Vail Resorts stock ($MTN) dropped nearly 7% yesterday, which garnered the reactions of Wall Street analysts, but CNBC contributor Jim Lebenthal had personal grievances to express towards Vail Resorts.Lebenthal explained on the January 2nd episode of CNBC's 'Halftime Report' that he was at Park City Mountain Resort with his family for the holidays. He expressed how "angry" he was towards Vail Resorts for not informing skiers about the ski patrol strike, and that, "less than 20% of the mountain was open during the peak Holiday time," despite over two feet of new snowfall.CNBC has yet to publish the clip to their channels, but a recording has been shared to the r/skiing subreddit. Press play on the embedded video below to watch Lebenthal's rant against Vail Resorts."If you want to run a travel and leisure company, you darn well better give the experience you're advertising," says Lebenthal in the clip. "If you don't, you will get negative PR, and non-repeating customers. Exactly what you don't want."
As for that last bit about providing the appropriate experience to its customers, why start now?
Words is that "progress" has been made in the talks, which I'm sure will be great comfort to those that chose to bring their families here for the holiday break. There doesn't seem to be a short-term financial hit to Vail, but word on the street is that Anheuser Busch and Jaguar have offered to hold their beer...
Can't Anyone Here Play Defense? - Kapalua has changed dramatically from those halcyon Tiger-Ernie days, morphing (for reasons Mark Rolfing never quite manages to explain) into a soft, target golf track:
After birdieing half the holes at Kapalua Resort’s Plantation Course on Saturday along with an eagle for an 11-under 62, Hideki Matsuyama never cracked a smile. The 32-year-old Japanesestar also declined to speak separately to the Japanese media, a dedicated crew that follows his every shot and hangs on his every word, for the second straight day. And this was – we repeat – after a bogey-free 62 that set a tournament 54-hole scoring mark and equaled the Tour record too.Matsuyama, however, is his own toughest critic and he high-tailed it to the range to iron out the flaws he perceived in his game. What could he possibly need to do at the range is a head scratcher, but Matsuyama said he needed to fix his driver and we'll take his word because it worked. The grind never ends, and very few can match Matsuyama’s grit and determination to scrape every ounce of brilliance out of his game.All the hard work paid off on Sunday when Matsuyama took dead aim at the par-4 fourth hole and two-hopped a wedge from 107 yards into the hole for an eagle.The mercurial Matsuyama, who has a well-earned reputation for hanging his head or dropping a hand off his club in disgust, only for the shot in question to be a thing of beauty, stared down his approach at the fourth and knocked knuckles with his caddie when it dropped. He closed in 8-under 65 to win The Sentry, the season-opening tournament on the PGA Tour by three shots over Morikawa, and notch his third victory in a signature event in the last 10 months.
I saw maybe an hour of coverage between NFL games, and it looked as boring as anticipated.
Geoff had some characteristically caustic reactions to it all:
For the few fans watching the PGA Tour opener positioned oh-so-strategically against the NFL regular season’s concluding day full of playoff ramifications to ensure the fewest eyeballs possible, viewers were treated to an abnormally high number of Matsuyama’s trademark one-armed finish. Or maybe it was the juxtaposition with fake-looking red numbers. The failed follow-throughs became so relentless during Saturday’s third round, that Golf Channel analyst Smylie Kaufmann suggested Matsuyama would likely hit the range post-round to figure out how to get back to more center-face strikes. After a 62.And this brings us to the nutty state of modern pro golf when a rain-softened course becomes defenseless, lacks a fighting spirit, and where record birdie totals elicit more yawns than yippy-doo-das.
C'mon Geoff, you know that's merely a result of all the ab crunches they do....
As for the TV schedule, I have a query. If you were trying to shed all your viewers, what exactly would you do differently?
Not to be outdone, NBC’s return to college basketball coverage means they are emulating the CBS tradition of scheduling games that bleed me into coverage. Lucky us. This set up a less-than-idyllic start on Golf Channel, a move for a few hours to NBC before the final 120 minutes concluded on Golf Channel.That’s not a big deal to those with a cable box remote control where numbers are entered and channels change effortlessly. But for streamers, Peacock only carries the NBC portion of the proceedings. This means the poor souls who cut the cord and signed up for Comcast’s Peacock had to navigate between multiple apps twice during the final round.Reminder: it’s 2025 and this Peacock Shuffle stuff is still going on.
Seriously, will Nielsen even detect an audience? The Tour tells us this is one of their eight precious, special events, yet the presentation, with it's network hopping, feels like a clown show.
While the event felt lifeless, at least these guys tried to liven things up:
That's something you don't see every day.Will Zalatoris and Cam Davis were each penalized two shots for playing the wrong golf ball on the par-5 15th hole Sunday during the final round of The Sentry at Kapalua's Plantation Course.Rules expert Mark Dusbabek explained that Zalatoris played Davis' ball, then Davis played Zalatoris. Neither player realized the error until they reached the green.The penalty for playing the wrong ball is two shots, so the players had to return to their previous shots and replay from there.Zalatoris and Detry both made double on the par 5.
The mishap occurred on third shots into a Par-5, lay-ups seemingly being the last place you'd expect the guys to go to the wrong balls. No word on whether they play the same ball and/or mark it in similar fashion, but one hopes the respective caddies are secure in their employment status...
The Tour Confidential panel fulfills your expectations of Tiger sycophancy, but they do get around to this event at the bottom of the page:
Hideki Matsuyama won the season-opening Sentry, beating Collin Morikawa by three with a PGA Tour record score of 35 under. Anyone impress you? Surprise you? What was your takeaway from Week 1 of the marathon 2025 PGA Tour season?Sens: Collin Morikawa looks hungry to get that third major, after a couple of close calls last year. He didn’t win but I dig his new Sam Snead-esque pre-shot routine and the ball striking it gave way to. He had a few short game glitches. But it still took a record-number of birdies to beat him.Marksbury: Takeaway No. 1: Maui is always a welcome sight in January. Those vistas are truly unmatched. And as far as player performances go, this week was a great reminder about how incredibly talented Hideki is. Thirty-five under, a new scoring record (!!!). That’s unbelievable! I think he tends to fly under the radar sometimes, even as a major champion (though not for our betting expert Brady Kannon, who’s 1/1 on winning picks so far this year!). I will say I’m a little surprised by Xander. He has an excellent record at the Plantation course, with a win in 2019 and three other top 10s since then. He was T30 this week — his worst finish ever — and was never really in the conversation.Hirsh: Hard to not be impressed when Hideki averages just one birdie shy of one every other hole. I don’t care how “easy” that golf course played, this tournament was never really intended to kick the crap out of these guys and that course would kick the crap out everyone reading this story from those tees. Could the 5th hole be switched to a par-4? Yea probably (it averaged 4.1 this week), but par is just an arbitrary number anyway. It’s the first tournament of the year at a beautiful and extoic resort course with only the 60 best players from last year invited. Let them make some birdies!
Yeah, you can hear the yawns as they scramble to say anything of note....
Let me just interject a story here to make a repetitive point about the ongoing scam that is the PGA Tour:
Including this one:
Added Malnati: “I'm hopeful that we can do away with the starting strokes thing because I hate that that's part of the conversation every year. I think it's important that we maintain a season-long element to it. If you played a Scottie Scheffler season, you shouldn't get to the Tour Championship and start even with everyone else. I think there's different ways that it could go but I don't know what direction it’s going to go (yet).” The Tour’s television partners – CBS and NBC – are driving the discussion to make a change.
Yes, it's that Peter Malnati, who along with Adam Scott has cornered the market in sponsors' exemptions. Malnati is there as a representative of the Rabbit-Americans on tour (and Adam Scott as well at this point in his career), yet they receive exemptions into all the massive money-grabs. Do we think this might affect their view of the world and resulting votes? Nothing to see here....
Simulate This - The other big news in the golf world is tomorrow's debut of the TGL, which the TC panel did a deep dive upon:
Finally, after a year-long delay and months of hype promoting the tech-infused golf league backed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, the first match of the inaugural TGL golf season kicks off at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday on ESPN. What’s your biggest question mark you want answered as you tune-in for opening night?Josh Sens: It’s a pretty basic question that applies to a lot of entertainment in our fractured,distracted age. Will it be fun and fast-moving and feel genuinely new and exciting, with enough golf to win over a traditional audience and enough novelty to capture a fresh one while earning the approval of the ‘internet?’ Or will it comes off like a contrived and cynical cash-grab, which has been the case with a lot of other televised golf concepts?Jessica Marksbury: Josh, spot on. The biggest selling point with a format like this is the showcase it offers for the various associated personalities. I’m wondering just how loose these guys are willing to be. Because simply watching them launch shots into a simulator for a couple of hours isn’t going to be enough of a draw for me.Jack Hirsh: Agree Jess, will there be enough banter to make it interesting? We all remember how hyped up the first Match between Tiger and Phil was, but it really wasn’t that great of TV because Tiger and Phil were being competitors, not entertaining and the banter between the two wasn’t that good. It wasn’t until The Match II when Peyton Manning and Tom Brady were added to liven things up that the series became a success. Will the whole concept of a simulator league be enough to lighten things up between some normally steely competitors? We’ll see.
Gee, I feel like I left some vitriol in the bag, as that "contrived and cynical cash-grab" perfectly describes the Sentry and all the Signature Events, no?
As for Jess' comment, I'm not sure "loose" is the issue, as to me the bigger issue is that these guys just aren't all that interesting, and that starts first and foremost with Tiger.
For tomorrow's premier I'm sure they've teed up their strongest rosters to make a dramatic first impression. What? Really?
The first match will feature the New York Golf Club (Xander Schauffele, Matt Fitzpatrick and Rickie Fowler) against The Bay Golf Club (Ludvig Aberg, Wyndham Clark and Shane Lowry). (Three of each team’s four players compete in a match.) Does the first match have enough star power to get the public interested?Sens: If this were a traditional tournament, I wouldn’t call this a field that is destined to move the needle significantly. But of course it’s not a traditional tournament. At this early stage, old-fashioned curiosity should be enough to get people to tune in. Would more people tune in if Tiger Woods were playing? Sure. But this schedule wasn’t made by coin flip. It was thought out. By not featuring Woods in the debut, my guess is that TGL is saving its powder for when the inaugural novelty wears off. The organizers understand that the field itself is probably not the most important factor this week.Marksbury: Agree. We’ll be tuning in regardless! But the novelty factor will only last so long. With the exception of Lowry, I don’t see this opening cast as much of a hot-take-spewing, yuk-it-up type. But maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised!Hirsh: Yea I’m really interested in TGL and like the idea, but I’m not sure I like the strategy of not putting Tiger in the first match. I get that the idea, as our James Colgan reported back in October, is to use strategically place Woods’ debut one day after the broadcasting network, ESPN, hosts an NFL playoff game to cross-promote it. But, we all know Tiger is the needle. Rickie Fowler is probably the only player a casual golf fan will recognize. Even after Schauffele won two majors last year, I still don’t think his brand has reached past avid golf fans. Shouldn’t TGL use Tiger as much as possible to capture the attention of non-avid golf fans with a new concept?
I think the half-life of that novelty factor is about fifteen minutes, so this seems designed more to solve America's sleep disorders, than to entertain. Where's Charles Barkley when we need him?
Finish this thought: the TGL will flourish if…Sens: If it has drawing power beyond its novelty and Tiger’s name. And if it gets talked up — as opposed widely mocked — on social media. It will definitely help if the matches are close and the shots seem appropriately challenging. Beyond that, it comes down to intangibles. In one respect, TGL seems to check the right boxes for our time. It’s high-tech and meant to be fast-moving. It’s got celebrities attached to it, and well-liked broadcasters calling the action. Oh, and you can gamble on it. But elements that seem great in isolation don’t always work when they’re brought together. The magic formula is hard to forecast. At least for me. When Survivor first aired, I thought, Who would watch this garbage? Shows how much I know.Marksbury: I’ve watched a fair bit of alternative golf in recent months, from Golfzon Tour’s simulator matches on YouTube to a lighted, high-stakes par-3 tournament here in Phoenix. And one thing is for sure: The golf is only part of the package. To stay interested, we need a reason to buy in to rivalries, personalities and storylines. It all has to matter. So I hope there’s plenty of that to chew on with TGL.Hirsh: Call me a broken record because I said this above, but I really think it’s going to come down to the banter. Players are mic’d up, is that going to be actually useful? If the guys are lose and taking swipes at each other during the match, while there is still an obviously high level of competition, that could be fun. Everyone is entertained at their golf course by the guy who can walk out with no practice and casually shoot 67 while trashing talking the crap out of everyone. That’s the kind of golf I wanna see.
OK, Jack, but if you're expecting that from Ludvig and Xander, I think you're betting against type. There's a reason all these made-for-Tv matches suck, so I'm taking the under...
And struggle if…Sens: Here, I’ll rehash some of my answers from above. If the banter is lame, as the kids say, if the matches are blowouts, and if leading names and whiz-bang tech aren’t enough to sustain interest. Also: if the tech glitches often enough that it doesn’t seem credible. There’s an obvious risk in live TV. My litmus test after the first airing will be to ask my kids and their friends, who are in their teens and twenties. If they deem it ‘cringy,’ I’ll take that as a sign of trouble.Marksbury: My hope is that listening to the team interactions will feel like being a fly on the wall in the matches these guys routinely play against each other without camera rolling. If they can’t tap into being themselves — or if they do succeed at being themselves, but it’s just not that interesting — I can’t see this endeavor becoming a screaming success.Hirsh: I agree Jess, if each match ends up like the first Tiger-Phil match, then TGL could die quickly. We have to see a side of these guys we’ve never seen before and we’ll get a golf product unlike anything we’ve seen before. If the players treat this as business as usual, it will not work.
There's probably a larger point to be made here about the nature of professional golf and it's fit with entertainment products such as this. The nature of the game demands an equanimity, as they win so seldomly and need to stay on an even keel. Here what they need is confrontation, and good luck getting that from Wyndham or the other guys.
Eamon has some thoughts as well:
The list of investors in TGL, the simulator-based league launching on January 7, is a veritable Burke’s Peerage of American oligarchy: John Henry’s Fenway Sports Group, Steve Cohen,Arthur Blank, Marc Lasry—all members of the Strategic Sports Group that dropped $1.5 billion into the PGA Tour a year ago. Joining them are Pied Piper figures like Steph Curry, Serena Williams, Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout and Josh Allen. If a group with that combined record of accomplishment and affluence all buy the same stock, average punters might conclude they’re on to something and follow suit. Yet on TGL, skeptics remain. Golfers know what they like versus what they need to be sold on, and for now TGL occupies a murky zone in between.There are numerous appealing aspects of this enterprise. The SoFi Center facility itself, for starters. I visited last month and saw an impressive feat of engineering. The technology too will stand out in a sport that’s doggedly analog and aged. There’s the opportunity, increasingly rare these days, to see Tiger Woods compete in an environment where he isn’t being upstaged by his kid. And to eavesdrop as teams debate strategy on unconventional hole designs. Or listen to the banter between opposing teams, though admittedly that’s the least promising selling point since an enormous book of evidence suggests cardinals playing canasta could produce more edgy trash talking than golfers in an exhibition setting. But will all of the interesting parts equal a whole that is sufficient to keep viewers coming back? The technology will eventually cease to awe and Tiger won’t play that often (though Charlie only lives a couple miles away and could be called up in a pinch).
Given the ubiquity of shot-tracing on golf broadcasts, I think it's open issue how different this will seem, but perhaps a reminder that no one watches real golf is in order as well.
Of course, Eamon has the receipts:
It’s one thing to consume a product when it’s temporarily convenient, quite another to develop an eagerness for more of it.The awkward reality is that a decade’s worth of flaccid efforts to make exhibition golf entertaining—most recently the Showdown in Las Vegas—has callused the tolerance of golf fans, and that’s before factoring in a palpable weariness about the current state of the broader game. The comical flop of LIV has also rendered team golf a subject of parody. The RangeGoats aren’t even talked about around water coolers in Riyadh, much less in America.“Rory under the lights at Shadow Creek pulls 625K viewers. Cam Young in a tennis bubble hitting into some simulator with NBA music and lights? Yeah, should be explosive,” texted one friend who, while a Colossus of cynicism on the daily, does offer a hint of the uphill climb TGL could face among even devoted golf fans.The roster of folks behind TGL features some of the smartest and most accomplished people in golf, including many far below the investor and executive level, but they all face an intriguing challenge: Can they manufacture demand that doesn’t seem to yet exist for a product they’re already committed to supplying? That question is unlikely to be answered quickly, and even if the first season of matches gains audience traction there’s the small matter of monetizing the entire enterprise over the longer term.
Yes, and this cynical observer assumes that the $12 billion valuation of PGA Tour Enterprises to support that SSG investment would include an excessive valuation of the TGL, which presumably will require a large audience to validate.
But color me skeptical about Eamon's rousing coda:
Headwinds notwithstanding, let’s hope TGL does succeed. It would be additive for golf to have a genuine attempt at expanding its product offering and drawing a fresh audience, one that isn’t a dilutive public relations exercise for an autocratic government. We see and hear enough about what’s wrong with this sport these days. If nothing else, TGL is a reminder that a grand old game can still accommodate something new, unconventional and ambitious. Who knows, maybe those rich folks are on to something.
I find myself instinctively rooting against it, just because the entirety of the prior three years has been about professional golf refusing to live within its means. To me this is just another adjunct money grab, the and inevitable mewling about growing the game have long since become tedious. The game of golf exists separately from the professional version thereof, and I find myself increasingly bored by the latter.
I expect to tune in and blog the opening night, but we'll see if they can get any kind of traction. Have a great week and I'll see you at some point this week, Wednesday morning perhaps being the most likely due to Tuesday night's broadcast of the TGL.
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