Year In Review, Vol. 14: Television and the PGA

ABC's team of Nick Faldo, Paul Azinger and Mike Tirico, along with a strong supporting cast (Baker-Finch, Rankin, Brown, North, Alliss) proved that you could make golf telecasts fun. Credit producer Mark Loomis for the fresh telecasts.

Meanwhile Stu Schneider and Peter McCleery did some of the best writing of the year covering golf on television.  Here's Schneider's year end wrap-up and maybe the best lead of the year here. And two of my favorte McCleery pieces previewing the US Open and British Open telecasts. McCleery also weighed in on the TV contract situation.

The wild and wacky PGA Championship, where the PGA of America ignored week-long weather forecasts predicting Sunday problems, culminated a wild and wacky week (it must have been the heat).

First, Stevie stepped on Tiger's ball, I mean, he was accused of doing that and of course he didn't. Then we learned they were raking the rough at Baltusrol. Not to mention that there was Tiger's Sunday departure, even though he was within striking distance of a playoff. And we had Tiger's refusal to be interviewed by Peter Kostis, which allowed Stu Schneider to write about that mysterious spat.

But it was the CBS-PGA decision to hope for a bad weather forecast that proved most embarrassing.  After all, a strong lead into a 60 Minutes rerun trumps all else.

That absurdity put Kerry Haigh in the hot seat, where already overheated writers sick of power outages, humidity, commutes and the PGA of America, unleashed their fury.

Peter Kostis defended those signing his paychecks for compromising a major championship in the name of ratings, but most of the press let the PGA have it, including McCleery, who had long been predicting the Monday-finish-due-to-darkness-scenario.