I’m going to have a nice wrap-up story in Tuesday’s dead tree edition about the AT&T National. But I’m happy to share most of the useful pieces of info here.
The six day total for attendance at Congressional was more than 194,000. That’s huge, given that last year’s tournament only drew about 107,000. Obviously, the return of Tiger helped. But the biggest factor may have been the opening rounds of Tiger and defending champion Anthony Kim on Thursday. Tiger shot a 64 and Kim shot a course-record 62. That turned heads, and led to a crowd of just under 47,000 for Friday, the largest ever in the three-year history of the event.
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Sunday’s crowd was about 44,000, the second-largest ever, and included huge packs following Woods and Tiger, who were in the final pairing together. At times, the galleries were 30 people or more deep, with a huge bottleneck around the 10th hole in particular. (Good thing Congressional widened that path along 10, or else it would have been even worse.)
Some of the loudest moments on the course came on holes 6 and hole 7, which Tiger birdied to take the lead that never relinquished.
The tournament was also good to CBS, which saw more than triple the TV ratings for the final round. The overnight ratings from Nielsen were 4.6 with an 11 share, up from 1.5/3 last year.
Ratings for yesterday peaked at 6.3 between 6 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Sunday. It was the highest rated round ever for the tournament.
CBS also saw high ratings on Saturday, when ratings doubled to 2.6.
