WGC HSBC Champions: Tee times, TV schedule, and how to watch Round 1 online

Let’s get weird and watch late night golf from the best in the world at the year’s final WGC.

The World Golf Championships, in theory, make a lot of sense. It’s an opportunity for the multiple tours across the world to hold joint events and showcase the game in a series of tournaments that are supposed to be more prominent than your week-to-week grinds. They should occupy their own space — not nearly as important as a major, but with loaded fields and big purses that make them worth watching and more important than other tournaments. It seems like an easy win. They should be an unqualified success.

Well, the fields are loaded and the cash is immense, but they still lack sizzle, especially among the diehards who follow golf closely and would want to get up for these kind of enhanced tournaments. One reason is they’re “world” golf championships in name, but it’s a U.S.-dominated series. Only one of the four events, until this year’s move from Miami’s Doral to Mexico City, was held outside the United States. The PGA Tour, the American-based operation, also controls them and while they count as European Tour events, there’s a clear understanding that it’s a PGA Tour show (that was obvious last year when the two could not agree on a date during the Olympics summer, and the Euro Tour just went ahead and held its prominent French Open the same week as the WGC Bridgestone in Akron).

Overall, they just still carry the vibe of sanitized no-cut money baths that have minimal authenticity and no history. The players will always show up because there’s just too much cash on the line and you get free world rankings points. Just by playing, you’re going to take home a nice paycheck and a bump in world ranking points, even if you finish dead last by almost 50 shots (as Steven Bowditch did last year at Doral).

This week is the traditional WGC event that’s always taken place outside the United States, the WGC HSBC Champions. It’s held at Sheshan International in Shanghai, which has become the annual home to this event. It’s the biggest event in Asia, one that HSBC backers wanted to make the continent’s “major.” The purse used to be slightly smaller than the other three WGC events, but it is now even with those three other championships ($9.75 million).

These fall months after FedExCup are referred to as the “silly season,” when players go for cash grabs and play different formats across the globe. The PGA Tour has tried, and rightly so, to use the time to gain a foothold in Asia and promote the game in some of those nations. We now have what’s unofficially called the “Asia swing” with the Tour bouncing from Malaysia to last week’s inaugural CJ Cup in Korea, the first ever PGA Tour event in that country, and concluding with this week’s WGC in China.

The PGA Tour should be making efforts to promote the game in Asia and get talents from those countries more involved in the game. There should be even more events than just this three-week fall stretch. Going to Asia is the right thing to do, and this is the right time on the schedule to do it. I just wish they could come up with some better formats and better courses. This is the second week in a row where there’s no-cut and an absurd amount of money available. It’s also on a pretty mediocre course rife with design flaws that might inhibit the audiences we’re trying to attract from getting into the game. Let’s try new formats, expand the fields, and rotate to different courses in different regions. It feels too sanitized and gets monotonous year over year, which should never be the case when taking prominent events to Asia.

Now that I’ve highlighted some flaws in this week’s setup, I’ll change course and tell you why you should watch. It’s primetime golf! It’s a loaded field! There’s little golf worth watching for months! While this WGC could be better, it can still be fun to stay up late and watch the top talents play on the other side of the world.

Here are your tee times for the opening round — all tee times U.S. ET for a first round that starts Wednesday night back in the United States:

NO. 1 TEE:

• 8:50 p.m.: Xinjun Zhang, Matthew Griffin, Gavin Green
• 9 p.m.: Andrew Dodt, Daisuke Kataoka, Charles Howell III
• 9:10 p.m.: Michael Hendry, Mike Lorenzo-Vera, Yanwei Liu
• 9:20 p.m.: Wesley Bryan, Graeme Storm, Yi Cao
• 9:30 p.m.: Ashley Hall, Phachara Khongwatmai, Haydn Porteous
• 9:40 p.m.: David Lipsky, Shugo Imahira, Hyunwoo Ryu
• 9:50 p.m.: Matthew Southgate, S.S.P. Chawrasia, Brandon Stone
• 10 p.m.: Peter Uihlein, Poom Saksansin, Wenchong Liang
• 10:10 p.m.: Adam Hadwin, Kyle Stanley, Paul Dunne
• 10:20 p.m.: Hideto Tanihara, Tony Finau, Russell Henley
• 10:30 p.m.: Ashun Wu, Thorbjorn Olesen, Bill Haas
• 10:40 p.m.: Jhonattan Vegas, Alexander Levy, Branden Grace
• 10:50 p.m.: Brian Harman, Bernd Wiesberger, Ross Fisher

NO. 10 TEE:

• 8:50 p.m.: Chez Reavie, Fabrizio Zanotti, Zecheng Dou
• 9 p.m.: Hudson Swafford, Richie Ramsay, Chan Kim
• 9:10 p.m.: Lucas Glover, Kiradech Aphibarnrat, Richard Sterne
• 9:20 p.m.: Ryan Fox, Scott Hend, Patrick Cantlay
• 9:30 p.m.: Si Woo Kim, Patrick Reed, Phil Mickelson
• 9:40 p.m.: Tommy Fleetwood, Adam Scott, Alex Noren
• 9:50 p.m.: Henrik Stenson, Jason Day, Brooks Koepka
• 10 p.m.: Jordan Smith, Marc Leishman, Francesco Molinari
• 10:10 p.m.: Rafa Cabrera-Bello, Xander Schauffele, Thomas Pieters
• 10:20 p.m.: Daniel Berger, Charl Schwartzel, Pat Perez
• 10:30 p.m.: Haotong Li, Tyrrell Hatton, Matthew Fitzpatrick
• 10:40 p.m.: Matt Kuchar, Justin Rose, Paul Casey
• 10:50 p.m.: Jon Rahm, Hideki Matsuyama, Dustin Johnson

Golf Channel will have the primetime and overnight coverage for the U.S. audience. Like I said, this can be a fun alternative event to watch in primetime or stay up for if you have no obligations to attend to in the real world the following day. Let’s get weird and watch late night golf. Here are your coverage options for the opening round:

Wednesday/Thursday's 1st round coverage

Television:

10 p.m. Wednesday to 4 a.m. Thursday — Golf Channel

9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET Thursday — Golf Channel (Replay)

Online streams:

10 p.m. Wednesday to 4 a.m. Thursday-- Golf Channel simulcast stream

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We’ll update this post throughout the week with scores, new tee times, and highlights as the final WGC of the year proceeds in China.