Celebrity Golf in Las Vegas: The Match and Beyond

Las Vegas was always going to be a natural home for made-for-TV golf. It has the courses, the broadcast infrastructure, and an audience that shows up for spectacle. Over the past several years, the city — and one exhibition franchise in particular — turned celebrity golf into a recurring event. Here's the real history, kept to what's on the record.

It started at Shadow Creek

The modern celebrity-golf era kicked off in November 2018, when The Match debuted at Shadow Creek: Tiger Woods against Phil Mickelson, head-to-head, for a winner-take-all purse. Mickelson won it in a playoff after the pair went the regulation 18 holes deadlocked. Staging the inaugural event at Tom Fazio's private MGM masterpiece told you everything about the ambition — this was prime-time golf with a Vegas backdrop, and it set the template for everything that followed.

Then Wynn became the home course

When The Match returned to Las Vegas, it found a permanent-feeling home on the Strip itself: Wynn Golf Club, the Tom Fazio course built on the site of the historic Desert Inn layout and reopened in 2018. Wynn hosted multiple editions of the franchise:

• A 2021 showdown pitting Bryson DeChambeau against Brooks Koepka, the grudge match that was as much about the feud as the golf.
• A 2022 edition that broke from tradition entirely — no professional golfers, just four NFL quarterbacks, with Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers facing Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen across a shortened match.
• A 2023 team event mixing NBA and NFL stars, pairing Steph Curry and Klay Thompson against Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.

The through-line: Wynn became, in effect, the unofficial home of exhibition golf, the convenient Strip-side stage where the made-for-TV format lived.

Why Vegas was the natural fit

No other city could host this format as easily. The talent is already in town — athletes and celebrities pass through Las Vegas constantly, so assembling a marquee field is a non-event. The broadcast and hospitality infrastructure is already built for events this size, the gambling angle gives the prime-time audience a built-in reason to watch a few holes of exhibition golf, and a Strip-side course like Wynn Golf Club means players, sponsors, and cameras never have to leave the resort corridor. The format and the city were almost designed for each other, which is why so many editions landed here before the franchise expanded elsewhere.

And then it moved on

The franchise didn't stay in Vegas forever. The next edition of The Match shifted out of state, to a course in Florida — a reminder that these exhibitions follow sponsors and storylines as much as geography. We mention it because it's accurate: Vegas was central to the format's rise, but it wasn't the permanent host.

What it did for the courses

The lasting effect of all this prime-time exposure is that two ordinarily hard-to-see courses became familiar to a national audience. Most golf fans will never get on Shadow Creek or Wynn Golf Club, but thanks to The Match they've watched holes played on both — the desert-oasis feel of Fazio's Shadow Creek, the surprising water and elevation of his Wynn layout on the old Desert Inn ground. For a city that trades on spectacle, putting its most exclusive courses on television was its own kind of marketing, and it cemented Las Vegas's identity as the place big-event golf comes to be seen.

A note on the record

We've kept this to verifiable editions and venues. Exhibition golf generates a lot of loose claims about who played where; where we weren't certain an edition happened in Las Vegas, we left it out rather than pad the timeline. That's the standard we hold ourselves to.

Play the same stages

The remarkable part for golf travelers is that two of these venues are reachable. Wynn Golf Club is bookable for guests of Wynn and Encore, and Shadow Creek opens up through MGM casino-host access. Read how that works in our guide on public versus private Las Vegas golf, or browse all 53 courses to find your own marquee round.