It was The Match! Two champions, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson were to face each other in an 18-hole match at the Shadows Creek Golf Course in Nevada. Everything looked perfect, and Woods had won an event just two months prior. The fans were excited to see him win again. The only way to watch The Match in 2018 was through pay-per-view. The event producers, Turner Sports, introduced the first golf match to be accessed through cable or direct TV and Bleacher Report Live but through pay-per-view.
Right as Mickelson and Woods geared up on the first tee, things went haywire for the viewers and producers. Even after purchasing the product, the fans could not get on. Turner Sports’s then-president, David Levy, talked about the famous bout at the Fairway to Heaven podcast and said, “On B/R Live we had a lot of subscribers signing on; we took their money, and all of a sudden we could not get through the Amazon firewall.” The match could be seen through TV and cable, but B/R Live suffered a glitch, and the fans were getting impatient. They had bought it for $19.99 and wanted to see it immediately.
Levy had to risk it all. He either could let the paywall be there or remove it and then everyone—those who paid and who didn’t—gets to watch. It could either be the worst pay-per-view experience for the fans or the best match they had seen of Woods & Lefty. Levy chose the latter; eventually, the paywall was removed, and everyone watched the 2018 edition of The Match for free. The downside? Levy said, “As far as the pay-per-view and the money side from the pay-per-view side, my friends on the cable side didn’t pay us a dime… We got no pay-per-view money from the entire event.”
So, they had to refund those who already purchased the pay-per-view, and the cable guys didn’t pay them either. You could call the match a failure. But the former president of Turner Sports accepted that from the viewership side, the event was a success with more than a million fans tuning in, even though they failed to profit from it.
