Flashback Reads: 2005's PGA Championship Tee Time Debacle

I'm not going to wade too deep (yet) into the PGA of America's decision to not alter tee times Saturday in the face of a pretty bad forecast.  Expecting different results again and again speaks to just how surreal the scene was Saturday as the PGA repeated its 2005 debacle in 2016. While a Monday finish is dreadful for all involved, this may be the Golf Gods making a statement about playing this PGA prior to the Olympics or in a time of year prone to this kind of weather. Or both.

I went back 11 years into the archives when GeoffShackelford.com debuted on Squarespace. Found were a few gems from the 2005 PGA debacle. That's when Sunday times were not moved up and the event finished on a Monday.

Bob Harig writing in 2005 for ESPN.com:

For most of the week, temperatures have hovered in the high 90s, with much humidity. You don't have to be Willard Scott to know these weather patterns present an excellent chance for thunderstorms, including lightning. The PGA of America, which is based in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., where this kind of weather is prevalent in the summer, should know better.

Several players wondered why the tee times simply were not moved up. The PGA Tour does it all the time when there is a threat of bad weather. Better to move up the tee times and have nothing happen than to wait and face what we now face. It happened at last year's Masters, where Mickelson won by a stroke. Nobody seemed to mind that Mickelson's victory leap came an hour earlier. Certainly not those who were there and those who got to see it on live TV.

The first tee time Sunday morning was at 8. Had it been at 7, there is a chance the round could have been completed.

David Whitley in the Orlando Sentinel likened the 2005 situation at Baltusrol to one of the most embarrassing mistakes in TV sports history.

In 1968, NBC switched to the movie Heidi instead of sticking with the New York Jets-Oakland Raiders NFL game. New York led 32-29 at the time, but Oakland scored two touchdowns in nine seconds to win and set off outrage throughout sporting America.

Heidi, meet Kerry Haigh.

As the managing director for tournaments for the PGA of America, he had to explain why the final round wasn't moved up to allow for the possibility of rain. Of course, everybody already knew the answer.

What TV wants, TV gets. CBS wanted golf action to lead right into prime time. God forbid there would be any down time before 60 Minutes.

The situation in 2005 was made worse when we learned Phil Mickelson asked that times be moved up after not being able to see the ball well enough on Saturday night. His request was denied. Alan Shipnuck wrote:

In the Saturday twilight Mickelson had trouble seeing the breaks on the final few holes and afterward beseeched tournament officials to move up the tee times. This request was denied, and ignored, too, was a foreboding forecast for Sunday-afternoon lightning storms, which should have spurred the tournament and the network suits to send the players out early. The first lightning strikes arrived around 2:30 p.m., delaying play for 39 minutes and setting up a race against the darkness. When another storm rolled in, the final round was suspended for good at 6:35, forcing a morning restart for all the marbles.

Then there was this back and forth in 2005 with Kerry Haigh where suggests they would end any event at 7, even if it wasn't on television.

Q. Truth be told, the weather forecast was far worse today than for any time of the week. There was just a chance of scattered showers early in the week and today every forecast I saw on The Weather Channel and locally were pretty certain it was going to happen.

KERRY HAIGH: The forecast was, I think, there was more of a chance of scattered showers but they were still scattered. If you look further to the south, they have had no activity at all, and we were within four or five miles of missing it ourselves. So I think the forecast was very accurate, that it was certainly very scattered. We were just unfortunate that it came too close and right on top of it.

Q. Let's see if he can drive this nail with a different hammer. You conduct a number of championships, some of which are not televised. If you were in like circumstance with a non televised championship, and you knew the details that you had today, would you err on the side of caution and adjust your time so that you didn't carry your championship over into the next day?

KERRY HAIGH: That's a good question. But no, I think we would have probably had we made all of our arrangements for a 7:00 finish and with all of the people and parties involved, we would have kept it the same.

Dave Anderson of the New York Times wrote back in 2005:

Maybe the organizers of the three major tournaments in the United States will realize that they should stop bowing to the Great God Television and schedule Sunday's final-round tee times early enough to better assure enough daylight, even if a playoff is necessary, for the finish.

Maybe.

The silver lining is simple enough: schedule the Sunday tee times in the best interests of the golfers and the golf fans, not for high ratings and the monetary interests of a network that demands a compelling lead-in to its prime-time shows.

Fast forward to 2016 and the explanations at least are just routing-based. From Cameron Morfit's golf.com story:

“It’s a major championship,” Haigh said, “and we want it to be run and perform as a major championship. We feel it’s important for all the players, in an ideal world, to play from the first tee and play the holes in order.”

Alex Myers with the scenarios for finishing. Few are very pretty based on the forecast.

The More You Play It, The More You...

Todd Hamilton, on Mirasol's Sunrise Course:

"The more you play it the worse this course gets," Hamilton said."I didn't know any better the first year. Now I know what kind of course it is."

Kostis: Shortsighted Criticism (Of His Bosses)

Golfonline's Peter Kostis defends his bosses at CBS and the PGA of America for the Sunday PGA tee-time boondoggle.

Everyone is going to roll the dice when you win nine times out of 10, and the PGA of America is no exception. That's why the stream of criticism directed at them and my employer, CBS Sports, is so shortsighted.

Hey, full disclosure. It's a beautiful thing, isn't it?

The writers who feel that money is not be a part of the equation should be reminded of stories they have written that were dropped from publications because there weren't enough advertising pages to compensate for the editorial pages.

Whew, what an analogy! The golf writers of the world will really $ee the light after that zinger!

But it's naïve to suggest that the PGA and CBS should forego their business plan because of an uncertain weather forecast. When you start aiming at a moving target like that, you end up on the wrong side of 90 percent.

Uncertain weather forecast? It was on everyone's mind Saturday night, and as Tom Mackin, Kostis's colleague at Golfonline reported (and I'll link it yet again), as early as Friday the PGA's on site forecasters were very worried about the possiblity of severe weather Sunday.

The PGA wants to be taken seriously as an organization and it has worked hard to ensure that its event  maintains or even improves its standing as a major. They put all of that on the line for a Nielson bump, a rerun of 60 Minutes and someone's "business plan."

If the PGA Championship's credibility is diminished, then the PGA and CBS lose a lot more than a few rating points. They eventually lose their major. Because a May Players Championship is going to look better and better if the PGA of America emphasizes greed over the good of the game.

Rough Raking

If you want a good laugh, go to the 2005 PGA's official site and click on the home page link to "Launch Photo Gallery." 

Once there, look to the right side of your screen and select images for Sunday, Round 4. The first image in the upper left of the thumbnail gallery is a shot of one of the volunteers proudly raking the rough. You can't make this stuff up!

Schneider in Golf World

The lead to Stu Schneider's Golf World PGA TV column:

Now I know why that new Kyra Sedgwick cop show was promoted so often during the PGA on TNT. On the first show, Gary McCord, David Feherty and Bobby Clampett guest star as suspects in the murder of the English language.

Hannigan on the PGA

Frank Hannigan says the PGA's Sunday debacle is actually worse than it appears and ends with this anecdote:

When the l967 Open was played at Baltusrol — the one Nicklaus won after hitting an ungodly l iron to the final green — there was a monumental thunder storm immediately after Nicklaus and his fellow competitor, one Arnold Palmer, holed out.

The USGA Executive Committee at its next meeting voted unanimously that it would never again schedule a U.S. Open to end after 6 p.m. so that it would have more than two hours, on the year's longest days to cope with weather delays. That action was simply ignored by the present crop of USGA nickel-and-dimers at Bethpage.

Ah, there were giants in those days. There are weasels in these days.

Diaz on Haigh

Golf World's Jaime Diaz writes about Kerry Haigh and the success he's had setting up PGA courses. Now his thoughts on weather forecasting and moving up tee times? That's another story.

Baltusrol...Odd NY Course Out?

"It would be silly of us to remove a course like Baltusrol from future consideration for USGA championships, including the U.S. Open. And we haven't," David Fay wrote in a letter to the club he's a member at.

"On the other hand, the rest of the country might look at the greater N.Y. metro area having four different courses in the so-called (and definitely unofficial) de facto U.S. Open rota and howl about geographic bias."

Translation: you're fourth in line behind Winged Foot, Shinnecock and Bethpage. Three's a crowd.

Tiger Watched With Us

Do you find this a little strange?

Tiger Woods didn't bother sticking around the PGA Championship for the final four holes, even though he was the clubhouse leader with an outside shot at getting into a playoff. Woods didn't see it that way.

He said Tuesday morning he flew home to Florida after he finished at 2-under 278, knowing the five players either tied or ahead of him would not drop shots over the final holes at Baltusrol, including two par 5s at the end.

The Hits Just Keep On Coming...

Sports and business writer Richard Sandomir of the New York Times has the best dissection of the PGA/CBS screw up, as well as Monday's golf-light, commercial heavy telecast that yours truly wrote about for Golfobserver. Sandomir writes:

CBS's commercial load was a distraction yesterday - even more than on Sunday - creating a disjointed viewing experience during the year's final major. The commercials interrupted the narrative flow of this five-hole event, with 12 golfers finishing their final round, half of them separated by three shots, and half of them paid little or no attention by CBS (except for a note by Jim Nantz, as the camera focused on Vijay Singh, that yesterday was the 60th anniversary of V-J Day).

CBS could have reduced the number of commercial blocks it had, or more boldly, eliminated advertising in the final 30 minutes. Perhaps it was waiting to go commercial free for a playoff, which would have caused the network to blow off more than "Guiding Light" and the first half-hour of "The Price Is Right."

But commercial interests won out over golf, even if no crucial shots were missed while CBS was in a break. Peter Oosterhuis, one of CBS's on-course reporters, seemed to believe the action was more important than mercantilism. After Mickelson missed a birdie putt on No. 17, Oosterhuis said, "Let's go to 18," but CBS went to commercials instead.

And he offers this quote from CBS's Rob Correa, a CBS Sports senior vice president for programming:

"The P.G.A. of America is responsible for the scheduling of the tournament," he said. "It's up to them." He said CBS would not have objected to an earlier start "if the weather reports were that severe."

The party lines seems to be: blame the weather reports for not making enough of a fuss. Only, that won't work as the forecasters were on the record with Golfonline's Tom Mackin as early as Friday that Sunday had the potential for severe, course-clearing conditions. Anyone watching the Weather Channel knew Sunday's afternoon forecast was for possible severe storms.  As reader Stan pointed out, a simple "we goofed" would make this go away, but as usual, the spin will only prolong the criticism, and unfortunately, may even begin to taint Mickelson's win.

Meanwhile, Sam Weiman in the Westchester Journal News and Robert Lusetich in The Australian review the situation. Lusetich looks at the various "what if" scenarios had play been started earlier and not halted. Even though Steve Elkington says that even though he was the hottest player on the course, the wind shift would have made the finishing stretch brutal. So he was glad play was halted.

Speaking of the man with the best swing in the world, Jim McCabe talks to Elkington about the PGA and the Scenarios that are already keeping him lying awake at night.

Just 60 Minutes?

Now posted is my Golfobserver column on the PGA of America's antics as well as the Walker Cup excitement.

Gary Van Sickle also writes about the PGA and CBS. He calls them greedy. And you thought I was tough?  I merely implied they were greedy!

2005 PGA Stats

The final PGA stat package is posted. Warning, it's a PDF file.  The USGA will be jealous. The "Cost of Rough" at Baltusrol was .489 compared to .363 at Pinehurst. Well, there's always next year!