Love him or hate him, Tiger Woods made a lot of you watch the Wyndham
For those of you that hate watching Tiger Woods, the inside advice to get the media to stop writing so darn much about him was simple: stop clicking on him.
And, as Woods struggled throughout this season with several career-worst rounds in the 80s, many of you did — or at least much less than you did when he was still winning golf tournaments on the reg’.
However, the 14-time major champion provided compelling theater this past week at the Wyndham Championship, climbing to the top of the 36-hole leaderboard with Tom Hoge in what turned out to be a must-win situation to complete and 11th-hour bid to make the PGA Tour playoffs. Woods failed in that quest, but still posted a T-10 in Greensboro for his best finish of the season. The tease was enough to get a lot of you to pop the channel to CBS over the weekend and see if Woods could pull off the improbable.
The final round of the Wyndham delivered a 3.9 Nielsen rating, a 143 percent increase over last year’s final round, in which Camilo Villegas came back to win. The rating also is the best for a non-major on any network since in May 2013 when NBC garnered a 5.7 rating for Woods’ win at The Players. The rating was also the highest for a non-major on CBS since Woods’ win at the AT&T National in July 2012, a day after a derecho closed Congressional Country Club to fans and most volunteers.
By comparison, the Jason Day-Jordan Spieth battle on Sunday at the PGA Championship drew a 4.4 rating.
So, we’ll keep on writing about the guy, at least for a little while longer.
Ryan Ballengee is a Yahoo Sports contributor. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.
