When you come to think of it that is the secret of most of the great holes all over the world. They all have some kind of a twist. C.B. MACDONALD
Outside of the USA I can't imagine the three-part NY Times story on ESPN to be of much interest, but in light of the recent Fox Sports deal to acquire USGA events along with ESPN's role in broadcasting the Masters and The Open, and Golf Channel's place in the cable "bundling" world, this three-parter is a must for sports business fans.
Parts one and two of the stories by Steve Eder, Richard Sandomir and James Andrew Miller deal mostly with college football, while part three gets into ESPN's future and the potential for ending the bundling of channels that lets ESPN take in $6 billion before ever selling a single ad.
But Matthew Polka, the industry lobbyist for small cable operators, said, “On à la carte, there was no stronger opponent than Disney and ESPN.”
And ESPN has no more stubborn nemesis than Mr. McCain. This past spring, with cable rates and ESPN’s monthly fees continuing to rise, he revived an effort aimed at undoing bundles.
“Why do I pick on ESPN?” Mr. McCain said in an interview in May. “I’m not picking on them. But they are the most glaring example of what people are required to watch — I mean pay for — even if they never watch it.”
And there was this, which could either be seen as justifying the overpaying for sports rights, or...
Meanwhile, companies like Google, Sony and Intel are planning virtual cable services that would be delivered on the Internet. They could lure consumers from traditional pay television as low-cost alternatives to traditional pay TV while also competing for major sports properties when ESPN’s contracts eventually expire. Mr. Skipper said he would make deals with these upstarts, but only on ESPN’s terms: they must take all of ESPN’s offerings, not just the ones they want.
With the rise of new competition come questions about the fate of existing customers.
Consumers are fleeing pay TV at a quickening pace: 898,000 in the past year, nearly twice the number in the previous year, the analyst Craig Moffett said. And in the past two years, ESPN has lost more than one million subscribers.
What’s more, ESPN ratings plunged 32 percent in the quarter that ended in June.
Mr. Skipper’s task — very different from that of predecessors who built ESPN into a powerhouse — is to negotiate a deeply uncertain future.
“It’s a high-class problem,” he said.
Ed Sherman interviews Dan Hicks about taking over announce duties for Notre Dame football and also addresses the "kick to the stomach" of losing the US Open to Fox starting in 2015. But on the minds of most is sidekick Johnny Miller's status, whose passion for the US Open was undeniable.
From the Sherman Report where he posts the interview, and Sherman's Tribune column.
I feel worse for (Johnny Miller) than anyone. He gives so much emotion to that championship. After I talked to (producer Tommy Roy), I called Johnny. You could hear the emotion in his voice.
Miller will be 67 next year. Is there any chance he does one final Open in 2014 and rides off into the sunset?
I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think Johnny is too good to just walk away because we’re not doing the Open anymore. He still wants to do some golf. Our team is tight. If the crew was breaking up, then I could see him leaving.
For those wondering if Tiger changed his assessment of a "great" year last week to include one with no major wins, Doug Ferguson's notes column says you are correct.
And it was just a year ago that Woods made his case.
It was at The Barclays in 2012 that he was asked about three PGA Tour wins and whether he saw it as a good year or some other description.
''Well, I see it as absolutely it's a good year,'' Woods said a year ago. ''But I think winning a major puts it into a 'great year' category. I've said that countless times prior.''
Or he used to, anyway.
Media bashers won't buy the argument, but Karl MacGinty lays out an eloquent case for why Rory McIlroy will continue to have weird little off-course dust-ups until his break-up with Horizon is settled.
His 'Black Friday' at the Honda Classic in March, when McIlroy walked off the 18th fairway and abandoned the tournament after completing just eight holes of the second round, is an obvious case in point.
His honest, heartfelt answer to reporters was that his head simply wasn't in the right place which earned respect and sympathy throughout the game.
Yet the drama turned into an enduring PR crisis when, within the hour, a statement was issued citing wisdom toothache as the reason for McIlroy's withdrawal, sparking a "mental or dental" which festered for five days until he (sort of) "cleared the air" in a media conference.
In fairness, Horizon were, I understand, in the process of appointing a full-time media and PR liaison officer for McIlroy when they were stunned by news last May of the golfer's decision to set up a team of relatives, friends and close confidants to manage his own affairs.
As lawyers from both sides try to settle serious contractual issues, McIlroy is in a managerial 'twilight zone', but until the legal situation is resolved, he cannot officially appoint his new team.
I would never advocate that the world of golf take any lessons from a $250 million+ golf course that looks like something out of a really bad cheesy 80s video game, but since Liberty National produced a super leaderboard for the 2013 Barclays it would be unwise to pass on yet another opportunity to point out how much better the game is without contrived, harvested, man-made rough.
John Hawkins on many topics in this week's Hawk's Nest, also addressed Liberty National's "overhauled" reputation which, in his "18 years covering the PGA Tour full-time, no course has overhauled its reputation as quickly and dramatically as Liberty National did last week."
Fifteen holes were altered in some form. Many of the putting surfaces were expanded and recontoured, which is a nice way of saying they dug up the elephants, but the problem in ’09 had more to do with all the humps in the original Tom Kite/Bob Cupp design.
Phil Mickelson has perfected the art of signing autographs, delivering the money quote and talking to drooling fans, all at the same time. “Imagine Augusta National with 24-yard-wide fairways and [heavy] rough,” he assessed. “The setup was fine once they turned the rough into a first cut. That brought out the strength of the golf course, which was the greens. You could play shots into them.”
With the (questionable) efforts to make golf a year-round cash grab at the expense of the seasonal ebb-and-flow other sports enjoy, Tim Rosaforte spotlights another bizarre twist that has arrived with calendar-year golf: players changing coaches at any given time.
He cites the Westwood-to-Foley move, the not so surprising Watney-to-Anderson move (nice going Butch!) and the very surprising Donald-to-Cook move.
"Used to say: 'We'll really focus on this in November,' " Foley said Sunday morning. "You can't do that anymore."
Players are looking for the type of impact Matt Kuchar gained from going to Chris O'Connell in 2006 for the one-plane swing, or in the case of Gary Woodland, some short-game counsel from the coach of the game's best short-game player. By going to Pat Goss on a cold rainy day in Chicago the week of this year's Masters, Woodland started learning the fundamentals of bunker play that paid off with a win at the Reno-Tahoe Open and a T-2 in the Barclays.
"It wasn't a rewrite," Goss said. "It was like writing it for the first time. When he came to me, his short game was terrible."
Goss has coached Donald since his freshman year at Northwestern and will continue to help him with his short game. What has changed is that Donald no longer uses Goss as his swing coach -- a switch Goss saw coming. He sensed that Luke had lost faith "when he started trying other things on his own in another direction."
Dave Kindred with the backstory on first Masters winner Horton Smith's green jacket--given to him retroactively by the club in 1949--going up for bid.
The auction is handled by who else, but Green Jacket Auctions.
"Of the so-called 'Original 10' jackets," Carey said, "all were accounted for except Smith's. We had kind of given up ever finding it."
Carey's company three years ago sold Doug Ford's 1957 green jacket for $62,967. Heritage Auctions two years ago sold a green jacket that may or may not have been worn by Bobby Jones for $310,700.
Lackovic, 76, a mortgage dealer in suburban Atlanta, and his brother, Tom, kept the Horton Smith jacket after the death of their mother, whose second husband had been Renshaw Smith, Horton's brother and also a professional golfer. On Horton Smith's death in 1963, the jacket passed to Renshaw, who died in 1971. For the 42 years since, the jacket has been in the Lackovic brothers' closets.
"We knew it was part of golf history," Michael Lackovic said. "But we never made a big deal out of it."
Nice spot by Kyle Porter to post Jeff Barton's ace in last week's Corley's Albuquerque Lincoln Volvo Golf Tournament in New Mexico and best of all, the crowd reaction.
Here goes...
No guest this week but plenty to talk about with Rod Morri and Mike Clayton, including The Open, the PGA, the prospects for distance regulation after the USGA TV deal, great golfers getting younger every year and, well, anything else but the FedExCup.
You can always subscribe here on iTunes or listen below:
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
