Set Your DVR's For Cape Kidnappers And Stevie's Announcing Debut

Word is the world's richest luggage looper was so good, NBC's rethinking their 11:30 Tonight Show transfer from Leno to Conan.

Just how good was Stevie Williams on the Kiwi Challenge, airing Saturday and Sunday at 4 pm. EST? So good, you won't care that you are getting to see the spectacular Renaissance Golf Design effort at Cape Kidnappers.

Just look at this endorsement from executive producer Jim Walton Jr., courtesy of the saints at Brener-Zwikel:

 Steve Williams was fantastic. One of the great things to look forward to are his pieces traveling around on a helicopter the Robertsons provided. He started in Auckland, then went to the 90 Mile Beach in the north and shot a piece in the rainforest with the oldest and largest living tree in the world. He also released a rare kiwi bird on a preserve the Robertsons set up at Cape Kidnappers.

Okay, I swear I didn't touch Stevie's press release remarks:

On what stood out for him during his debut: “The knowledge and statistics that the commentary team had on every player.”

On how it went for him: “I really enjoyed the experience and have learned a lot about another part of the game.”

Interesting story: “On the thirteenth hole at Kauri Cliffs the moment Hunter Mahan's second shot left the club I knew it was well over the green and my first thought was that it was a bad yardage. But these days, caddies who work for this calibre of player don't make mistakes with yardages. I made the call on air which was a poor call on my behalf, however it was the first thought in my head.”

Ever?

ESPN Secures Rights To Open, R&A "Envisaging The Platforms"

I love that they are doing the Walker Cup when it's in the British Isles. 

Okay ladies and gentleman, roll up your sleeves and tell us about those platforms and other delivery mechanisms. 

For Immediate Publication

THE R&A AND ESPN REACH WIDE-RANGING EIGHT-YEAR AGREEMENT FOR THE OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP

All Four Rounds on ESPN Beginning in 2010 - Expansive Content for Digital Platforms and Expanded International Rights

13 November 2008, St Andrews, Scotland:  The R&A, the organiser of The Open Championship, and ESPN have reached an eight-year agreement that will place all four rounds of The Open Championship live on ESPN beginning in 2010, it was announced by George Bodenheimer, President, ESPN, Inc., and ABC Sports and Peter Dawson, Chief Executive of The R&A. 

The new pact will also provide broad and comprehensive rights for digital platforms; expanded television and digital media rights for ESPN International; and extensive same-day weekend highlights coverage on ABC. 

ESPN will televise 34 live hours of Championship play over the four days and produce six hours of encore highlights coverage over the weekend, to be broadcast on ABC.  The coverage on ABC will extend The R&A’s relationship with ABC beyond half a century.

Bodenheimer said: “One of the most venerable of all sporting events has embraced the 21^st century worldwide media landscape, and we’re thrilled to showcase The Open Championship like never before.  The scope of this deal and the enhancements we obtained offer us tremendous opportunities to serve The R&A and golf fans around the world through any device.”

Dawson said: "It is all important to The R&A that we preserve the traditions of The Open Championship while at the same time ensuring that golf fans are able to enjoy modern state-of-the-art coverage of the event.  We know just how much ESPN respects The Open's heritage and we are very excited by their many innovative plans to cover the Championship across the whole media spectrum, both in the United States and internationally.  We look forward to a long and productive relationship."

Alastair Johnston, IMG Vice Chairman, who led the negotiating team representing The R&A said, "We had to consider not only the financial terms but The R&A's overall mission to promote and develop the game of golf to an evolving global audience.  Envisaging the platforms where a younger generation could be positively influenced to experience The Open Championship over the next decade was a significant factor in assembling this arrangement with ESPN."

Envisaging the platforms...take that Finchem!

The deal also includes exclusive US coverage of all rounds of The Senior Open Championship, which is governed jointly by The R&A and the PGA European Tour, and coverage of the next two Walker Cup matches when contested in the United Kingdom (2011 and 2015).  In all, there will be 90-plus television hours and 40-plus hours of live coverage on ESPN360.com and ESPN Mobile TV.  ESPN will provide unprecedented live coverage of the Championships, including the first and second rounds of The Open Championship, which will begin at 5 a.m. ET.  

Wow...now the EST folks will understand what us PST types were going through. Kind of. 

"We are disciplined in our approach to negotiating programming rights"

You can't blame Turner for pulling out of the R&A sweepstakes when the dollar figure is at $25 million, but the timing of their press release seems odd. Perhaps they want to make sure ESPN knows that no one else is bidding? 

Don't the folks at Turner understand we all lost interest in them when they sent Bobby Clampett packing?
 

Turner Sports Declines to extend TV rights with the R&A for The Open

Turner’s 7-year deal with the R & A culminates with TNT’s coverage of the 2009 British Open Championship from Turnberry, Scotland, July 16 -19

Statement from David Levy – President of Turner Sports

"We are disciplined in our approach to negotiating programming rights. While we were unable to reach terms on future rights that made economic sense for our company, we respect and value the R&A and our partnership of the past six years, and look forward to TNT's final year of covering The Open."

Turner Sports will air approximately 28 hours of the 2009 Open Championship on TNT during its four days of coverage. TNT will also continue to air approximately 17 hours of golf’s final major, the PGA Championship, with this year’s event taking place August 12-16, from Hazeltine National Golf Club inChaska, MN. TNT will also air in 2009 the PGA Grand Slam of Golf, the toughest event in the sport to qualify for with only that year’s major winners receiving an automatic invitation. The 2009 PGA Grand Slam of Golf will be held at the Port Royal Golf Course on Oct. 20 & 21. Turner Sports also operates and manages two of golf’s premier Web sites in PGATour.com and PGA.com. 

HSBC Final Round Airing Sunday Night

As exciting as the PGA Tour and Nationwide events were Sunday, that impressive leaderboard at the HSBC event in China was even more attractive until rain delayed Sunday's final round.

Word comes from the Golf Channel has scrambled to work out the details to bring us the final round of the HSBC tonight, Sunday, following the broadcast of the Nationwide Tour Championship with only a 30 minute interruption for the Sprint Postgame. My cable listings are a disaster, but it appears the start will be pretty soon.

And if the leaderboard doesn't excite you, it's worth recording just to hear the weird crowd reactions and fireworks explosions. If only Monty were playing...

"Anywhere between 0.2 and 0.3"

Since Thomas Bonk's Monday golf column was eliminated as part of the L.A. Times' hunt for irrelevance, we no longer get the weekend television ratings. Of course, Golf Channel's are almost never reported, even by Bonk, but Doug Ferguson managed to slip in this number in a story on the Fall Series:

Really, there should be no surprises in the Fall Series because the players who might be expected to win aren’t playing. Of the seven multiple winners on tour this year, none has teed it up in America since the Tour Championship.

That doesn’t mean the Fall Series is a waste of time—certainly not to those scrambling to keep their jobs.

Sure, television ratings are abysmal (anywhere between 0.2 and 0.3), which is to be expected during football season. Then again, they weren’t that much better a few years ago when these tournaments were the final stops on the way to the Tour Championship.

“If you’re doing P&L’s these guys have done spectacularly."

There's nothing golf related in Richard Sandomir's story on ESPN firing the first warning shot in bidding on the next two Olympics games, just some beautiful businesspeak that our friends and Ponte Vedra may want to note.

“Our DNA is different than theirs,” John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content said by telephone on Tuesday. “We serve sports fans. It’s hard in our culture to fathom tape-delaying in the same way they have. I’m not suggesting it wasn’t the smart thing for them to do, but it’s not our culture. We did Euro 2008 in the afternoon. We’ve done the World Cup in the middle of the morning. We have different audiences.”

I always love the talk of culture and ESPN. They two words really are synonymous.

Skipper, who returned earlier this week from Beijing after attending the Summer Games, said NBC’s enormous success over the first 11 nights of the Games “probably forces us to change some of our calculations.”

“If you’re doing P&L’s,” he went on, referring to profits and losses, “these guys have done spectacularly. If I was holding the rights to this, this is a great time to be selling them.”

Meanwhile, the thought of golf in the Olympics prompted this positive post by Iain Carter at the BBC, with one caveat: he wants to see a better format. Who doesn't?  Gary Van Sickle at golf.com was not so kind.

Dodson On Drum

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"

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?"

Rick 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"

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.

Women's Open Beats Buick

It was a showdown for the ages...from Thomas Bonk's online column:

The overnight rating for Kenny Perry's victory in Sunday's final round of the Buick Open on CBS was 1.5, down 12% from a 1.7 rating in 2007, when Brian Bateman won. The final round Sunday of the U.S. Women's Open on NBC had an overnight rating of 1.6.

Jim McKay R.I.P.

The sound of Jim McKay's voice accompanied by the Love Unlimited Orchestra's "Love Theme." Nirvana for golf fans (my generation, anyway).

Here's the New York Times obit.

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

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.