ESPN Turns The Masters Into Amateur Hour

Jason Kelce, maybe leave this one to Jim Nantz.

Professional golf’s premiere event, The Masters, brands itself as “A tradition unlike any other.”™ (A Nantz line from the ’80s, but Augusta National owns the rights to anything said during Masters broadcasts.) There’s a little bit less tradition thus far this year.

ESPN shoehorned Kelce, a retired (terrific) NFL center and the brother of active (terrific) NFL tight end Travis Kelce, into its early Masters coverage — an effort to make its broadcasts and streams of a stuffy golf major championship more enticing for our doomed doomscrolling culture. (How buttoned up is The Masters? The winner literally gets a sport coat.)

Through no fault of (Jason) Kelce’s, America could probably use a break from the bearded big fella. ESPN has gone to new heights deploying the New Heights podcast co-host in every possible way. Some say in too many possible ways.

Kelce, officially an ESPN NFL analyst, is at the exclusive Augusta National Golf Club this week in Augusta, Ga. “conducting interviews with players and their families,” according to an ESPN press release. This is ESPN’s 19th year of live coverage from the Masters Tournament. Its rights include main telecasts (ESPN and ESPN Deportes) of the first two rounds, plus “Featured Groups coverage,” as well as Holes 4, 5 and 6, Amen Corner, 15 and 16 (streaming). On Wednesday, ESPN presented exclusive live coverage of the Masters Par 3 Contest on the ESPN app and Disney+. That’s where this went wrong.

Donning a full Masters-caddie jumpsuit and rooting for holes-in-one, in a brief TV hit that was not especially a hit on social media, Kelce attempted to fire up the crowd and earn a few yucks — two things he is good at. Problem is, to borrow a title from Netflix (which itself just bastardized baseball in the name of self-promotion), nobody wants this. Golf fans want The Masters to be The Masters, and The Masters is anti-“fun” by design.

At Augusta National, spectators cannot bring in their cell phone or wear (overly) branded clothing. They can’t sit on the hallowed Bermuda grass (overseeded with Perennial Ryegrass) or run, and wearing a hat backwards is strictly prohibited. It’s like church, just with no tipping (another rule). Yet every year, roughly two million applicants will enter a lottery system for a long shot to join the congregation. Golf fans are lured to Augusta because of the lore, and TV viewers want the closest possible facsimile.

To be fair to ESPN (and Kelce), the Masters Par 3 Contest is the lightest fare of the tournament’s coverage, but even that comes with convention. Typically, the children or grandchildren of the tournament’s competitors and legends carry the pros’ bags — or they try to — and they’re adorable in the effort. No offense to Kelce, but his act just isn’t cute here.

Attempts to reach ESPN for comment on this story were not successful. Again, no cell phones.

There is a counterargument to be made — and it’s not unreasonable. Golf needs to find a new generation of fans as its old one, gets, well, really old. The game is late to adapt, but it’s tried.

There’s the LIV Tour (a Saudi-funded, team-based alternative to the PGA Tour), TGL (a sophisticated virtual golf league started by Tiger Woods and the reigning Masters champion Rory McIlroy), Grass League (a franchise-based par 3 startup), Top Golf (a hi-tech alternative to driving ranges that’s fun… once), footgolf (a dumb combination of soccer and golf that ruins golf courses more than geese) and disc or frisbee golf (which hit its peak as “frolf” in 1997 Seinfeld episode “The Summer of George”).

YouTube Golf has been a successful outlier — DeChambeau has 2.65 million subscribers — TikTok and Instagram too. But even the founder of Good Good (2.07 million YouTube subscribers) Matt Kendrick will tell you it will never replace the real thing. Or at least that’s what he told me last year.

As it turns out, the best golf is golf, and the best representation of golf is The Masters (1934-2025). The solution to golf’s viewership problem can possibly be solved with time: Let young people get old. That’s definitely going to happen — it is a traditional unlike any other.