Tom Kite pretty much hated the idea.
Ty Votaw thought it might actually work.
Billy Horschel mulled it over and thinks it could be fun.
Even I think it’s harebrained crazy, but it’s a crazy world. How else does one explain the Kardashians?
Again, I’m not considering adding a shark’s mouth or a loop-de-loop prop to some holes on the PGA Tour, so go easy.
So here’s my brainstorm. Or brain lapse, depending on your viewpoint.
Given the runaway success of the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play tournament at Austin Country Club for the past seven years, how about staging a similar event using the same round-robin format but open up the competition?
Have the world’s first coed match-play tournament. Invite the top 32 ranked male and female golfers in the world to play intermingled in the same 64-player field just as the PGA Tour folks have now for the PGA’s Dell tourney.
So the Austin Country Club, Dell folks and PGA Tour don’t freak out, I’d recommend we keep the Dell tourney as it is and let’s get busy creating a similar event on the schedule that we’ll call, say, the Kirk Bohls-Michael Dell Coed Match Play tournament somewhere else on the calendar. Heck, I’ll even give Michael top billing. Or Elon Musk, are you a golf fan?
Imagine Lydia Ko squaring off against Jon Rahm. Jin Young Ko facing down Bryson DeChambeau. Or Nelly Korda (or anyone named Korda) versus Xander Schauffele in a battle of Olympic gold medalists from the Tokyo Games.
Gives you chills, right?
Would television bite on such an out-there idea?
WGC-Match Play: Yardage book | PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ | Saturday tee times, TV info
Hey, we seem to get these made-for-TV exhibitions every other month, whether it’s Tiger Woods and Peyton Manning beating Phil Mickelson and Tom Brady on a live broadcast on four networks drawing an average of 2.8 million viewers or you name it.
Heck, some people even watched — through squinted eyes — Charles Barkley team with Phil to beat Manning and Steph Curry. We’ve had Phil vs. Tiger and Brooks vs. Bryson, and there may be no end.
I assume NBC probably already tried to line up Brady again for another such showcase until he decided he’s still got some football left in his tank.
If we can be subjected to those silly events, why not a serious one in a true mano a mano Battle of the Sexes. For big dough.
Votaw, who is a former commissioner of the LPGA and a current PGA Tour adviser when he isn’t promoting his new bourbon brand Blue Run, was on hand for the third round of the Dell Match Play tournament on a calm, cloudless Friday. We chatted as he was in the grandstand at the first tee and took in a few of the golfers starting their third-round matches.
I wouldn’t say he fully embraced the scheme, but he far from rejected it.
So what do you think, Ty?
“Against each other?” asked the 60-year-old, who will retire from his job as the PGA’s chief marketing officer in July but remain as an adviser to PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan. Monahan could not be reached for comment about how nuts I am, and who can blame him? Or he’s already on the phone to the networks.
But his office released a statement from him that reads, “In March of 2016, the PGA Tour formalized its relationship with the LPGA with a strategic alliance agreement designed to further promote the growth of golf, and this included the potential development of joint events.”
I’m going to take that as a yes. Glad to have you on board, Jay. We’re all in favor of joint events.
But why not such a tournament? Got to think out of the box in 2022, right? The world ain’t flat, no matter what Kyrie Irving says. Think big.
Votaw seemed intrigued by the concept even though he was much more focused on Friday night’s North Carolina basketball matchup with UCLA in the Sweet 16. And is the UNC Law School grad openly rooting against Duke?
“Uh, yes,” he said. “But it’d be nice if they meet again in the Final Four. Some people would watch that, I think.”
As they would the inaugural WGC-Dell Technologies Coed Match Play event. I’m only asking for a 5% cut.
“We’re constantly trying to think of ways do (events like) that,” Votaw told me. “We’ve had a lot of conversations, and we do have a strategic alliance with the LPGA Tour. Down the road, both parties would have to be interested. It’d have to be the right format and the right date.”
There are inherent problems. We get it.
Fitting in an event like that in an already crowded schedule could be nightmarish. The two tours normally play on opposite coasts at the same time. When the men are on the West Coast, the women are on the East.
Votaw did say the two tours have had conversations about staging separate but equal golf tournaments concurrently at the same site, a place with 36 holes to accommodate each event. Likewise, they have discussed mixed team concepts.
Horschel, the defending champion who tied his Dell match with Thomas Pieters on Friday to become the first to advance to Saturday’s quarterfinals, endorsed the idea.
“I think it’s pretty cool,” Horschel said. “It’s not a bad idea at all. I watch the ladies play golf all the time, and several of the girls are really, really good.”
He’s never played on an LPGA golf course set up for tournament play, and he thinks his male counterparts would probably have an advantage because he said the LPGA greens are “usually softer” than on the PGA Tour.
He avidly follows the Korda sisters, Nelly and Jessica, and says many of those on the LPGA Tour are “pretty unbelievable.”
I would imagine Monahan and new LPGA Commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan will tackle this idea soon. Samaan didn’t get where she is by taking the well-traveled path from her days as athletic director at Princeton, where she was an All-Ivy ice hockey player. Yeah, she’s a get-it-done gal.
But Kite, a Hall of Famer who won 19 times, including a U.S. Open, during his brilliant career, wasn’t buying it.
“Years and years ago, they tried mixed events in the ’70s and ’80s, and it died,” Kite said during a break from watching Scottie Scheffler bury Matt Fitzpatrick 5 and 4 Friday. “I don’t think it would work. You wouldn’t get the top players.”
You would if the purse were big enough. The Tiger-Phil match purse was $9 million, although maybe that was in crypto coins.
This Coed Match Play event would have twice the appeal of a Billy Jean King-Bobby Riggs sham. King was in her prime, Riggs moved around like the Statue of Liberty in an awful performance at age 55, and the staged event in the Astrodome scored huge points for the feminist movement. Good for her and the movement.
And it did draw 90 million eyeballs — I guess actually that’d be 180 million eyeballs, give or take — worldwide, and BJK walked away with 100 large.
Hey, I still daydream about the day Serena Williams takes on Novak Djokovic in a best-of-three tennis match. I’d sure watch. And I’ll be happy to watch Candace Parker take on Steph Curry in a game of H-O-R-S-E.
So let’s put on this unique format and watch Jin Young Ko battle Jon Rahm in a matchup of No. 1 seeds on their respective tours. I’m guessing that draw would get boffo ratings in Korea and Spain.
For that matter, Koreans might steal the whole show with three top-10 LPGA golfers in the world from there as well as six in the top 20 in the world.
I don’t see how it could not be a big hit.
For now, I’ll leave the details to Jay and Mollie. You got my number. You can thank me later.
Kirk Bohls is a columnist for the Austin American-Stateman, part of the USA Today Network.
