USGA: Timing Of Fox Sports TV Deal "was consistent with good organizational practice"
The USGA appears to be working feverishly while quietly punching back throughout the weekend nights, trying to penetrate the (mostly) negative coverage of their despicable (but completely planned) decision on a new 12-year television contract in the middle of the PGA Championship.
Out of respect for the PGA of America, I'm not going to address some of the big picture issues related to the sport as revealed in this Ron Sirak story until tomorrow. But for giggle purposes, this corporatespeak from USGA flak Joe Goode is right out of the Bank of America playbook and should brighten your Monday.
(Before you read how the money people have kidnapped and tied up the golf people at Far Hills, I remind you that the USGA is a non-profit organization running a few golf tournaments...err...championships...shaping the rules of a game, and doing some nice turfgrass research when the Executive Committee isn't chopping away at that research budget.)
From Sirak's story:
"The timing of our announcement was consistent with good organizational practice, a commitment to transparency, and involved a national governance organization and several large media companies whose stocks are traded publicly and applicable to disclosure laws and requirements," USGA spokesman Joe Goode said in a statement.
"The USGA and FOX Sports Media Group promptly made public our agreement, just as we made other applicable news throughout the day public," Goode said. "It would not have been proper, nor realistic, to withhold this news from the public in these circumstances."
As we learned in Adam Schupak's story, the USGA structured the timing of their decision to coincide with the PGA, so right off the bat they were going to be un-gentlemanly unless the 15-person committee that voted decided to sit on the news.
So again, this means the USGA Executive Committee could not be trusted to keep a secret.
Sunday, August 11, 2013 at 07:36 PM
Reader Comments (10)
To follow up C&C's question in the previous thread about golf being a "small niche sport" in the US, that is exactly what it will remain despite the gobs of money Fox is throwing at the USGA, which we must remember has one of the four Majors. Good arguments can be made about which of them is preeminent, but it is not a slam dunk that the US Open is #1 forever and always, or whether that means anything anyway.
Compared to NFL Football and MLB Baseball, professional golf is a flyspeck. OK, maybe a bit more than that, but those of us who follow the Game of Golf are a cult. And a small one at that despite the worldwide prominence of GS.com. I also doubt we are, as a group, all that more desirable a demographic than those who follow football and baseball (and professional hockey and basketball). They are true believers, even if the last time they played their game was as a 13-year-old. And form such large groups that they are certainly not "cults" like those of us here. Besides more F-150s will be sold (units and $$$) to them, many of whom are us, than E-Class sedans. Period.
Which brings us to Tiger and his impact on golf. Yes, it has been very real, but primarily at the level of TOUR prize money and visibility on TV (when the commercials are ignored) and other media; maybe this will continue. Still the data seem to say that golf may be barely holding its own over the past 16 years. Tiger's foundation is doing good work as many here have pointed out. Good for him and his coworkers. But much of Tiger's potential for the "transcendence" his father predicted has been vitiated if not outright destroyed by the late unpleasantness. That is a simple fact, even if such a thing was unlikely in the first place. More relevant is that more people in the world know who Imran Khan is and care what he did than really know anything about Tiger Woods. For all I know the same is true of some of the cricketers I watched briefly last month in The Ashes when I was in England (Cricket and curling will forever be as foreign to me as haggis and escargot). And then there are Lionel Messi and David Beckham, who probably have Imran Khan by several hundred million. No one is ever going to make a movie nominally about Tiger such as "Bend It Like Beckham." "Wipe It Like Tiger" (Produced by Mark Steinberg, Directed by Sean Foley, Technical Medical Advice from Anthony Galea) just doesn't seem likely.
So, compared to American football, baseball, football, and perhaps cricket, golf will stay right where it is. In the US a stable pastime for the very well off and an up-and-down pastime for the rest of us. As Del has so often pointed out, Nike Golf may not be just a rounding error in Phil Knight's balance sheet, but it could disappear and be replaced by something else without notice.
What an absolute load of utter BS that is.
Honestly though, does anybody really think Fox Sports' executives are dumb enough to turn the U.S. Open broadcast into some garish clone of its NFL programming? If they inject a modicum of technology and other innovation, which we're much more likely to see than CGI robots with golf clubs, the deal could be the best thing to come along in decades and push the other broadcasters off their butts in this regard.
"The PGA of America did a great job ... Better week than Merion"
jds,
You may be correct, but the timing of the deadlines and decision all came from the USGA. They chose last week on purpose and therefore chose to announce when they did.