More Thoughts on the TV Coverage for the US Open
What if the leaders played a little bit worse on Sunday, and some of the guys who started out the day a few shots back played a little bit better? We'd have had a US Open in which the eventual winner was either not shown on TV at all or shown a maximum of twice.
Here's a rough estimate of how many times some of the players who finished in the top ten appeared on your television sets on Sunday:
Miguel-Angel Jimenez (+3) - once
John Merrick (+3) - zero
Carl Pettersson (+3) - six, but that's because he started so early, and they needed to fill the time between 3pm and Tiger's tee time
Eric Axley (+4) - once
Brandt Snedeker (+4) - twice, but one of the times was to explain a weird penalty that he took; the other time was a replay of a birdie putt
Heath Slocum (+4) - zero, mostly because he finished his round before 3pm, but they never even showed highlights of his bogey-free, six-under par round
It would have been terribly ironic if any of the above players had won. I also continue to wonder how the executives at the PGA Tour and the television networks can spend half of their lives wringing their hands over what their product will be like after Tiger retires, yet they seem to have no interest in giving airtime to other players. Once Tiger decides to take his yacht out for a permanent cruise, which players will golf fans know well enough to become excited about?
Here's a rough estimate of how many times some of the players who finished in the top ten appeared on your television sets on Sunday:
Miguel-Angel Jimenez (+3) - once
John Merrick (+3) - zero
Carl Pettersson (+3) - six, but that's because he started so early, and they needed to fill the time between 3pm and Tiger's tee time
Eric Axley (+4) - once
Brandt Snedeker (+4) - twice, but one of the times was to explain a weird penalty that he took; the other time was a replay of a birdie putt
Heath Slocum (+4) - zero, mostly because he finished his round before 3pm, but they never even showed highlights of his bogey-free, six-under par round
It would have been terribly ironic if any of the above players had won. I also continue to wonder how the executives at the PGA Tour and the television networks can spend half of their lives wringing their hands over what their product will be like after Tiger retires, yet they seem to have no interest in giving airtime to other players. Once Tiger decides to take his yacht out for a permanent cruise, which players will golf fans know well enough to become excited about?
posted by John Gorman at 11:41 AM
2 Comments:
Hey, NBC can't show those losers when essayist Jimmy Roberts needs his time to give us much needed back story and personal drama vignettes rivaled only to the broken-heart-surprised-they haven't-killed-themselves-already Olympian biographies.
Ha ha. Hicks - how's Bayonne playing these days?
In England, they show the majors on TV sans commercials and sans the melodrama. It's so much better. Can you come up with a device that gets us Yanks the BBC feed on our computers or something?
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