The telecasts keep coming, relentlessly, and next week Golf Channel will enjoy another milestone as it televises the first two rounds of the Players Championship, the Tour's flagship event.
"It's our Super Bowl," says Manougian, and as such it will come with the attendant hype and overexposure.
The first two rounds each will have a whopping six hours of live coverage. The golf will be sandwiched by four hours of pre- and postgame shows, live from the Stadium course. All of this will be followed by a condensed three-hour replay of the on-course action.
For two days in May, from 11 a.m. until midnight, Golf Channel will feature nothing but the Players Championship. This wall-to-wall coverage will neatly highlight Golf Channel's symbiotic relationship with the Tour.
"It's a big week for us, a big week for them," says Finchem. "There's been a lot of talk about the new date for the tournament, about how the course will play firmer and faster, but the real change this year is television. With limited commercials" — only four minutes per hour, same as the Masters — "and the entire broadcast in high definition, it will clearly be the second-best stage in golf, and I don't mind being second to Augusta. Golf Channel is a huge part of taking us to another level."
How Golf Channel became such a key player is a tale years in the making. Few people remember now, but when the channel debuted in January 1995, it was a subscription service, like HBO (though cheaper). That experiment lasted less than a year, with Golf Channel evolving into an advertiser-supported network.
Paying the bills was not as hard as persuading cable operators to offer the fledgling channel; it wasn't until July 1997 that Golf Channel reached 10 million households. Slowly but surely the channel increased its distribution by creating demand through improved programming, with an emphasis on live coverage of the European tour, LPGA, Nationwide and senior tours; news and highlights shows; instruction with big-name swing gurus; and a few stabs at original programming, most notably The Big Break.
By 2001 Golf Channel was a nice niche network, available in about 40 million households and turning a tidy profit as advertisers were drawn to the affluent demographic.
The landscape began to change in May '01, when Comcast, one of Golf Channel's original investors, paid a reported $365 million to buy out partner Fox and assume an ownership stake of more than 90%.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is one of the titans of the new media world, celebrated for his visionary thinking. He is also a passionate golfer with a single-digit handicap who counts Finchem as one of his golf buddies.
In December 2003 Comcast bought out all remaining parties to take 100% ownership of Golf Channel, and that is the first entry on the time line of how the PGA Tour came to Golf Channel.
"When Comcast made it totally theirs, Brian made it very clear to me that they'd like to aggressively expand their relationship with us," says Finchem.
By the end of 2003 Golf Channel's household reach was nearly 60 million, which represented solid growth but was still far from the 90 million benchmark at which a network is considered more or less universal. Landing the PGA Tour would be invaluable in Golf Channel's long-standing struggle to entice more cable companies to carry the channel, or to move it from a pricey special tier to basic service.
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