The Golf Channel’s Solheim Snooze

The Golf Channel served as the exclusive home for the Solheim Cup this year, providing coverage from 9am until as late as 8pm on each of the three days of play. They covered the press conferences beforehand and had post- and pre-game shows nearly 100% dedicated to Solheim Cup coverage.

The 2005 matches were some of the most exciting ever witnessed. The U.S. team fell behind early 5-3, but pulled back to 6-6 and then 8-8 entering singles play. Needing 14.5 points to win the Solheim Cup back, the first five matches included blistering play by Paula Creamer and Laura Diaz en route to an eventual 15.5-12.5 American victory.

The 2005 Solheim Cup rivals or surpasses even the (blowout that was the) 2004 Ryder Cup in terms of excitement – despite the fact that it’s women’s golf. Yet The Golf Channel’s coverage rivaled only public access programming in its appeal. Could the coverage have been any worse? It’s tough to imagine.

Sunday’s coverage was some of the weakest golf coverage I can remember in over 15 years of watching golf on television. Not only did The Golf Channel fail with poor technology, but they failed with lackluster broadcasting “talent” and insipid storytelling.

Technology… Or Not
Perhaps you can forgive The Golf Channel their technical issues. Perhaps the non-working microphones don’t bother you. Maybe you’re a fan of the audible static that plagued the broadcasts. Let’s forgive those portions of the broadcast.

Where were the course fly-overs? The overhead views of holes? Flyovers and overhead views – along with artist’s renditions and 3-dimensional renderings of holes – have long been a staple of the average golf broadcast, yet the best The Golf Channel could manage was to use outdated technology to show the locations of a few players’ drives.

The Golf Channel has long wanted to cover some PGA Tour events, content until the new TV negotiations take place this fall to cover Nationwide, Champions, European, and LPGA golf.
The Solheim Cup is arguably the biggest event The Golf Channel is going to cover this year. If they couldn’t pull out the technical big horses for the Solheim Cup, what kind of coverage would the PGA Tour get?

Even use of a telestrator was limited! We saw very, very few slow-motion replays of swings. Technology goes a long way towards advancing golf coverage, and The Golf Channel doesn’t seem to have invested in any new technology since its inception a decade ago.

Technology can add tremendous value to a sports broadcast. CBS’s “SwingVision” and ABC’s “X-Mo,” combined with the analysis of Peter Kostis and Hank Haney, offer a peek at the swings of the great players, allowing us couch duffers the chance to learn something. Women play a game far more familiar to the average male golfer, perhaps tripling the possibility that what we see could be applied to our games, yet I can remember only two slow-motion swings in three days of coverage.

I’d talk more about the technology used to cover the Solheim Cup, but there really wasn’t any. Limited telestrator use, limited slow-motion use, and virtually no use of three-dimensional mockups. And that’s it.

Broadcasting “Talent?”
The Golf Channel has a reasonable amount of “talent” under their employ. Kelly Tilghman, Peter Oosterhuis, Frank Nobilo, Peter Jacobsen, and even Vince Cellini can all hold their own. They have the respect of the players and, in many cases, have “been there” – a skill crucial to broadcasting a golf tournament.

Why, then, for TGC’s largest event of 2005 were the likes of Jerry Freakin’ Foltz sent to cover the play at Crooked Stick? Jerry Freakin’ Foltz, for crying out loud! The man who called hall-of-fame catcher Johnny Bench “Johnny Miller” and thought that the “Big Red Machine” was the Boston Red Sox during TGC’s coverage of the PGA Merchandise Show was given announcing duties in TGC’s largest event of 2005.

Of course, Val Skinner didn’t fare much better and Brian Hammons is as boring as Jerry Foltz is clueless. Kay Cockerill managed well, as did Rich Lerner and Dotty Pepper, but everyone on the announcing team acted as though they were handcuffed to a policy of politeness. Johnny Miller (the golf announcer and major winner, not the hall-of-fame catcher, Jerry) may get into some hot water with players for talking about choking, or hitting a poor shot, or exposing some of the tricks of gamesmanship, but at least he talks about the topics. The Golf Channel avoided those subjects like the plague. Too intent on “being friendly” and not intent enough on telling the truth, The Golf Channel’s coverage was warm and fuzzy when it needed to be nitty gritty. Yes, the women play a somewhat gentler game than the men, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to kick the crap out of their opponents. It doesn’t mean they don’t choke, don’t try some gamesmanship, and don’t hit bad shots. It happens, and I want to hear about it when it does.

The Golf Channel has better broadcasters than Jerry Foltz, Val Skinner, and Brian Hammons. Brandell Chamblee, Frank Nobilo, Peter Oosterhuis, and even Kraig Kann are capable of delivering far better coverage – honest, truthful, and when appropriate, critical coverage – than the Three Stooges. Yes, I’m grateful that Adam Barr and Dave Marr were kept away from Crooked Stick, but even they could have provided better coverage than Foltz and Skinner.

It’s About the Story
Though the Solheim Cup doesn’t have quite the history of the Ryder Cup, eight matches came before the 2005 version and the U.S. hasn’t won them all. If you were to watch The Golf Channel’s coverage on Sunday, I wouldn’t blame you if you thought this was the first ever Solheim Cup! The Golf Channel barely mentioned previous Solheim Cups – their outcomes, the players, the locations.

Meg Mallon has been on every Solheim Cup team (if I recall correctly) and even said during a post-round interview that “her teams” were 6-3 overall. I don’t recall seeing her overall record on screen even once in three days of coverage. The overall records of nearly every other player saw similar treatment: they were ignored when they could have added to the story tremendously.

Where was video footage of previous Solheim Cups? Or even John Daly’s PGA Championship victory at Crooked Stick in 1991? How has the course changed since then? How are the ladies driving the ball compared to Daly, given that he was likely using somewhat more inferior equipment than the ladies had in play this weekend? We’ll never know.

While Paula Creamer was thrashing Laura Davies 7&5, why weren’t we told about some of the all-time greatest whuppings in Solheim Cup singles history to see how her smackdown ranked? Why wasn’t a bigger deal made of the the 6-up lead Paula took to the tenth tee? Had anyone been so dominated – or dominating – as Davies and Creamer? Laura Diaz followed Creamer with a 6&5 win. Are these the two biggest blowouts in Solheim Cup history in one year? We may never know.

En-route to her possible-record-breaking 7&5 victory, Creamer shot a front-nine 30. That’s a Solheim Cup record. Her 6-under performance was mentioned twice: once as she headed to the ninth needing “only a par” to break the record and once in the post-tournament coverage. Who held the record previously? How badly did she beat her opponent (if at all)? This is vital information that adds to the depth of the accomplishment, and we were kept in the dark.

The American rookies were talked about plenty – Paula Creamer, Natalie Gulbis, and Christina Kim – yet we were shown almost no footage of them playing (or winning) on the LPGA Tour. Does The Golf Channel own the rights to some of this material or not? If so, why wasn’t it worked into the coverage?

Laura Davies hits her driver off of a grass mound. In her “Playing Lessons from the Pros” she spends a minute or two explaining why she does this. Why couldn’t this footage – footage TGC certainly owns – be worked in to the broadcast?

Though the crowd may not be as big as those at Ryder Cups, where were the microphones to pick up the crowd noises? Aside from a few cheers, very little crowd noise even made the broadcast. The European team didn’t look like they were playing in hostile territory, yet they all made mention of the crowd noise in the post-tournament news conferences. Late in the day, when several matches has finished, why weren’t the teams shown huddled near the greens and walking the fairways, cheering on those still playing? We see it all the time in Ryder Cup coverage.

Even the leaderboard failed to help tell the story of the 2005 Solheim Cup. It didn’t differentiate between finished matches and matches still on the course except for a small block of text that read “4 to play.” Finished matches can’t change hands, but those on the course certainly can, and TGC let us down in cluttering the late-afternoon leaderboard with both and very little to tell them apart.

NBC, CBS, and even USA and TNT understand sports. They emphasize the story (Can Ben Roethlisberger, a rookie, take his team to the Super Bowl? Is this the day Nolan Ryan wins his 300th? How will Ben Crenshaw’s haunting “I have a feeling about this one” manifest itself?) while providing honest, sincere insight into the play-by-play. The Golf Channel covers only one sport – golf – yet can’t even manage to adequately cover the story of the largest event they’ll cover this year.

Zzzzzzzz…
The Golf Channel dropped far more balls than those listed above. The 2005 Solheim Cup was as exciting as any women’s golf event I’ve ever seen, and rivaled many men’s majors. Yet The Golf Channel not only failed to convey that excitement but to dumb it down to the point of distraction.

On the biggest sports weekend of the year, the Solheim Cup was a dead last thanks to The Golf Channel’s coverage. The Golf Channel took one of the most exciting sporting events of the year and turned it into one of the most boring.