Varner's Not-Intentional Lay-Up At 10: To Show Or Not To Show A Bad Shot?
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Harold Varner (purple shirt) just off Riviera’s 10th tee short of the first fairway bunker.
Leading the Genesis Invitational at the time, Harold Varner hit an unfortunate 129-yard tee shot at Riviera’s 10th and ultimately made double bogey. Yet CBS did not show the shot for almost an hour. (Other issues with the broadcast were noted here by Joel Beall at GolfDigest.com.)
Not until the 14th hole and after much social media griping did CBS show the shot as Varner was playing the 14th hole.
After the round, Varner explained what happened:
Q. Did your foot slip at all?
HAROLD VARNER III: I don't know, I just know I missed it, I missed the ball. I couldn't tell you what exactly happened. I just know that I hit the dirt before the ball. I've actually done it before, which is funny enough. I did it in Korea, same exact thing, same exact wind.
Q. Were you playing off the deck before then, too?
HAROLD VARNER III: No, I teed that up. Yeah, I wish I would have hit it off the deck.
Q. And then after that now you've got to regroup and try to approach the hole from a different way, right?
HAROLD VARNER III: Yeah, I was screwed pretty much. Yeah, it's not like you can just hit the next one on the green and be like, all right, salvage it. Yeah, it's just funny, I'm looking at the hole right now as we're talking about it. It is what it is. There's nothing I can really do about it. I just wish I would have rebounded a little bit better. That's what I kind of, you know, alluded to all week is just how you respond to it.
No one wants to pick on Varner or revel in his horrendous shot. But not showing it until after a social media storm suggests that it may have been intentionally kept off-air.
At last year’s Genesis, a final round 8 by Jordan Spieth at the same hole was also not shown.
Naturally, CBS has a truckload of promos to show and other obligations as the round proceeds, but one of the three leaders hitting a disastrous tee shot by PGA Tour standards, should have been a focal point of the broadcast.
And while social media can get carried away with telecast griping, the outrage likely stems in part from a sense that network broadcasts and announcers increasingly are feeling pressure to put players only in the best light.
Had Varner made a miraculous par, perhaps the tee shot might have been shown sooner than the 14th hole. Either way, the overall sense of a State television vibe will only make fans less interested in watching PGA Tour golf, even when the player does something all golfers can relate to.
**This just in to Newscenter 7 with the video:
CBS’s Frank Nobilo took to Twitter to defend the coverage.
