(For an overview of our cast of characters, click here)
Rick: Nice approach on 18 Tucker – you punk. If you’d hit it like that all day you would’ve pounded us.
Tucker: Yeah, and if my aunt had a Johnson, she’d be my
uncle. Sure I couldn’t find it for about
15 or 17 holes, but when I had to have one, I found it. Did I mention the beer always tastes better
when you’re buying – I’m good for a
Rick: Ha – oh, that’s funny – you’re killing me – you may end up with some secret sauce in yours if you’re not careful.
Walt: I’m good for Corona as well – hey, any of you boys check out the details on the new PGA Tour TV deal for 2007?
Tucker: What for – you’ll give us all the highlights, I count on you for my PGA Tour headlines. It’s just so much easier to get the relevant news second-hand than to actually go out and read it myself. Reading it and processing it is so much more work than just having it spoon-fed to me.
Walt: Apparently most of the media agrees with you – and thinks that many of us would rather have our sports news spoon fed to us, particularly when their conclusions don’t quite jibe with the facts.
Billy: Jive – did you just say jive? You gotta got off those “What’s happening?” reruns on Nickelodeon – they are putting your vocabulary in the remedial section. Now “what you talking about Willis” – there’s some classic TV.
Walt: Yeah, good call, from the show that either put you six feet under or in drug rehab – think we’ll pass on the Different Strokes Tivo season pass. Now back to our topic – the new TV contract. ABC, ESPN and USA are out – NBC and CBS now split virtually all the big-time tourneys and the Golf Channel has a 15-year deal to do the fall events and the early rounds for some of the rest. Gary Van Sickle at SI.com makes some interesting points, including that there’s a dark side of Tiger’s success in the past decade – lot less people watching events he’s not playing. For example, Tucker is still blissfully unaware that they even have a PGA tournament on Super Bowl weekend.
Tucker: There is? Well
hey, I can be forgiven – with my Patriots winning 3 of the last 4 Super Bowls
I’ve been kind of busy on Super Bowl Sunday. Where do they play – over there in
Walt: Uh, yes, but that’s not the PGA tour.
Rick: Yo, chowder-head, that’s 3 of 5. My Steelers took care of the Sea Chickens this year while your Pats watched on TV like the rest of us. So back to the topic, if Dubai’s not a PGA event why is at always the lead on SportsCenter?
Walt: Maybe because Tiger’s playing over there. I don’t seem to remember it being found on SportsCenter when Tiger wasn’t in it. Dubai, of course, is one of those scourge tournaments that pay, ahem, appearance fees.
Tucker: I’m sure like 17 people watched it in between offensive series – and believe me in that first quarter most of them were offensive, it stunk worse than those cattle feedlots on the 5 freeway on our drives down to SoCal. And why should they watch – Tiger’s not there and nothing exciting ever happens at tournaments he’s not playing.
Walt: Wrong again, young grasshopper, they had over 500,000 fans in person and
a fair number on TV because they’re smart enough to finish before the Super
Bowl starts. You would hope that
entertaining golf could beat some of the 10-plus hour pre-game show, and this
one was real entertaining. Three bombers
were in the last group – J.J. Henry and Ryan Palmer can move it out there a
bit, but the star that emerged from Phoenix was
the 23 year old from
Rick: Wow – 354 – sounds like my kind of guy. I didn’t see it – I actually watch the entire pre-game when the Steelers are in the big game. You’d be amazed how many things I did not know about the Steelers – thankfully that got fixed with 8 hours of game-day education. What a great investment of time on my part – OK, the web helped a little bit. So that sounds kind of entertaining – hey, anytime a guy is hitting it 263 with a 4-iron – and that’s over water, I believe – that is getting it done, even more so when it’s under final round pressure. So why weren’t people watching?
Walt: Presumably because Tiger’s in Dubai, so watching a different tournament strikes some people as a waste of time.
Tucker: Wait a minute – I remember this tourney. Tiger did play it once or twice early in his career – he made an ace there on 16, right? How exciting was that – Tiger buries it with about 50,000 people watching in that stadium seating around 16 then plays raise the rough as he approaches the green. That place was off the hook – I’ve seen arena football games with less noise.
Walt: Yeah, there’s the comparison you want – against the noise level at an AFL game – woohoo, way to set your sights high. Let’s not forget, Tiger was trailing Steve Jones by double digits at the time – Jones went on to win by 11. That was a nice little shot by Tiger, and of course ESPN runs that highlight as if it helped Tiger win the tourney and take the PGA to a whole new level of fan awareness and insanity. In reality, it probably drove Tiger out of town – less than two years later Tiger was complaining about the Phoenix crowd being too rowdy. Imagine that – Tiger complaining about the same crowd he fired up getting out of hand a few years later. Maybe tournaments without Tiger aren’t boring – maybe they’re just tournaments without Tiger but with a lot of other great players hitting some tremendous shots under pressure, like J.B.’s 263-yard 4-iron on 15. That was clutch – whether you watched it or not.
Tucker: Yeah, but J.B. can hit all the nuked 4-irons and drivers he wants – if Tiger’s not playing, he’s not going to get any kind of TV audience and he’ll be on the 48th minute of SportsCenter, right after highlights of Michelle Wie missing yet another cut in an obscure Nike event in a city you’ve never heard of unless you or your relatives live there. That’s Tim Finchem’s problem – all these youngsters, bombers, and AARP wannabes like Fred Funk win tournaments Tiger’s not playing in and expect people to watch.
Walt: Not so fast – Funk actually won the Players Championship with Tiger in the field last year.
Tucker: Which makes my point – you want people to watch, win with Tiger in the field. Want nobody to watch – win when he’s not playing.
Walt: Hold on there Sparky – Tiger only plays about 21 tournaments a year – and one of those is the British Open, so that makes 20 on this side of the pond. There are 48 tournaments on the 2006 schedule. So there are 28 tournaments that Tiger’s never going to get beaten in – for those of you that are math-challenged, that’s 58% of the tournaments!
Rick: That’s unbelievable that Finchem let’s those kind of #s happen – what kind of commissioner is that guy? He should be setting it up so Tiger plays every tournament – look at Nascar, they’ve got it set up so that there’s incentives and almost all the Nascar boys show up every week. Now, admittedly, that could just be because many of them are southern rednecks who never get tired of checking out the trackside talent, which is apparently easier to get to know when you’ve actually raced a vehicle instead of just standing around. If Nascar can do it, why can’t the PGA?
Walt: First of all they might not be rednecks, they could just be horny. There’s quite a bit of talent at the tracks, if you know what I mean. Second of all, Nascar built a brand around the events – the PGA has been all about personality marketing, closer to the David Stern model, which is great when Larry and Magic are going at it in the finals almost annually, then hand it off to Michael who plays in the finals 6 out of 8 years, skipping only two years for that little fling with baseball. Nowadays, with the Spurs and Pistons looking like mini-dynasties, it’s really tough to try and shove Kobe and KG and the other score-a-bunch, don’t-ask-my-shooting-% idiots down the public’s throat when they’re missing the playoffs or bowing out early.
Billy: So you’re saying the PGA chose the wrong model – they marketed personalities when they should’ve been marketing events? I can understand that – sort of, I still need more to drink to really comprehend it – waiter, scotch and soda, rocks, stat!
Walt: You’re pretty much on top of it Billy – nice work. But it’s not the PGA’s fault – they were trying to market the whole tour with all the “these guys are good” commercials – you know the ones, like Lefty hitting that wedge to David Robinson – see, the Spurs can do cool commercials! – for a dunk at the buzzer.
Billy: Thanks waiter – glug glug glug – ahhhhhhhh, lunch of champions. So wait a minute, that sounds like personality marketing to the dummy sitting in my chair – they’re building campaigns around the players. Shouldn’t they build them around some of the great courses like Riviera or Pebble Beach or Bay Hill? The courses always show up and never get injured – geez, I’m a sales guy but even I know that much about marketing.
Walt: Well, Billy, you’re smarter than the boys at PGA headquarters – they went with the player campaign. Another great alternate would have been to go with a campaign around the great finishes – Allenby’s 3-wood in a 6-man playoff at Riviera, Shaun Micheel’s 7-iron to ice the PGA Championship, and so on. If you sell the locations or the old finishes, you don’t have to worry about who shows up.
Billy: Now of course if you sell that stuff you’re only going to get the hard-core golf fans like us – wooh, hey, excuse me, sorry about that, let’s not light any matches on this side of the room for a while, OK?
Tucker: What’s that – oh, man, that’s putrid – whatever you ate, don’t ever eat it again. I think something died inside you and has been waiting to get out. I’ll … just … respond from over here where it’s relatively safe. Gotta agree with Billy – those types of campaigns aren’t the answer – they just get the guys who watch golf anyway. I thought the last couple of TV deals were huge. And if this Tiger-skewed ratings stuff isn’t the PGA’s fault, then whose is it?
Walt: You’re right – those campaigns are going to get the hard-core golf guys watching, and the last two TV deals were huge. That’s part of the problem, and why the growth rates on this recent contract are so much smaller. The media early on decided that the PGA was wrong – “these guys” may be good, but Tiger’s better for ratings. So they basically ignored a bunch of great performances from guys like David Duval, Mark O’Meara, Retief Goosen, and Ernie Els to pump up the Tiger hype machine. This got casual golf fans to watch and drove the TV rates through the roof – the ’97 deal was negotiated after Tiger’s break-out win at Augusta – the next contract after Tiger’s slam. Fortunate timing for Tim, but meanwhile the networks were losing a ton of money because the rest of the tournaments had low ratings that more than offset the ratings when Tiger played and was in contention. The PGA didn’t want Tiger to skew the ratings – but the media made sure he did. Third time around the networks were getting smart – they knew they’d been losing big and didn’t feel like getting pounded by Finchem again. Meanwhile Finchem knew that he was tired of playing roulette – imagine having to sell a TV deal on a year where Tiger’s 0-for-4 at slams, or actually misses a cut at one.
Rick: Misses a cut – yeah, like that’s gonna happen. His streak is at like 140-something.
Walt: Not so fast there Rick – you’ve been drinking more than Billy, thankfully without the after-effects. Tiger’s consecutive cuts streak ended at 142 at the Byron Nelson last year, and just for good measure he missed at Disney as well, said something about wanting to show Elin his monorail, not sure what that’s all about. Remember, a couple times he’s been dangerously close to the cut line, including that one tremendous up-and-down on the 9th at Augusta to make the cut on the number – how tight do you figure the sphincters were on the CBS brass as he lined up that putt?
Billy: About as tight as mine before I let out that air biscuit?
Walt: I’ll say this – you’re not a funny drunk, just a smelly one. So long story short, Finchem got sick of betting on Tiger’s performances so he could stick it to the networks. So he took the long-term deal, shrunk networks covering it to spread the big tournaments out better – we all know things split better 2 ways than 3. In short, Tim went from Russian roulette to master of his domain in a hurry. Now he’s able to invest with NBC, CBS, and the Golf Channel in some of the campaigns I was talking about and try to make the events bigger than the personalities, which is the best way to play it. More like Nascar, less like the NBA and the PGA of the last 10 years.
Billy: I still think he’s better off making Tiger into Magic and Phil into Larry – worked for David Stern.
Walt: Works in basketball because only two teams make the finals – golf tournaments are so deep these days that anyone can win them – see Ben Curtis, Shaun Micheel, and Michael Campbell for recent entrants into the “one-hit wonder” club. Tim and the networks are making the right call – might be the only call they could make, but they made it.
Billy: Yeah, well if you'll excuse me I'm going to go check out some websites of Tiger's wife and master my own domain.
Walt: Wherever the over-sharing line is, you just crossed it. Taxi - take this man home!
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