BBC Ready To Give Up Open Championship Coverage

Ewan Murray reports the inevitable: BBC will be ready to give up their Open Championship rights after this year's edition at St. Andrews.

Sky Sports takes over UK coverage in 2017.  The news left BBC as a two-year lameduck.

The rights to American coverage are currently held by ESPN, but those rights beyond 2017 are due to be decided any day.

Fox Baseball Viewers Just Love Hearing About The U.S. Open

I'm not sure bringing a a USGA President into the booth of an MLB game with his searsucker and hurling his "Jr." designation is the way to cool-up the U.S. Open's move to Fox, but then there I go again thinking this is about the golf instead of branding the USGA!

Sure, Brad Faxon, who loves his Red Sox and could do baseball banter with the announcers while promoting the upcoming debut telecast from Chambers Bay would have been the logical choice. But Brad's not on the Executive Committee and just months from becoming even more irrelevant than ever!

I can't embed the full response because of Squarespace's inability to fix Twitter issues and I'm limited in the number of obscenities visually available in a month, but you can view the Fox fan's reaction to having their compelling Dodgers-Cardinals game interrupted here. But here's a sampling (thanks reader Sean for spotting):

Rugby Dude: BBC Gave Up The Open Due To Small Audiences

The Telegraph's Hannah Furness quotes Eddie Butler, plugging his new book as voice of The Beeb's rugby coverage, suggesting that BBC did not put up a hard fight to keep The Open Championship due to audience size.

Furness writes:

Speaking about his new book The Head of Gonzo Davies, Butler, the BBC's voice of international rugby, said: "There is a will to protect the Six Nations, which for most of my working life was not considered jewel by the BBC.

“It was something the BBC did, but rugby was a very arcane, esoteric sport which nobody really understood. Until the BBC did some market research and found ten million people watched it.

"The moment they started to take the Six Nations seriously, they've actually given it their full attention and are going to protect it as best they can.

"They're certainly going to protect it harder than they protected the Open golf, which has gone from the BBC. They didn't defend that with much vigour because not many people watched it.

"All those Sunday afternoons of the Open title being decided, across the land not many people watched it.

"But there are things the BBC will fight hard for."

The Open's rights have gone to Sky Sports, with the American rights current up for grabs in a sudden chase literally out of the blue, even though ESPN is signed through 2017.