Trying To Find A Positive In The Mostly Loathsome GolfSixes...

On the golf desperation scale from 1 to Live Under Par, the second UK playing of GolfSixes registered a solid 8.  

There was the entrance smoke.

The mascot playing becoming a human bouncey house as key final day development.

The children on the tee feeling suspiciously like they’d been coached to generate excitement.

The overall agony of having the telecast playing with volume of any kind. 

Et. cetera.

Year two of this innovation all added up to a well-intentioned but at-times embarrassing effort to reach new audiences. 

As with most of these attempts to show the advertisers that golf has shed the dreaded rich old demographic for the one that either can’t or won’t pay for anything, GolfSixes empties the bucket of "fun" ideas. The ”greensomes” team format seeks to replicate Twenty20 from cricket and make golf cool, fun and watchable. In other words, it’s another well-intentioned effort to speed up a game that has become a slog, with telecasts that can’t do much about the pace and often all-day sensibility of our sport.

But the combination of unheard-ofs, the excess of forcing elements for the sake of doing something different and the gratuitous attempt to have kids hit shots to let the precious little ones know they are part of the proceedings, added up to some of the worst professional golf “product” imaginable. 

Simply unveiling the event's fresh format would have been enough innovation. But it’s all the other nonsense added on that announces to the world: golf is not comfortable enough in its skin. Oh, and the sport has not done much about the swollen scale of the sport so this is how we remedy that issue. 

The latter problem is not European Tour Chief Keith Pelley’s fault. He and the team are trying their best to liven things up.  They are just trying too hard.

Alistair Tait of Golfweek did find one positive in all of this: the quarterfinal appearances by the teams of Charley Hull and Georgia Hall and Mel Reid and Carlota Ciganda may inch closer to a legitimate format that combines men’s and women’s combined team play in a professional event.

That’s the kind of novelty GolfSixes should focus on going forward. If it goes forward.