Dodson On Drum

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Jim Dodson recalls the role Bob Drum played in creating the modern grand slam and also offers this, which got me thinking...

Bob Drum continued being, well, Bob Drum -- literally the loudest, largest, hardest-drinking character in the press caravan bumping along the Tour Trail and various by-waters of the game for the next two decades -- until a CBS producer had the crazy idea of making Big Bob Drum the color man on a celebrated broadcast crew that included the likes of Jack Whittaker and Ken Venturi.
Legendary CBS golf producer Frank Chirkinian later told Drum's wife, "M.J., this could be the best idea I've ever done -- or the worst."
Almost overnight, at age 68, however, six-foot-three, 290-pound Bob Drum became a large-than-life TV star -- a mountainous, rumpled, oddly comforting presence who spoke the language of the everyday golf fan. For eight years on a two-minute segment called "The Drummer's Beat," Drum's gruff and salty Everyman commentaries on the vagaries of golf and life in general -- most of which sprang from his oversized head only minutes before airtime and were recorded in one take -- comprised some of the most entertaining moments in golf broadcasting. He was eventually nominated for an Emmy.
Wouldn't it be fun of CBS posted some of these online or even put a DVD together of the best of Bob Drum?

"The British Open will be an all-cable major beginning in 2010"

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From Thomas Bonk's LATimes.com column, reporting on the 2008 British Open television ratings:
The overnight ratings for ABC's final round coverage Sunday fell 14.6%, from a 4.1 to a 3.5.
And this is surprising, particularly the dollar amount, which sounds awfully high.
The British Open will be an all-cable major beginning in 2010 and be carried only on ESPN, ending a 50-year association with ABC, according to SportsBusiness Journal. The seven-year deal is not yet finalized but reported to be around $25 million a year.

BARKLEY: "Live blog? What's that?"

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BarkleyPhone.jpgRick Chandler at Deadspin will be live blogging Charles Barkley's play at the Tahoe celebrity event for NBCSports.com He checked in with Barkley at the range and the round mound of rebound did not know what a live blog was! Then again, I don't know if anyone has ever lugged a laptop around a golf course tracking someone's round. Blackberry maybe, but a laptop?

Deadspin featured this shot of Barkley on the range, accompanied by three friends named Corona. And msnbc.com is sharing this cruel video of his swing for all to study that mind-boggling pre-impact hesitation move.


"Barely registered"

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Thomas Bonk with Monday's overnights for the AT&T National and the worst titled LPGA event ever:
In a word: bad. The overnight ratings for Sunday's fourth round of the AT&T National on CBS were down 48%, from a 2.9 to a 1.5. The third-round overnight ratings were down 35%, from a 2.0 to a 1.3.

Meanwhile, the overnight ratings on CBS for the weekend's LPGA event, the P&G Beauty Northwest Arkansas Championship, barely registered. Saturday's rating was a 0.7 and Sunday's rating was a 0.6.

Berman: ESPN Would Be Doing Public A Disservice By Asking Him To Shelve "Ground Control To David Toms" And Other Not-Funny Knicknames

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Jay Posner bravely talks to Chris Berman about the ESPN legend's uncanny ability to make 6 hours of U.S. Open telecast seems like 60 hours in a Guantanamo detention cell.

We talked about his passion for the Open – which he has been covering since 1986, including the last five years as the play-by-play voice on Thursday and Friday – but also the criticism and why he believes it's unjust.

“First of all,” he said, “it's unfair because if you're on the air for six hours and heaven forbid I say, 'Ground control to David Toms,' you're writing it like I said it 500 times. Not the case.”

One Ground control to David Toms was one time too many.

Perhaps the biggest criticism I hear about Berman is that he puts himself above the event he's broadcasting. When Maxim recently named him No. 1 on its list of the 10 worst broadcasters in sports, author Will Leitch – who founded Deadspin.com – wrote that Berman “never fails to shoehorn his trademark nonsense into a game.”

Said Berman: “It's unfair if people say I'm trying to make it my show. Then you haven't paid attention. Then you haven't done me fair. 'Cause I'm not. But I'm trying to be me and have a good time with it as someone who's an avid follower of the game; someone who's like most of the audience who are watching, a 16-handicap give or take, not a 3 (handicap) or a scratch.

“I would think that's someone loaded for bear before I even come out of the woods, and I can't help that.

Loaded with dread was more how I think of it.

“It's the only way I know how to do it. There's a lot of ways to announce it; I'm just being me. I'm not trying to overdo it at all. If anyone thinks I come in to overdo it, you're not being fair and you're not listening.”

No, I believe you. Just wish we would get more stuff like this.

John Skipper, ESPN executive VP of content and a supporter of Berman's, said Berman “is aware of a balance about being himself and the event. But part of what you want on the event is Chris Berman.”

Because it's just the little old U.S. Open, it needs that extra push!

“The U.S. Open guys love him on it,” Skipper said (a USGA spokesman confirmed that). “They position themselves as the people's golf tournament and Chris is the personification of that. . . . He's knowledgeable and passionate. For us it's a no-brainer (to use him).”

Really, there's nothing I can add to those sentences.

IBF Replaces Clampett; TNT Press Releases Will Never Be The Same

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They're surely rejoicing in the TNT PR department at the news that they'll never have to put together press releases compiling the best of Bobby Clampett (for samples, go here, here, here and here).

Former British Open Champion Ian Baker-Finch Joins TNT PGA Championship and British Open Championship Coverage

1991 British Open Champion returns to Birkdale for network’s coverage
 
Turner Network Television (TNT) announced today a multi-year agreement with former British Open champion Ian Baker-Finch to join the network as an analyst for its coverage of professional golf, including the British Open, PGA Championship, PGA Grand Slam of Golf and President’s Cup.  Baker-Finch will join the TNT golf stable of Emmy® award winning host Ernie Johnson, analyst/course reporter Bill Kratzert and course reporter/essayist Jim Huber for the network’s golf events including the two majors, British Open Championship, PGA Championship and PGA Grand Slam of Golf.  Baker-Finch will continue to serve as an analyst for CBS Sports' golf coverage.

"I am excited to be joining the TNT golf team for such high quality events as the PGA and Open Championships, President's Cup and the PGA Grand Slam of Golf," said Baker-Finch. "I look forward to working with Ernie Johnson, Bill Kratzert and Jim Huber as well at some of golf's premier events this year and hope our coverage will help bring the viewers a little closer inside the ropes."

“Ian’s personality, experience and knowledge of the game will be tremendous assets to the TNT golf telecasts and the fans at home,” said Jeff Behnke, executive producer, Turner Sports.  “We are pleased to welcome Ian to the Turner Sports family and look forward to televising another year of dramatic golf events.”

Baker-Finch’s crowning achievement was winning the 1991 British Open at Royal Birkdale, site of this year’s British Open Championship.  He turned pro in 1979 and won the first of his 16 championships in 1983 at the New Zealand Open in Auckland. His first major victory in Australia came at the 1987 Australian Matchplay Championship at Kingston Heath. Among his credits, he has won on all four major tours, U.S. Tour, European, Japan and Australasian Tours, including the 1988 Australian Masters, the 1989 Colonial Invitational (USA) and the 1993 Australian PGA.

TNT holds the top spot in airing more hours of major championship golf than any other television network airing 63-plus hours of British Open (July 17 – 20), PGA Championship (August 7 – 10) and the PGA Grand Slam of Golf (October 14 – 16) coverage, along with the President’s Cup in non-Ryder Cup years.  The network earned an Emmy® in the Outstanding Live Sports Special category for its coverage of the British Open in 2005, which included Jack Nicklaus’ farewell to major championship golf from the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland. 

"I was pretty surprised."

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Buried in Jim Gorant's weekly roundup for SI Golf Plus:

A players' meeting was held last week at Wachovia, and conversation on two topics became animated and went on for more than a half hour each: slow play, a perennial problem; and near-unanimous criticism of Golf Channel commentator Kelly Tilghman. Said one player in attendance who asked not to be identified, "I was pretty surprised."

 

Comcast Exec Admits Golf Channel Needs Work

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In discusing the hiring of consultant Mike Weisman, Comcast exec Jeff Shell talks to the New York Times' Richard Sandomir about Versus and Golf Channel.

Look at Weisman nailing three MBA buzzwords in the first quote while weaving it into a beautiful metaphor. Or is that a simile?

“This is an opportunity to leave some footprints in the sand and build brands and networks,” Weisman said.
According to Comcast's Shell, the Golf Channel's presentation needs Weisman's touch. 
“We don’t have someone responsible for everything that goes on over the air,” Shell said. “If you look at what goes on over the air, it’s respectable, but not memorable. We want it to be memorable.”
And...
 The Golf Channel has a studio program, “Golf Central.” “It’s good, but not good enough,” Shell said.

That's what happens when you pay people next to nothing.

One issue that Shell said was being worked on was occasionally leaving an early round of a PGA Tour event before it had ended to go to the studio. “It’s a contractual obligation and reasonably easy to fix,” he said.

Really? Somehow I think if it were an easy fix it would have been addressed already. 

"We should have caught that for prime time and didn't."

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Steve Elling, the Hogan, Snead, Nicklaus and Woods of press room cussing, a true master of the medium, says these fancy new microphones picking up saucy language may turn out to be a very, very...bad thing?

But still, there's no reason the masses in the audience must be involuntarily subjected to Watson's screed, right? Some citizens, not to mention the FCC, take a dim view of this sort of speech.

Someone has lived in Orlando way too long. This is interesting:

Oddly, the Golf Channel rightly saw fit to bleep out the objectionable language in its post-game news show, where the disagreement between Watson and Elkington was examined in detail, but let the objectionable language fly live and nationwide in the raw replay. That's irresponsible or lazy, if not a bit of both. According to Golf Channel spokesman Dan Higgins, there is no fabled seven-second delay on the broadcasts and the re-airing of the comments without editing was a mistake the network acknowledges.

"That's something we have to improve upon," Higgins said Monday. "We should have caught that for prime time and didn't."

I seem to recall the "crawl" during the rebroadcast was offering up a teaser about the incident. Hmmm...

If you didn't catch Bubba apologizing to God, country and every volunteer who has ever been subjected to an entertaining on course spat between millionaires, here it is on PGATour.com.

"No, guys, it's normally bigger than this, I swear!"

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march14_feherty_299x199.jpgConnell Barrett talks to David Feherty about his bike accident. While Feherty is in top form comically, this caught my eye:

I was writhing around, unable to breathe. I said to myself, 'If I pass out, am I coming back?' I remember feeling that if this is it for me, I'm not unhappy. I've done all right. I was ready to go, if it was going to happen. I wasn't afraid. I also remember a woman stopping. She came over and held my hand, asking, "Can you hear me?" She stayed with me until the paramedics came. I couldn't talk, but I could listen, and I remember her voice. I haven't been able to find out who she is yet. If you're out there, call me. I'd love to say thank you.

"Let's listen."

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mar25_tigersteve_299x297.jpgGolf.com's Michael Bamberger offers a fun behind-the-scenes look at why NBC's sound dudes are picking up more conversations. Now if we could only get you know how to shut his trap for a second we might hear them.
For years, the Woods-Williams discussions were off-limits. But late last year, NBC producer Tommy Roy started to notice a change. During the FedEx Cup playoffs, he had two sound men, Andre Carabajal and Frank Ricciardi, take turns working Tiger's group. Each carried a new model microphone — the Sennheiser 816, replacing the Sennheiser Mke2, for you audiophiles — that permitted them to pick up conversation from about four or five feet away, instead of three. When it comes to Tiger's personal space, every foot counts. Steve Williams wasn't moving them out.

The payoff came at Bay Hill. Carabajal, tall and lanky but unobtrusive, was assigned to the Woods — Sean O'Hair group. On the 16th fairway on Sunday, Woods and Williams were throwing grass and analyzing a make-or-break shot when Roy said into the earpieces of all his announcers, "Let's listen."
Shut up Johnny!
Johnny Miller stopped talking, and we heard Tiger say to Stevie, "If that flag changes, let me know." It was an insight, among other things, into how much Tiger trusts his caddie. Then on 18 Williams threw grass and told Woods to add 13 yards to a 167-yard shot. Tiger didn't say a thing. We watched him process the information and then play a low, fading five-iron from a place another golfer might have smashed a seven.