Stacked leaderboards but no characters leaves me stuck in the middle

The FedEx Cup Playoffs got underway last week and I only watched the 72nd hole. It was enough, I saw all that I needed to see.

Last week LIV Golf Greenbrier went up against the FedEx St Jude Championship and on Sunday evening we had a thrilling finish on the PGA Tour while Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka went head to head on the other side. Yet, it never felt like we were spoilt for choice.

Instead it feels as golf fans, or viewers on television that we are stuck in no man’s land. What a world to live in where many of us have no interest in a Rahm and Koepka showdown – only 16,000 tuned in on YouTube – but on the PGA Tour the cream really rose to the top for the first leg of the FedEx Cup but still felt diluted, devoid of an edge, lacking the personalities where you can become invested in someone coming down the stretch.

An even stranger scenario is that Koepka now leads the LIV Golf League in wins (5) while he didn’t post a top-25 finish in any of the four major championships this year. Just a complete inverse era of Koepka to add to another underwhelming year for men’s golf.

LIV won’t have another event until September 13th making that tour just increasingly difficult to track, which again does not help the golf fan.

In golf’s civil war the PGA Tour have definitely come out on top in terms of quality of fields but while they have won that battle they have been dealt serious wounds in this war.

The worrying downward trend for PGA Tour TV viewership is continuing, US viewing figures for Sunday’s final round were down 30% on last year with just 2.2 million tuning in to NBC last week.

Golf is in need of a personality injection and perhaps this extends further than just the men’s game with Lexi Thompson’s imminent retirement a huge loss for the sport as well.