Hyperbole Extends Now to Golf

I was watching the Waste Management Open in Phoenix yesterday... Well, I was watching it in San Diego; the tournament is being held in Phoenix. Anyway, NBC was carrying on about the tournament drawing the biggest crowds of any golf tournament in the world, which it does, and then they got carried away and started putting up graphics to claim that the event draws by far the biggest crowds of any sporting event ever, of any kind, anywhere in the nation.

They put up a graphic showing attendance for this year's event at 689,000 and pointing out that the largest crowd ever to watch the Indianapolis 500 was a paltry 350,000, but they failed to mention that the golf event is four days while the auto race crowd is cited for a single day event.

Not everyone who attends a golf tournament goes all four days, so it would be incorrect to assume that the daily attendance in Phoenix is 172,250, but the highest single day crowd is not much bigger than that, being about 204,000.

It's certainly far smaller than the crowd of 350,000 which showed up in one day to watch the Indianapolis 500.

They also failed to point out that, since the event is always held on NFL Super Bowl weekend, their biggest daily crowd of 200,000+ is on Saturday. That crowd almost entirely evaporates on Sunday, dropping to 50,000 or so, when 75% of those who attended on Saturday stay home on Sunday to watch the Super Bowl.

They made quite a point of saying that their attendance of 689,000 is more than twice the population of Scottsdale, which hosts the tournament and is home to 246,000 people. That little bit of hyperbole suffers when one realizes that the tournament actually draws about 200,000 people, many of whom attend the tournament multiple times, and that means there are actually more than 40,000 fewer people coming to the tournament than the population of Scottsdale.

The narrative really bites the dust when it is pointed out that Scottsdale is a contiguous suburb of Phoenix, and that the Phoenix metropolitan area has a population of over 4 million.