On the morning after the big feast, with tryptophan still coursing through my veins, I woke early to indulge in a form of consumption the pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving would not have recognized: live-streaming golf on a personal device.
What a difference a few decades make.
More than 40 years ago, in an era when Vin Scully still called the shots, I’d tuned into the inaugural Skins Game on a small black-and-white in my college dorm room, fiddling with rabbit-ears for better reception. Now the event was playing on my laptop, beamed through the ether on a platform owned — fittingly for Black Friday — by the largest online retailer in the world.
Sports is commerce and commerce is sport. Always has been. That was plain enough in 1983, when Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Gary Player pegged it at Desert Mountain in Arizona. That maiden Skins had its sponsors, its signage, its corporate imprint. But compared with Friday’s iteration — the 2025 Capital One Skins Game — it felt as quaint as a trip to the mall. The entire purse back then was $360,000 — about one-fourth of what the final hole was worth this time around — and the whole enterprise had the air of holiday escapism. You tuned in for the golf but also for the desert sun and the banter among four aging legends. Though that first Skins was taped, edited, and aired over two days, it still gave you the sense of stumbling onto something unscripted in the lull before December.
Then it went away. After 2008, the event disappeared for 17 years, a hiatus long enough to skip an entire generation of fans. The decision to bring it back marked a departure from so much televised golf these days, which, with its TGLs and YouTube influencer tourneys, aims so openly at younger generations. This Skins was more like a nod to greybeards, a gentle stroll down memory lane.
The broadcast leaned into that nostalgia. It opened with highlights from the inaugural edition — retro graphics, Sansabelts, a silver-haired Arnold Palmer — as if inviting us to remember not just the four-man competition but the era that framed it. Interviews with players from generations past punctuated the coverage. Annika Sorenstam rang in to remember when. So did Fred Couples, who relayed an endearingly out-of-time moment by revealing he’d offered to handle 1st-tee introductions until he realized the event was in Florida, not Palm Springs.
If anything, all the backward glancing helped to throw the present into sharper relief. Couples summed it up best: in this event, you’re not really worried about how you play. All you’re paying attention to is the money. As a fan, you could prioritize the moolah, too, by placing a live wager on the action. DraftKings had cameos during commercial breaks.
None of which was reason to begrudge this year’s cast. Xander Schauffele, Tommy Fleetwood, Shane Lowry and Keegan Bradley are immensely likable players still in their primes, still capable of putting on shot-making shows. There was a bit of that. Bradley played steadiest and walked off with the most skins. A rusty Schauffele was shut out but won the entertainment category with a droll sense of humor and a dead-on, impromptu Sam Burns impression.
For all its throwback content, the event also had some recent history to draw from in the form of the Ryder Cup, which added a dash of spice to the banter. Lowry couldn’t resist a playful jab at Bradley: “I have just spent the last few months breaking Keegan Bradley’s heart,” he said after draining a birdie putt to halve the 2nd hole. Every viewer knew the context, no matter their age.
The commentary, meanwhile, was mostly syrupy, appropriate for a televised confection, though it could have done without some of the sugar-coating. Peter Jacobsen, an affable presence and a veteran of many hit-and-giggles himself, tried to talk up the intensity of the nerves, as if this were the Masters and not a light-hearted payday. As if Fleetwood hadn’t winged in last minute from his home in Dubai and teed it up without bothering with a practice round.
On top of any jet lag, he had to get up early to make his tee time, not because golf fans were clamoring for dawn-patrol skins, but because the event needed to clear out before the Bears-Eagles game kicked off. Even big-money fourball matches are chicken feed compared to the economic force of the NFL.
Do I sound like an old grump?
I don’t mean to. Mostly, what I’m feeling is melancholy, which shouldn’t be a shocker. In helping us recapture the way things used to be, nostalgia also highlights what we feel we’ve lost. I’m not naive. I don’t believe the early ’80s was an age of innocence, or that Jack and Arnie weren’t also in it for the money. Was the world back then really all that different than as it today? Probably not. But I’d seen less of it. Come to think of it, maybe what I was missing most was my own youth, something no amount of skins could ever buy me back.
