While some have pointed out that the Augusta National Golf Club could be making a lot more money off the Masters Tournament, one thing the club has always done well is to deliver high television ratings. Every year, the final round of the Masters typically rates as the most-watched single golf event of the season. With much of the drama taken away from the broadcast as Scottie Scheffler held the lead on the back nine Sunday and Cameron Smith hitting into the water on the 12th hole, some might have wondered if viewers would stay away from network coverage.
They didn’t.
According to CBS, the final round of the 2022 Masters was the most-watched golf telecast on any network since the fourth round of the 2019 Masters, when Tiger Woods famously won his fifth green jacket. An average of 10.173 million viewers, which is a seven percent increase over last year. The final hour of the telecast saw Scheffler, the No. 1 ranked player in the world, win his first career major. That is a seven percent increase over Sunday’s broadcast of the 2021 Masters.
At its peak, 13.16 million viewers were tuned in between 6:45 and 7 p.m. Eastern to see the final moments of the tournament.
To give those numbers some perspective, the final round of the 2021 PGA Championship, which featured a duel between Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka on the Ocean Course at Kiawah, was watched by 6.583 million viewers.
The week started with record-breaking viewership numbers for ESPN, the network that carried coverage on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. ESPN’s live telecast on Thursday averaged 2.8 million viewers, a 21 percent increase over last year. It was ESPN’s largest first-round audience since 2018. The following day for Friday’s second round, an average of 3.5 million viewers tuned in to ESPN to see if Tiger Woods would make the cut. That figure was a 31 percent increase from 2021’s second round of Masters coverage.
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