Artificial Intelligence comes to the Masters

GM. This is Easy Pars. The golf newsletter that loves teeing off on a cool spring morning. Nothing better, right?

Here’s a look at what’s happening in the Pro Golf World:

• Tiger takes a championship in a whole new way

• CBS breaks PGA vs. LIV silence

• AI reporters coming to the Masters?

Tiger runs off with a PGA tour championship

If you watched LIV’s inaugural event at Mayakoba (which you probably didn’t because hardly anyone did). Well, there used to be a PGA tour event there.

As you might imagine, the Tour wasn’t too happy with Mayakoba being friendly with LIV. So they took their business elsewhere.

That elsewhere? Cabo.

Cabo San Lucas—at the Tiger-designed El Cardonal Course—to be precise.

In case you didn’t know, Tiger has spent his time away from the golf course… designing golf courses. And he’s pretty successful at it. So far he’s designed nine courses with his firm.

And all of them get rave reviews.

This year, the World Wide Technology Championship will take place at the first course he designed. It will be one of the two events held in Mexico.

Wouldn’t it be great if Tiger played in a PGA Tour event held on the golf course he designed while taking a hiatus?

Or would it be too much of a golf-ception?

Tense Dinner at The Masters? Maybe.

Have we mentioned, the Masters starts next week! Here’s our sentiments reflected in a hilarious tweet from the No Laying Up podcast:

But will there be drama?

The media has been trying to convince everyone there will be. One of the Master’s representatives even mentioned that it might get “tense” at the table during the Champions Dinner event.

But according to most players, that just isn’t the case.

If you recall Cam Smith’s comments from the last EasyPars newsletter, there simply isn’t any animosity between LIV and PGA Tour players.

Recently, Bubba Watson also shared a similar stance.

That said, we can definitely see things getting awkward at the dinner. But probably awkward in the same way as showing up to Thanksgiving dinner in a Trump 2024 hat. (Don’t lie, we know some of our readers have done it.)

On the one hand, it’d be great for ratings if a leotard-clad Phil Mickelson came out from the clubhouse with a folding chair while Bubba Watson rose from a coffin on the first tee, like a scene straight out of a 90s Monday Night Raw.

“Next up on tee #1; Bubba Watson” —

But so far, things are looking…surprisingly normal.

E.’s take on it: At Easy Pars, we don’t want drama. BUT if things get heated and it comes down to a true PGA vs. LIV battle — we’ve got the popcorn ready.

What about news coverage?

A couple of huge announcements have golf fans on edge this week.

First, CBS gave a non-answer, answer on whether or not they’ll leverage or even acknowledge the LIV exists.

CBS Sports Chairman, Sean McManus, promises “We’re not going to show any different treatment for the golfers who have played on the LIV Tour than the other golfer…we’re not going to put our heads in the sand.”

What exactly that means? Don’t know.

Rise of the golf bots

IBM just announced they’ll be using AI to help provide more reporting on the Masters tournament.

What does that mean? Well, primarily it’ll be used two ways:

• To provide spoken commentary on golf clips

• Real-time “hole-by-hole projections” to predict the scores of players

It’s not really a welcome change, but we’ll see if it’s cool. Inspired by the announcement, the Easy Pars team used one of those new-fangled AI art generators to paint a picture of the upcoming Augusta event.

Here’s a couple of the images it came up with:

Meme of the Day

1 down, 2 to go, 😂.

That’s it for today, golf fans. Stay tuned for Monday’s issue and then a special issue on Wednesday covering all we know about the Masters (with the EP spin!).

Later gator,

E.