Is the IOC OB?

In October of 2009, the International Golf Federation lobbied to have golf added to the 2016 and 2020 Olympic Summer Games. With visions of players winning Olympic glory for their home nations, the International Olympic Committee agreed and voted to add golf to the Summer Games for the first time since 1904. In 2016, competitors will face off on a Gil Hanse-designed course in Rio and I couldn't be more excited.

Excited, that is, until I found out the format of the competition. Two fields of sixty competitors, male and female, will compete for the gold, silver, and bronze medals in two seventy-two hole stroke play tournaments. In other words, it'll be exactly the same as all of the other tournaments you've probably seen on television, except it'll be on at weird times and I'm almost certain I'll miss it. See, the problem here isn't necessarily about the format of the competition, its a perfectly fine way to determine the top three players at the competition. The problem I have with it is that it feels as though the IOC and, to some extent, the IGF missed a huge opportunity.

The Olympics are kind of magic in a way. They have a way of getting people to care about sports that they didn't even know existed. For example, I know nothing about curling. Like actually, ask me a question about curling, I don't know the answer. But I do know that the Norwegians are my favorite.

BOOM. Bloodbath on ice. Don't even bother showing up.

What I'm trying to say is that, if the IGF want to get more people excited about golf, they should make the Olympic golf competition as intense as possible. The best way to do this? Probably not churning out the same product that's already available every other week of the year. This is not to mention the fact that tour pros will have to decide whether or not they even want to go, as the Olympics will fall right in the fat part of the PGA Tour season. So what is the Olympic golf lacking that it so desperately needs?

This.

The Olympic golf needs a taste of Ryder Cup intensity. Every two years, the United States and Europe face off for a matchplay-style event to determine who holds the Ryder Cup trophy, and every time the two teams meet, the golf is fantastic. The IOC had a real opportunity here to not only showcase some of the best golfers in the world, but also some of the young talents that are up and coming in the world of golf. This could have easily become the World Cup of golf. Imagine a matchplay style tournament between eight teams of ten players, ranked through qualifiers. It would finally put the nations relegated to the President's Cup, golf's second-tier international competition, into direct competition with European teams. The IOC could even require that five players on each team be amateurs or under the age of 25 in order to promote the future of golf.

To be fair, competitions like this do exist, but they deserve a grander stage. The ISPS Handa World Cup of Golf doesn't exactly have the same ring as The 2016 Olympic Summer Games, does it? In fact it's so bland, it's logo could double as a corporate logo for vanilla ice cream. It looks like the designer did one draft and was just like "yeah, that's probably fine," and never came back to it.

I don't mean to hate on the ISPS Handa either, I'm sure its a fine display of international golf that I would enjoy immensely, if it weren't on at three in the morning. It just seems like the Olympic Committee and the IGF had a great opportunity to expand the global reach of the sport, but decided to do what was safe and easy by simply following the formula that they've been employing since the last time golf was in the olympics...110 years ago.

Keep your head down.