest culmination of drama in years.

Bryson vs. Rory. Rory vs. Scottie. Scottie vs. everybody. Scheffler remains the No. 1 player in the world, coming off the best three-year run golf has seen since Tiger. McIlroy is golf’s most accessible superstar, exorcising his demons while making his case as the best in the game. DeChambeau is both a populist sensation and a pariah, a YouTube star that can more than hang. On and on down the board, from Xander Schauffele and Jon Rahm to Collin Morikawa and Justin Thomas, the faces are instantly recognizable, and the storylines are in abundance.

For all of the outside messes diluting the overall men’s professional golf product, the golf itself has never been more captivating than those four weeks a year.

It was Rory McIlroy’s time to shine. #themasters pic.twitter.com/0FFotJPqNd

— The Masters (@TheMasters) April 14, 2025

Look at the evidence. Sunday’s final round on CBS drew an average of 12.7 million viewers, up 33 percent from 2024 and the most watched since the 2018 Masters. At Sunday’s peak between 7-7:15 p.m., 19.5 million were tuned in. That’s just 700,000 less than Tiger Woods’ win in 1997. Sky Sports in the United Kingdom said it was the most-watched day in network history!

The impact went deeper than just people watching the “moment.” The Golf Channel show “Live From” is a somewhat niche yet beloved roundtable show hosted morning and night from the biggest events of the year. An average of 672,000 people watched its Sunday pregame edition, a 21 percent increase from the exciting in its own right 2024 Masters. The post-tournament prime-time show had 307,000, up 44 percent. People wanted to talk and hear about what they were seeing.

Tiger dominated the sport so greatly that it spent a decade trying to fill the gap. At his peak, he took up all the oxygen in the room. But we live in a post-Tiger era, and we’ve learned that trying to make McIlroy, Jordan Spieth or anyone else the next Tiger was a misguided quest. Tiger will not happen again.

And since 2022, that oxygen has been taken up by golf’s great schism. The exodus from the PGA Tour to LIV, including DeChambeau and Mickelson. The lawsuits. The framework agreement in June 2023 and the two years since of up-and-down negotiations, of conversations that belong on CNBC and not ESPN. But as of this moment, there is little optimism in a deal. Sides seem as far apart as ever.

Suddenly, the dominant storyline is about golf again, and its major championship weeks are the beneficiaries.

Professional golf’s appeal has always been more about context and narratives than strategy. Sure, the comparatively smaller audience watching the John Deere Classic truly, truly love golf. But the 19.5 million watching Sunday as the putt went in? They’re watching to see who becomes a legend. Who conquers their greatest flaws and who succumbs? Which out-of-nowhere fairytale takes down the dragon? Which prodigy makes the leap from promise to world-conquering menace?

This works both ways. The 2024 Masters was a wonderful moment in the sport as Scheffler lifted himself from being not just the best player in the world but one of the best of all time. It was history. But the U.S. Open at Pinehurst two months later was a defining moment, and that was as much about McIlroy’s collapse, missing two short putts in three holes, as it was DeChambeau’s bunker shot to rob it from him.

But for all of these moments to become so iconic, the audience needs characters it already knows and understands the context for.

That is why championship golf is in such a great moment. Those characters and storylines are as fully developed across a wide spectrum of people as they’ve ever been. Is there a Jack vs. Arnie or a Tiger vs. Phil? Maybe not yet. But there are eight golfers with two or more majors between the ages of 27 and 35. There’s also rising sensation Ludvig Åberg, who finished in the top 10 at his first two Masters.

You cannot manufacture these moments, of course. Sunday isn’t Sunday without the 16 years of McIlroy in our lives. We saw a floppy-haired boy turn into a sensation with four majors by 25, and we saw that same man collapse with a Sunday 80 at the 2011 Masters. We saw him fail to make any consequential putts in the 2022 Open Championship with a 54-hole co-lead, or to take charge one back at the 2023 U.S. Open, or to make those two short putts last June against DeChambeau. It is in the overwhelming understanding of his pain that we could relate to his visceral relief.

But the intrigue leading into Sunday was boosted by his opponent. By the undeniable rivalry forming that’s rare in this sport.

When McIlroy and DeChambeau — along with Scheffler and Brooks Koepka — faced off in TNT’s “The Match” there was a clip on the practice range of McIlroy saying, “I’d like to get Bryson back for what he did to me at the U.S. Open.”

Bryson very playfully quipped: “Well, to be fair, you kind of did it to yourself.”

So when DeChambeau finished Saturday’s third round on a heater to put himself in the final pairing with McIlroy, it was golf gold. Because here was true intrigue that didn’t need to be explained to a single viewer. Everyone understood the stakes: Rory trying to achieve immortality against the one man who hurt him the most. You cannot create that in a boardroom.

Scheffler, left, and McIlroy are the top players in the world according to OWGR. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images for The Showdown)

While we lose the story of McIlroy’s never-ending climb, it may unlock something greater or more sustainable. Because for much of the past decade, McIlroy has been the supreme talent who couldn’t come through. Now, with the lid removed, the conversation is about how many more McIlroy can win.

The pain is over, and McIlroy vs. Scheffler is a sincere debate.

Scheffler remains comically good, so much so that “only” finishing in fourth place at the Masters, following December hand surgery, makes people wonder if he still has it. Fair or not (it’s absolutely the latter), Scheffler enters the final three majors of 2025 with pressure to reestablish his place. McIlroy is undeniably coming for him.

To be clear, we’ve been living in this wonderful major moment. Look at 2024. The Masters had the best player in the world in a four-way tie with 11 holes to go before Scheffler ran away with transcendent excellence. The PGA Championship included Scheffler getting arrested and Schauffele winning his first major with a birdie on the 18th hole to beat both DeChambeau and another international star, Viktor Hovland. The U.S. Open was the best major in a decade (until Sunday) between McIlroy’s heartbreak and DeChambeau’s personality transformation. Even the Open Championship was an evil, penal battle down the stretch until Schauffele broke out on the back nine to contextualize his entire career with two majors in what was supposedly Scottie’s year.

Maybe that means we’re all due for some duds. That an unknown will win the PGA Championship next month, or the U.S. Open will end in a blowout. Probabilities say some of those will happen.

But golf is built on intrigue. It only works if the narratives are so well established that who loses carries as much weight as who wins, that Jim Nantz can sit back and let the pictures tell the story for five minutes after the final putt falls.

Right now, golf is as compelling as ever during those four weeks a year, leaving us wondering who will be the next to have their iconic moment.

(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Photos: Richard Heathcote, Kieran Cleeves / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

Share on

email

Previous

trending_flat

Who will be the best players in the 2026 WNBA Draft? Our big board examines the options

Sports

Next

trending_flat

Mandel’s mailbag: Is Nico Iamaleava worth it? Which schools are possible suitors?

Sports