Video: When Golf Carts Burn And Melt

I'm not sure of the course or if the videographer is also a culprit of this video dated September 26, 2013. A future in television analysis is not in his cards.

Thanks to Douglas Han for Tweeting this.

From YouTube:

Must Read Digest Story: The Fox & The Peacock

Ron Sirak has written a lengthy, Michael Lewis-style inside look at the USGA-Fox Sports partnership and my only quibble is that the November Golf Digest story was not long enough. I highly recommend reading it before reading the analysis below.

While the average reader probably doesn't care about the insider moves analyzed here (scrolling is your friend), anyone with an interest in business, golf, common sense and television coverage of our beloved sport will find the revelations both fascinating and sad.

My kneejerk reactions:

• USGA President Glen Nager will go down as the most obtuse leader in the history of the USGA. We learn he's been obsessing about the Masters drawing a higher rating than the U.S. Open and becoming the premier event in golf. His reaction is to then steer the USGA television contract to a network that has little chance of drawing a higher rating, especially when the price tag paid will require a longer broadcast and more commercial inventory, factors which should drive down the rating.

• The money people tied to this deal think that driving up the rights fee is a great thing for golf. Yet there is never any suggestion the USGA required an investment in technology to enhance the quality of the broadcast? Or reducing commercial time, which the Masters and The Players have proven as the best way to make for a great viewing experience. The extra money derived from the deal will merely go to some investment account and fans will watch more commercials on a network that has never televised golf. 

• Fox Sports was in the minds of those handling this much earlier in the process than we realized, with Sirak reporting that the USGA met with Fox representatives for the first time April. 

• The role of USGA Executive Director is now very much secondary to the 2-year lame duck presidency post. In this case, the lameduck president is someone who not only does not appear to understand some very basic things about a golf telecast, but who also may have fudged the truth in the story (more on that later). Current ED Mike Davis very much works for President Nager, and based on this story, the ED job may even be less influential in the organization than someone like television contract negotiator Sarah Hirschland who steered the USGA to Fox Sports. This is definitely a change for the USGA which used to be a golf organization first, but which comes out of this story sounding like a corporation where golf is just the widget in question.

• The people who stuck the USGA with this deal for 12 years will be gone by the start of the deal, or within a year or two of Fox Sports taking over. As Sirak portrays them in this story, none are lifers who love golf or care about the hard core fan, but instead are obsessed with some mythical "broader audience" that only Fox Sports knows how to tap. (Meanwhile, brace yourself for yet another year of Fox Sports drawing a record low World Series number unless the Dodgers and Red Sox meet.)

My only real quibble with the story was the lack of connection made between the timing of the announcement and Fox Sports 1's negotiations with cable companies over its subscriber fee. While most of us thought the USGA was announcing the agreement during the PGA Championship to stick it to the PGA of America for not supporting the anchoring ban, subsequent reporting and common sense suggest the rush to announce the deal was all about help Fox Sports 1 landing more money per-subscriber.  Armed with the USGA deal on August 7th, Fox Sports 1 was not able to get past $0.23 per subscriber for its August 10th launch, which is less than the Golf Channel currently gets.

In other words, the rush to sign the deal yielded nothing for Fox Sports and a whole lot of resentment toward the USGA.

Here are some of the highlights of the story, starting with Nager's mesmerizing quote about what drove him to push for a new broadcast partner. (And this for those of you who didn't go to law school).

"I told them that if you went back to the '70s and looked at TV ratings and other indicia of what makes a championship great, the U.S. Open was considered the premier major championship in golf," Nager says. "And that if we looked at indicia today, the Masters is considered the No. 1 major in golf. I said I wanted to work with a media partner that had a proposal to elevate the U.S. Open and the other USGA championships and the USGA as a governance organization." (The weekend rating of the 1973 U.S. Open beat the Masters, 9.0 to 8.4. The next year, the Masters edged ahead and began widening the gap after that.)

The only indicia I see where the U.S. Open competes with the Masters in the rating department is with 4 minutes of commercials an hour and a slightly shorter telecast. That ingenious standard stems from a year-to-year deal like the Lords of Augusta have, something Frank Hannigan explained in his letter on this topic. Glen Nager just tied the USGA up for 12 years with Fox Sports, meaning there is no incentive from competitors to offer such a broadcast.

Genius.

Sandy Tatum, who negotiated previous USGA deals and is a former USGA President who knows his stuff, touched on the contradiction in Nager's fantasy of a "premier" event clashing with exhorbitant rights fee:

"I would judge this as a transforming event," Tatum says of the FOX deal. "The challenge is very significant. How are they going to be able to justify the money they spent without increasing the commercial clutter of the telecast? That will destroy the telecast."

The story outlines the cultural change within the USGA that led us to this mess. Not surprisingly, Walter Driver's name comes up but so does Jim Hyler, the president immediately preceding Nager. And then there are the folks who steered and spun the current Fox Sports deal:

On Sept. 1, 2011, Joe Goode, a 15-year veteran at Bank of America, was named as managing director of communications and made a member of the senior management team. This was a tipoff of what was to come: The USGA was loading up leadership that did not come from the world of golf but was more experienced in the business world.

A week later, Hirshland left Wasserman Media Group for the USGA. And a month after that, the USGA nominated Nager to take over as president in February 2012, a spot most thought would go to Jay Rains. (Rains, considered close to Fay and NBC, was removed as vice president in 2011.) Nominated to the Executive Committee was Stevenson, who in 2007 sold his sports marketing and TV consulting firm, OnSport, to Wasserman.

The story explains the surprise appearance made by Arnold Palmer during NBC's 30 Rock presentation to the USGA group, which my sources say ended in a standing ovation for The King. There was also this terribly embarrassing moment for the USGA's legal firm considering the overall tone of the story, which suggests Fox was very much in their hearts all along, if not the choice from the outset.

Palmer gave an impassioned appeal that he believed it was in the best interest of the game to keep the package with NBC/GC. One of the lawyers from Proskauer asked for Palmer's autograph.

Casey Wasserman, head of the Wasserman Media Group that consulted on the deal (and full disclosure, who I have worked for at the Memorial Tournament the last two years), is cited as having been part of the process. His comments to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts at the annual Allen & Company gathering in Sun Valley are in dispute, but either version does not give a good impression of how the USGA/Wasserman side viewed the seemingly strong presentation of the incumbent.

Asked if Casey Wasserman told Roberts the USGA deal was going to go to auction—a move that would have altered NBC/GC's negotiating strategy. Jordan, the Wasserman executive, says: "That is absolutely not true. That sounds like sour grapes to me. I know Casey had a conversation with Brian, and he told him, 'You need to get serious about this, or you'll lose it.' "

Personally, I wouldn't be throwing around the term "sour grapes" in the same sentence as Brian Roberts, one of the most powerful men in media and corporate America. And second of all, the quote Dean Jordan does attribute to his boss Wasserman also doesn't look great when NBC, at least at this point in Sirak's version of events, has made such a huge offer that ESPN has already backed out. ESPN!

Now, here's where it becomes apparent that the USGA's representatives either (A) have no class (B) were set on Fox Sports, (C) were in a hurry to help Fox Sports 1 get a higher subscriber fee, or most likely (D) options A, B, C.

All bids were to be in by 5 p.m. Monday, Aug. 5, and NBC/GC upped its offer to a little more than $80 million and expanded its plan for massive promotion of the U.S. Open.

There was silence for 48 hours.

Then shortly after 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 7, NBC's Lazarus got a phone call from Nager breaking the bad news. FOX, which had never televised golf in the United States—though Sky Sports, also owned by News Corporation, does golf overseas—had the exclusive rights to the U.S. Open and the rest of the USGA properties for 12 years beginning in 2015. "The board made its decision on Wednesday morning, and our president informed NBC sometime Wednesday," Hirshland confirmed.

"Deals like this don't happen this quickly," says one former USGA staffer.

"Only four or five people knew what our offer was," says an NBC official. "When you're a longtime incumbent, you get some sort of hometown prerogative. Would we have matched? I don't know. They chose not to give us the opportunity. FOX ended at $93 [million a year], NBC just north of $80 [million]."

"With the benefit of hindsight, we're not sure the process was handled in the way that it was presented to us," says NBC spokesman Greg Hughes.

So (A) the USGA gets an extra $13 million a year by going with Fox, yet loses Golf Channel as a promotional partner (we don't need no stinking core audience!) and worse, appears to have had little integrity in the process when the spokesman is suggesting something fishy took place. 

When you are a non-profit rulemaking body integrity is kind of important, no?

Finally, if you come away from the story thinking President Nager had no imagination, think again. Picture the scene he paints as the deal was announced...

Nager was attending a PGA of America dinner in Rochester, N.Y., with many other golf dignitaries, when the news release hit. "Several people came over to congratulate me," Nager says. "One said it was the biggest thing to happen to golf since Tiger won the 1997 Masters."

That anyone in the golf's executive ranks thinks anything they do in the negotiating room equates to something like Tiger Woods winning the 1997 Masters, should probably be under Nurse Ratched's care.

That he expects us to believe people sought him out at a PGA of America dinner, much less congratulated him on a 12-year television deal announced on the eve of that organization's major, speaks to a certain emperor-not-wearing-anything-but-a-blue-blazer situation.

There was also this credibility blow to Nager and press release crafter Joe Goode:

The sentence in the USGA release that annoyed NBC and ESPN was this one: "The game is evolving and requires bold and unique approaches on many levels, and FOX shares our vision to seek fresh thinking and innovative ideas to deliver championship golf." Mike McQuade, who produces golf for ESPN, and NBC's Roy privately bristled at what they perceived as a knock on their ingenuity.

"We were disappointed that the USGA chose to disparage our production and the production of every media company [CBS, ESPN, Turner, Golf Channel, NBC] that covers golf instead of just being candid in choosing money over mission," says NBC's Lazarus.

Barely more than two hours after that press release about bold new directions went out, a former NBC executive now at FOX, David Neal, called Roy to talk about jumping to FOX. A close friend says Roy viewed the wording of the press release as "reprehensible" and told Neal thanks, but no thanks.

That's right, producer Tommy Roy, who couldn't be counted on to bring a bold, unique, fresh or an innovative approach for NBC's future USGA coverage, was offered the producing job by Fox Sports within hours of the deal's announcement.

Thumb's up to Fox Sports for recognizing Roy's quality work. There is hope for them yet.

The USGA? Not so much...

NBC sources say the 70 hours of coverage FOX will give the USGA's big three events is half that of what NBC/GC promised.

"False in every respect," Nager says. "The only one who would know that is us since we are the only ones who have both proposals. In terms of contractual commitments for our Opens—the men's, the women's and the seniors'—FOX proposed more, and for our amateur championships FOX proposed substantially more."

Of course, Nager would never actually show anyone the proposals and the parties involved will not violate confidentiality agreements to prove what they otherwise believe to be the truth. So we'll have to take Nager at his word.

After reading this story and the delusional dream of Nielsen superiority over the Masters, few will believe a word the USGA President says. The indicia suggest even fewer will take him seriously.

This Week In Golf Channel Ratings: 175,000 Average Viewers

Son Of The Bronx posts the Golf Channel ratings for the week of September 16-22, which means the Monday finish of the BMW Championship helped make up for lackluster numbers for the Tour Championship later in the week.

Still, the network averaged 175,000 viewers compard to 97,000 the previous week.

The top 10 was led by the BMW spillover coverage on Monday, followed by Thursday and Friday of the Tour Championship. Nice to see so few people find the ResetCup interesting and the format so un-playoff-like, not that this would prompt the tour to admit the thing isn't finding an audience.

1 PGA TOUR: BONUS  Mon  10:00AM- 2:51PM  0.6  792,000

2 PGA TOUR  Fri  1:00PM- 6:00PM  0.6 734,000

3 PGA TOUR  Thu  1:00PM- 6:00PM  0.5  664,000

4 PGA TOUR  Sat  10:00AM-12:00PM  0.4  507,000

5 PGA TOUR Sun  12:00PM-12:55PM 0.3 483,000

6 GOLF CENTRAL-POST Thu  6:00PM- 6:30PM  0.2  326,000

7 GOLF CENTRAL-POST  Mon 2:51PM- 4:00PM 0.3 304,000

8 GOLF CENTRAL-POST  Fri 6:00PM- 6:30PM  0.2  300

9 PGA TOUR  Thu 6:30PM-11:30PM 0.2  287

10 PGA TOUR  Fri 8:30PM- 1:30AM 0.2  228

And in the go-figure department, Friday's Champions Tour outdrew Sunday's coverage, both tape-delayed.

12 CHAMPIONS TOUR Fri 6:30PM- 8:30PM 0.2 189,000

14 CHAMPIONS TOUR  Sun 7:00PM- 9:45PM 0.1 172,000

"As golf enters its own Moneyball Era, every number counts..."

It's been a longtime coming, but the Moneyball mentality has finally come to golf, reports Tim Rosaforte in this week's Golf World.

Most notably, Brandt Snedeker and Zach Johnson are attributing some of their recent success to more numbers crunching by outside sources, and it's not all ShotLink stats helping the players prepare. Snedeker won't reveal much other than the role Mark Horton has played.

"The lines [between a good and great season] are so thin, so I'm trying to find any edge I can get," Snedeker said. "Mark's done a great job for me of understanding who I am as a golfer. We, as professional golfers, have a tendency of thinking we're strong in particular areas, and that may not be the case at all. He does a great job of identifying what I need to work on, what my strengths are so I play to those, and what my weaknesses are, so I can play away from them."

At East Lake a year ago, Horton worked his computer in the clubhouse, and Snedeker executed a game plan that resulted in a sweep of the final playoff event and the FedEx Cup title for an $11.44 million payday. At the end of the year, Snedeker said Horton was the difference for him in jumping from 38th to ninth on the World Ranking.

Johnson was less secretive about his work with Peter Sanders, whose Shot By Shot website is part of the numbers crunching process.

Sanders, who works out of his house in Connecticut, contends that ShotLink stats are "myopic" and "one-dimensional answers to multi-dimensional questions." The blunt comments point to the theory that identifying tangible areas of improvement that can truly help improve scoring comes from a more focused exploration of the data.

Video: Ouimet And Lowery 50 Years Later

Nice find by the USGA to post this film of Francis Ouimet and caddie Eddie Lowery fifty years after making history at The Country Club, talking about the 1913 U.S. Open.



The anniversary of their win was Saturday and The Country Club celebrated the moment in grand style.

AJGA Averages 4:17 In 2013

Ryan Lavner sums up the AJGA announcement on Morning Drive to tout their 4 hours, 17 minute 2013 pace of play average.

According to AJGA Executive Director Stephen Hamblin, that was six minutes faster than last year and much of the improvement could be attributed to the system of first player holing out heading to the next tee.

At the AJGA level, the tournament committee designates six holes for timing checkpoints, where volunteers are stationed to record both the threesomes’ gap time relative to the group ahead and to the overall time par for the course. In recent years, this system has been duplicated at the college level.

The AJGA said its quickest tournament was the Kansas Junior at Buffalo Dunes, where the average pace of play was 3 hours, 50 minutes. The fastest round of the year was 3 hours, 23 minutes, while the low round of the year played in less than four hours was Wes Artac’s 10-under 62 at the Genesis Shootout.

The interview:

Must See Video: In Play's Francis Ouimet Segment

In case you missed it, here is In Play with Jimmy Roberts' feature hosted by Rich Lerner on the anniversary of Francis Ouimet's historic U.S. Open win.

There's some tremendous historic footage in this, including Ouimet talking years later well as scenes of Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer in their offices reading old newspaper clippings, paying tribute to this monumental event without paying tribute in the usual sitdown interview way. Powerful stuff.

There is also footage from Saturday's The Country Club reenactment of the historic day artfully woven into the feature. The only complaint and it's a big one: it seems they were in a hurry to fit the In Play half-hour format. As with too many of these quality historical pieces by Golf Channel, this should have been longer, with more on Saturday's reenactment and Ouimet's odd relationship with the club.

Update on 2013-09-25 15:28 by Geoff

**GolfChannel.com has posted a bonus segment on the reenactment:

Finchem: "I can't find too much wrong in what we're doing."

Commissioner Vader appeared on Morning Drive for da full hour and if you like an arrogant, dismissive and a steady monotone, this was television gold!

As usual, the Commish put out all of the fires of the current tour, of which there are many created by the thirst to fill every week on the calendar with PGA Tour golf. (Kudos to Williams, Hack and even Finchem fishing buddy Rolfing for picking sensitive topics).

A few quotes to remember from Finchem.

On players skipping playoff events: "I don't see it developing as some kind of trend."

He did concede that the FedExCup points have "too much volatility" but summed up the current state of the tour by saying, "I can't find too much wrong in what we're doing."

Gary Williams left the interview (AFTRA rules forbid listening to Commissionerspeak for an hour straight) and Finchem fishing buddy Mark Rolfing took his place, and the topic of rules came up. Unfortunately, the one really bizarre moment was not part of the Golf Channel uploads posted below.

In a nutshell: when the topic of Tiger's ridiculous final round drop at The Players came up, Finchem revealed his axe to grind with Johnny Miller for basing his analysis on Mark Rolfing's initial reaction and the blimp shot, whereas Finchem took the evidence in and as he said this morning, declared to himself, " no problem here."

How anyone could watch that situation play out and not even concede it looked bad, is pretty disturbing.

Anyway, Finchem's rambling answer on simplifying the rules where he essentially says the PGA Tour has no desire to get into the rules business and that the Rules of Golf, as written, are "not that far off now."

On fan rulings he tries to explain why they aren't the end of the world, but doesn't go so far to say that getting rid of phone-in help would create the perception of cheating or incompetance.

Adam Scott Apologizes To Aussies For New Calendar Year Schedule

This Ben Everill story is just the kind of thing that hurts Viagra sales in greater Ponte Vedra, but mostly it makes me sad that the PGA Tour's "calendar year" schedule welcomed by no one but the four fall events, has this kind of residule effect.

The gist? Adam Scott is essentially apologizing for the PGA Tour taking quality Australian golfers away from visits to their home country events so they can play early fall PGA Tour events.

'Playing the PGA Tour is very tough, it's a fine line week to week and it's players' careers at stake,' Scott said.

'You can easily be off the tour and it would be unfair for these guys to jeopardise their careers for a couple of events at home.

'It is too much to ask.

'I am in a fortunate position where I can play and I am happy about that.'