Tuesday
Dec072010
The Ramifications of Sunday's Impressive Chevron Rating
The most impressive thing about the Chevron final round 2.7 rating, a smidgen higher than this year's Open Championship: the event was up against the NFL.
The most unfortunate ramification: it underscores the power of Tiger, likely inspiring the PGA Tour to lean on his star power, without digging a little deeper to improve the "product" for the long term benefit of the tour and the game.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010 at 11:58 AM 19 Comments | in 2010 PGA Tour, Golf and Television, Tiger Woods
Reader Comments (19)
The Print Media - constant articles, whingings etc negative and positive on Woods,
The TV Media - Only showing Woods and his playing partners during a round. There were 9 groupings on Sunday and from the telecast, you would not have known that -pathetic
The Players -They all need to step up and show consistetnly good and winning golf. They can't just win once and then don't show up for the rest of the year or years. Media hyping does not make a great player, a player becomes a great player by winning all the time, winning Majors
Finally, do you remember how Woods became such a great player and to be known globally.
Golf is and will be a niche sports- the average fan, who is different from a football or basketball or baseball fan, cannot truly relate to playing pro golf -(look at the players) therefore players have to draw them in by, otherworldly playing, not looking like the cookie cutter golfer, on course flair and charisma, and moxie. In Summary the player has to stand out in his play for the casual fan to watch.
Too many long commercial breaks and the same commercials time after time....Tiger hits a drive...quickly show a couple other shots... cut to 3+ minutes of commercials...Tiger approach shot....go to commercials..put out...commercial. If you are not a golf fan there is no way you can watch this straight....too boring.
Since I'm rolling...How in the heck is the PGA Tour a non-profit when the 90th least successful member makes $1M and the 150th least successful employee makes $500K?? The retirement plan is flush to say the least. Normally a very high % of revenue goes to the charities, not the "labor", If a "normal" non-proift made payouts like this it would shutdown.
http://dynamodata.fdncenter.org/990_pdf_archive/520/520999206/520999206_200812_990O.pdf
How about sports fans just wanting to see if the most dominant golfer of all time is close to making a comeback? How about knowledgeable golfers wanting to see what his "new motion" looks like and is he going to stick with that new putter? . . . In the wide world of sports these actually are big stories - bigger even than whether 'them Cowboys' battle back to a .500 record.
As for Geoff's observation (The most unfortunate ramification: it underscores the power of Tiger, likely inspiring the PGA Tour to lean on his star power, without digging a little deeper to improve the "product" for the long term benefit of the tour and the game.), I'm sorry, but I just don't see this as being accurate. The Tour has done a good job of hyping the 20 somethings that have started to win in Tiger's absence, but this is a relatively new phenomenon. The Tour was in a difficult position with its most dominant player ever caught in the biggest feeding frenzy that sport has ever seen and even puffing up the resumes of the other players won't change the fact that Tiger is the best player ever and that is who the fans want to watch. He's like Michael Jordan squared.
One plays golf, a compound verb; one does not "golf".
This usage (golf as a verb) was an affectation of the English upper classes around the turn of the twentieth century as in
"Golfing, old chap? Lovely day for it, what?"
"Oh no, Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondley*, old sport, I'm tennising, actually, and Hermione's croqueting: I'm afraid my golfing's** quite appalling, by Jove!"
* pronounced Fanshaw-Chumley
** a very unusual structure: the gerundive form of a non-verb, a "synthetic" gerund perhaps?
Surely everyone knows all this!
No linguistic snobbery intended, but using golf as a verb is nearly as bad as "burglarize", or "incentivize".
But it's not very important!
However, to set my mind at rest, I did look up the OED, upon your kind suggestion, and "golf" is indeed listed there as a verb. No comment is made as to its correctness. The OED prides itself these last 20 years or so on reflecting the changing everyday usage of the words in the language, taking no view on the appropriateness of that usage. I see the word "staycation" is an addition to the latest version, for example. Who on earth past the age of reason would use such a word? And there are thousands more of similar, "slang", "street" provenance.
So "golf" is present as a verb to reflect a common (but not necessarily correct) usage, which is fair enough.
Even the OED however does not appear to altered the meaning of gerund.
And all this is really, really, really unimportant. But it does get us to discussing something other than Tiger Woods's transgressions.
He used women as a verb