Too Many Fairways and Not Enough Rough
Johnny Miller recently announced his retirement from the golf broadcast booth. He is 71 and wants to teach his now 24 grandchildren to fish and play golf. It sounds like a great plan for him, but it was a potential disaster for golf fans. I say was because his successor is Paul Azinger. That somewhat saves the day because those two are an EXTREMELY rare pair in the golf broadcast industry, analysts with something to say.
I love watching golf on TV. That can elicit laughs from many and nods from some. I used to be even more rabid about it, DVRing anything that aired and watching most of it, be it PGA Tour, European, Asian, Australian, LPGA…whatever. Becoming a soccer fan has mitigated that some, but not much.
But the fun of watching tournaments (not instruction or any of that blather) is in the golf itself, because the announcing is generally tepid. No sport brings out the banal in announcers like golf. Actually, there are very few announcers who do not do a good, solid job. This sounds counterintuitive, but it is not. Almost all are quality broadcasters, well-prepared, and truly seem to enjoy being where they are.
The problem is the corporate nature of the game, and the in-general thin skin of many of the participants. In no other sport are the participants treated with kid gloves more than golfers. By a mile. Criticism of any kind is in such short supply that when Miller started announcing golf back in 1995, you would have thought Sam Kinison had started ranting in the booth.
Miller actually used the work “choke”, which in golf was about like saying “f%@k” on the air. The first time he did it, he said that Peter Jacobson had a shot he could choke on, in the final round of a tournament that Jacobson would go on to win. He didn’t even say that Jacobson did choke, but the usually lighthearted Jacobson, a friend of Miller’s, didn’t speak to him for months.
But Miller’s refreshing analysis, delivered in a deadpan monotone, enlivened the golf broadcast landscape, but it hardly changed it. To this day, on point commentary, not really even criticism, is preciously hard to find. There are so many examples of this that I won’t even come close to getting them all in, but here are some….
Virtually every putt that is missed is deemed to have been “misread”. Bull. Putting is hard, just look at Jordan Spieth. He made everything for a couple of years and now he has trouble from five feet. He didn’t go blind, he has some kind of mental or physical issue that is causing him to hit putts off-line.
If a guy is a bad putter period, year after year well down in the rankings, the line often used is “IF he has a weakness in his game, it’s his putting”. Just say it man, it’s OK. It IS a weakness!! Hell, if the guy is on TV and he can’t putt, he is one hell of a ball striker to still be on tour. This appellation is used in all areas of the game. If a guy can’t hit a fairway off the tee with a rifle, here it comes again… “IF he has a weakness in his game”……YUCK.
I am still a decent golfer, about an 8-9 handicap, and once was good enough to play in actual golf tournaments like city championships and U.S. Mid-Amatuer qualifiers. Where I routinely choked. Tour players talk about their hands shaking, or hardly being able to bring the club back. If you then hit a bad shot, it’s choking, plain and simple. If they handle it, it’s a great right of passage.
So, I have a little frame of reference for what is good, since these guys are about a million times better than I ever was. Thus, when a pro has a pitching wedge in his hand and knocks it thirty-five feet from the hole, that sucks out loud. I’m mad at twenty-five feet away. What do we hear from the tour player PR crew in the booth???? ”That wasn’t a very good shot by his standards”. Again, BULL. Why the disclaimer? It’s a bad shot, plain and simple, say it.
Of course, this rises to absurd levels at the Masters. I think it would have been really interesting if NBC had ever gotten the rights to that event. Actually, I’m sure if they even had tried, Miller would have been the biggest stumbling block. Gary McCord was sent packing from the coverage for, among other things, saying that the greens were bikini waxed to speed them up. Oh, Horrors!!!!
It’s only gotten worse. The announcers now can’t call the spectators fans, they are “patrons”. Every time. Nobody calls them that the rest of the year. But that is easily topped by the fact that the place off the fairway that in every golfer’s lexicon for the history of the sport is called “the rough”, cannot be termed that at Augusta National. It’s the “first cut”, or the “second cut”. Granted the rough at the Masters isn’t very rough, but that’s the name for it. It’s not like people were saying the ball rolled into the weeds for crying out loud.
Only partially related is the piped-in bird noise that they obviously use in the broadcast. I brought this up a couple of years ago with my wife while I was watching. She begged to differ. I said, just listen closely. The same six chirps, over and over. She relented, but was still mad because now she notices it all the time.
Unrelated to the issues of player pampering are a beauty or two in phraseology used all the time. A player is “quietly moving up the leader board”. Actually, a genius director must have thought of this and advised it’s use because what it’s code for is “we haven’t shown this guy hit one damn shot today and now he is a stroke off the lead”. It’s as if he was hitting his shots and then darting into the woods to avoid discovery.
When an announcer stuns us all by actually saying that a player pushes or pulls a putt, this gem often appears…”he pulled it right off the blade”…Really, no kidding…he didn’t knock it off line when it was halfway to the hole???
But Gary McCord comes back into the discussion when it comes to humor in golf broadcasting. You talk about a low bar. If someone is mildly out of the middle of the fairway, so to speak, he is just plain wacky. I like McCord, he IS funny, but it’s not as if Jim Gaffigan is roaming the fairways.
I think David Feherty is a fine interviewer, which makes his “Feherty” show a great watch, but I think he is only “golf funny”. Maybe I am affected by the fact I read his dreadful 2002 book “A Nasty Bit of Rough”, a sophomoric, fart-joke filled wreck. I think when he just analyzes the game, he is quite good, but I’m sure his agent and his checkbook are glad that he is deemed a howl.
From Charlie Rymer to the “Golf Boys” (Bubba Watson, Ben Crane, Ricky Fowler, and Hunter Mahan) and their absolutely painful videos, golf fans prove over and over again that H.L. Mencken had more than just a humorous point when he wrote that “no one ever went broke…. underestimating the intelligence of the great masses”.
This all being said, I will repeat that I find most of the golf announcers on television a good listen. The lead guys like Dan Hicks and Jim Nantz, and most of the tower announcers, do fine work. I have my favorites like Miller (sob), Azinger, Judy Rankin, Roger Maltbie, Frank Nobilo, and Kansas Citian Matt Gogel. Nobilo would be considered right down the line in other sports, but he is thought to be some kind of firebrand in this medium.
The production of these tournaments is out of this world stunning. There really is so much good to say about how the sport is presented. Everybody needs to just throw a little bit of caution to the wind, and I don’t mean yelling “Babbabooey”.
There is hope in getting some real teeth in the broadcasts with the likes of David Duval, but I don’t think he wants to commit to the time. Brandell Chamblee has become a virtual pariah among tour players because his studio analysis has some teeth, but you will notice he never actually is in the booth for live tournament coverage. I DO think Azinger will be a great successor to Miller.
Gotta run now though, my DVR of the Andaluccia Valderrama Masters is waiting, and even if there is a little bit of pablum on that European Tour broadcast, it will may sound less so with a clipped accent.