Normally I love sitting back on Sunday in April and taking in the Masters. It’s simple, it’s great entertainment, and no TV station could possibly screw up golf coverage right? Wrong. Here are but a few of the ways that CBS continuously screwed up this weekend.
# 1 - Missing Shots
I can understand this on Thursday and Friday because a lot of people are in contention and about 452 people are playing at once. But on Sunday we were interested in what? Maybe 7 golfers? Mickelson, Westwood, Choi, Woods, Couples, and a few others off and on. (we’ll get to how the screwed up the coverage of Kim later.) But we continuously missed shots from these groups because we were busy watching out of focus flowers with scoreboards above them or shots of people walking past ponds or any number of things that weren’t golf.
# 2 - About 50% of people watching care about Tiger Woods and ONLY Tiger Woods
That’s just how this works CBS. We all want to know what the leaders are doing, and what Tiger Woods is doing, and we don’t really care how unlikely it is that he’s going to come back. If he shanks one into the trees and drops a series of F bombs, guess what? THAT’S WHAT WE WANT TO SEE! We missed several of Tiger’s shots, especially on the final round. And I realize he was out of contention but we didn’t miss them because Phil or Lee were putting, we missed it because we were listening to piano music and watching Azalea’s waft in the breeze.
# 3 - Show the damn shots in the right order.
We’re watching on TV. So we have no idea what’s actually happening at this moment in Augusta, Georgia. Now there have been some amazing advances in technology lately, and we all like seeing shots live. But since people on the course can’t carry cell phones, and this event is only on your network, we don’t need to see every single shot exactly live. Here’s a good example, Nantz “throws it over to 15” (may not have been 15) and we see Tiger’s shot live bounce up onto the green near Choi’s. THEN we get “and a few moments ago…” and they show Choi’s shot. That doesn’t even make sense.
# 4 - Jim Nantz and his “old timey-ness”
I like Jim Nantz, I really do, but he was over the top this weekend. Not every single shot ever “hearkens back” to some magical moment in history. If I had to hear “Shades of (old person) in (year a long time ago)” one more time I was going to start driving around Houston mowing down old folks. We need more of commentators telling us what’s going to happen on that putt, or what options the golfer might have (or you know, maybe show another guy hitting a golf shot.) We need less of Nantz telling us how Clyde “Biscuits” Johnson hit a beautiful 19 footer from that same spot to close the lead to 1 in the ‘65 tournament. It’s like nobody can ever do anything original ever again in golf.
# 5 - Anthony Kim - Some old guy in a truck needed to wake the hell up and check the leaderboard.
Kim put on absolutely dazzling display of golf on Sunday and prior to hole 16 we saw a grand total of about 5 of his shots. I don’t know if we were too busy watching the ceremonial start from Thursday morning (again) or if we were taking a Cribs style fly through tour of the pro-shop. Either way, we missed the best shots of what was a spectacular performance from the 24 year old Kim.
It wasn’t a bad tournament, the golf action was great actually, but CBS was so wrapped up in itself that we missed way too much. And it’s not that I don’t like drama, I love seeing the leaders approaching the tee boxes as the holes wind down. But there could have been four people on the course today and we still wouldn’t have seen all of the shots. It would also be nice if the commentators could live more in the moment and give us some insight into what the players might be looking at with their shots and less about how old guy did it.
