"PGA Tour big bird didn't like this tweet"

Steve Elling reports that master Tweeter Stewart Cink heard from The Man Wednesday after Tweeting about AT&T's wretched (I can attest!) cell coverage.

That's when Commissioner Tim Finchem called to ask him to stop ragging on key PGA Tour sponsors on his Twitter site. AT&T is the title sponsor at events in Pebble Beach and Washington, D.C., and now stands as the lone sponsor of multiple events on the U.S. tour.

Cink was somewhat amused by it all. Later, when he got to the course, he was asked by another tour official to take down the posting, which he did. Eventually.

The offending Tweets:

Comments

[Kevin]

I can sympathize with Cink. I have a Blackberry Bold running on AT&T, and service is really mediocre. Cink probably gets the same message I do when I try to access the internet from some spot "Data connection not available - try again from a different spot" or something like that. Amazing that iphone partnered with AT&T and their crappy network.

[thusgone]

that's funny, i never heard tiger bitch about the performance of his buick. . .

[bsoudi]

Goofy corporate suits don't realize that AT&T will probably look worse because of this than because of Cink's tweet. Plus, it's not like he said anything people don't know -- a recent study showed that the biggest thing people in the U.S. hate about their iPhone [which Cink uses] is AT&T coverage [55%!].

[Scott]

He may have been referring to the iPhone's lack of MMS. When someone sends you an MMS message, you get a text with a link, a message id, and a password. You have to go to that website and put the credentials in to see the barely recognizable photo of a beautiful sunset.

[Vince Spence]

I wanted an iPhone and borrowed a friends to check AT&T reception at my house. Rotten, Nada. Zero. Zilch. I have a few little things I do from home and need at least basic coverage and I wanted to use Apple as I have for everything else and combine my phone and iPod.

Finchem & AT&T should have just shut up. It would have disappeared. Now it's being blogged throughout the world. Are they really that stupid? Do they understand that just because Stewart has 750,000+ followers, only a small percentage saw the actual tweet.

[Zelda]

I side with the tour on this one. Cink should put his Tweeter where it won't tweet anymore.

[Pete the Luddite]

I thought that the players were independent contractors. Why can't he provide a personal opinion, even if it has to do with a sponsor for another tournament during the year and not this one?

[Bob S]

You gotta love freedom of speech but that doesn't mean you don't face consequences with your spoken word.

And iPhone users and Apple (unofficially of course) will blame AT&T for poor coverage but the radio on the iPhone is not very good either ...

[Scott]

I think Stewart will be fined for this one. But we will never know as fines are not made public.

Section VI-D in the PGA Tour’s player handbook reads, “It is an obligation of membership to refrain from comments to the news media that unreasonably attack or disparage tournaments, sponsors, fellow members, players of PGA Tour.”

Does Twitter count as a comment to the news media?

[Taylor Anderson]

How in the world was Cink's comments in any fashion an unreasonable attack or disparage against AT&T? He stated a fact - he didn't have coverage - then pointed out that he can't believe that in NYC, he would have spotty coverage.