Caddies To Become TV Announcers This Week… Oh The Humanity

Posted on November 17, 2015 by Keith Hirshland

If you are one of the few that is still paying attention to golf on tv these days you have no doubt heard that the NBC golf announce team will add a couple of fresh, new voices in PGA TOUR caddies Jim “Bones” MacKay and John Wood to the broadcast this week. MacKay normally works for Phil Mickelson and Wood, who used to caddie for Hunter Mahan, now works for Matt Kuchar. Phil is taking the week off while Kuchar will play using another looper this week freeing up the two veteran caddies for this experiment. I’m under the impression one will announce on Thursday while the other will don the headsets Friday.

I produced golf on tv for more than two decades and in that time had the pleasure, and the pain, of giving people who weren’t professional broadcasters a microphone and sending them out on the golf course during a telecast. My guinea pigs were always either players, former players or celebrities, never caddies, but for the most part the mechanics of the broadcast is the same for NBC producer Tommy Roy as they were for me. So in my opinion here is some of what you can expect to see and hear on Thursday and Friday from Sea Island.

Less golf… Because NBC normally doesn’t have on course guys call pre recorded shots look for the action to “stay” with the group Bones or Wood is covering instead of bouncing around between live shots and taped shots. Roy will still do it but my guess is in an effort to make the caddies comfortable and give them more airtime we’ll see more shot preparation time with one group as opposed to NBC’s usual style on Friday and Saturday of showing a lot of golf shots.

More questions… The best way to get the caddies involved in the conversation will be for the other talent to ask them questions to get the chatter going. Announcers with experience almost always know when to jump in and sometimes know when to stop talking. These guys won’t so listen for quite a bit of “what do you think he’s looking at here Bones?” or “what would you be telling your guy to do here John?” type stuff. I always told my on course “rookies” to wait until they heard their name in the headsets to start talking so I won’t be surprised to hear even more “Bones” and “John” on Thursday and Friday than the “Rog” we usually get.

A lot of apologies, “you knows”, “yeahs” and “ums”… The vagaries of calling golf on tv from the ground are many. The best on course guys know exactly where to position themselves to see the shot from start to finish, which way the wind is blowing (voices carry), and the ability to use your normal speaking voice during commentary. But in my experience the toughest thing for the guys on the ground, who have never done it before, to do is figure out what’s happening in your headsets when you’re actually on the air. You have to be observant and listen at the same time, be able to distinguish the voice of the producer versus the voice of another announcer and resist the urge to answer said producer when he, and not the fellow announcer, asks a question on the air. It doesn’t matter how many times you rehearse or watch from the back bench of the production truck, it all changes when your on the ground with a headset on live television. As I said it will help that they won’t be asked to call shots that play back on tape but there will be times that confusion will reign during live action so expect some miscommunication.

There are bound to be mistakes but those should be overshadowed by the insights these two will offer. I expect a couple of interesting broadcasts and only wonder why MacKay and Wood will be sent home early and not get to “work” championship Sunday.

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When Was The Last Time You…

Posted on November 12, 2015 by Keith Hirshland

Okay so this idea came in a flash and caught me by surprise. Like most things on first blush I thought it might be interesting but, quite frankly, it might not. So without further ado here goes.

When was the last time you pretended to be Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Steph Curry or fill in the blank and practiced your “jump shot” by trying to toss something in an open trash can?

When was the last time you opened the car door for your wife, girlfriend, date?

When was the last time you wrote and mailed a Thank You note?

When was the last time you read an actual newspaper?

When was the last time you said “Gesundheit” to a stranger after he or she sneezed?

When was the last time you went to the library?

When was the last time you followed the recipe directions… Exactly

More of these might pop into my head or this might be it. You never know, good idea or bad, if it’s done

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This New Era In Golf Looks Like An Old Era In Golf

Posted on November 10, 2015 by Keith Hirshland

For twenty years Palmer, then Nicklaus, then Watson were the dominate figures in the game of golf. Then came a stretch in time, BT (before Tiger), in which some very good players rose to the top then fell, played great then not so great, and won then lost majors (sometimes more than one in a year). It was fifteen years of Kite, Stadler, Sutton, Curtis, Corey, Faldo, Price and the Great White Shark. Excellent players all but not the caliber of the three they followed or the one they came before.
PGA TOUR MONEY LEADERS (1981-1996)

1996 – Tom Lehman, $1,780,159
1995 – Greg Norman, $1,654,959
1994 – Nick Price, $1,499,927
1993 – Nick Price, $1,478,557
1992 – Fred Couples, $1,344,188
1991 – Corey Pavin, $979,430
1990 – Greg Norman, $1,165,477
1989 – Tom Kite, $1,395,278
1988 – Curtis Strange, $1,147,644
1987 – Curtis Strange, $925,941
1986 – Greg Norman, $653,296
1985 – Curtis Strange, $542,321
1984 – Tom Watson, $476,260
1983 – Hal Sutton, $426,668
1982 – Craig Stadler, $446,462
1981 – Tom Kite, $375,698.84

I contend that we are not in an era of “the next Tiger Woods”, nor are we looking at another “Big Three Age”. Instead my gut tells me we’re about to relive the ’80’s and early ’90’s with a different cast of characters reprising the roles of Strange, Sir Nick and The Shark.

The best of the bunch in those non carnivorous animal years (post Bear, pre Tiger) was Nick Faldo. He won six major championships by being the most dominant player for a dozen years at two of them, The Masters and The British Open. He never won the United States Open or a PGA Championship. Let’s call Rory McIlroy this generation’s Nick Faldo, able to contend every time he tees it up but unable to solve the puzzle at two of the game’s three biggest events.

Curtis Strange was the first player to win a million bucks in a season, the first player since Ben Hogan (1950-51) to win back to back U S Opens and led the PGA TOUR money list three times in four years. His singular focus and attention to detail was legendary (perhaps second only to Faldo) and in that regard he and Jordan Spieth are a lot alike. Granted Spieth already has the Masters title Strange never won, despite coming oh so close in 1985, but I believe when all is said and done Jordan Spieth, like Curtis, will collect more U.S. Open trophies than green jackets.

Many experts believe that in his prime Greg Norman was the best driver of the golf ball the game has ever seen. He was at or near the top of the statistical heap in both distance and accuracy for the better part of a decade. That helped him win 20 times on the PGA TOUR and two British Opens. He was long, lean and, at times, larger than life. After the driving display Dustin Johnson unleashed at Chambers Bay last year and his colorful lifestyle can you argue that D J is following in the Shark’s impressive wake?

That “limbo era” had Nick Price, this one has Jason Day. Then they had Corey Pavin, now we have Zach Johnson. There WAS Fred Couples, Hal Sutton, Craig Stadler and Tom Lehman. There IS Rickie Fowler, Patrick Reed, Bubba Watson and Adam Scott.

This is not going to be a Renaissance nor a rebirth, what it is going to be is a decade or more of very good golf played by very good, but not transcendent, players. Much to the talking heads at the Golf Channel’s dismay the next Golden Bear or Tiger is still a twinkle in some parents’ eyes and that’s okay by me.

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Golf Channel Makes Double Bogey With Decision Not To Renew Brian Hammons’ Contract

Posted on November 4, 2015 by Keith Hirshland

Let me start by saying this… Brian Hammons does not need me to be his advocate. Yesterday on Twitter the 21-year Golf Channel veteran announcer said his goodbye, informing followers that his contract had not been renewed by the all golf network. For those of us who have followed the channel from day one, or just simply appreciate good broadcasting, it was a sad day. Hammons is one of the good guys in the business and a true professional on and off the set. Golf fans know he will be missed and the saddest part of all is the folks who now make the decisions at the Golf Channel didn’t think so or don’t care.

Full disclosure… I have a long history with “Hammer” having met him for the first time in the early 1990’s. I was working as an Associate Producer for OCC, a company charged with producing all the golf that aired on ESPN. Our team was in Las Vegas working on the broadcast for what used to be The Las Vegas Invitational, Brian Hammons was there too. He was a “racing guy” coming from Indianapolis and the open wheel racing world. To the best of my recollection, OCC owner and Chairman Don Ohlmeyer had worked with Brian on Indy Car racing shows and thought he would be a good addition to our team covering the action at one of the tournament’s satellite courses (at the time the LVI was played over three different golf courses around Las Vegas). Ohlmeyer was right, Hammons was.

Serendipity would have our paths cross again several years later when a start up niche network that hoped to broadcast golf 24 hours a day, 7 days a week hired us both. They inked Brian first, me weeks, if not months, later. Brian was hired to be the face of the network, to sit at the anchor desk and bring golf fans the “news of the day” on a show they wanted to call “Golf Center” but ended up deciding on “Golf Central” after someone at ESPN suggested the former name might not be such a good idea. I was signed to produce all the the network’s live domestic tournament coverage. I don’t know for sure but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Brian Hammons was the channel’s first choice for the job, I do know for a fact that I was brought in after all other options had been exhausted. I lasted through management and ownership changes for 18 years, Brian made it three years longer than me.

Brian, along with co anchor Linda Cardwell, were the first faces the dozens (maybe hundreds, we were hoping thousands) of viewers saw on the night of January 17, 1995 but Hammer’s voice was the first “live” one they heard. His words were heard for the next 21 years as he moved from behind one desk in the studio to sit behind another one, either in a mobile trailer or scaffolding tower, on golf courses all around the world. The beauty of Brian’s broadcast style was that he spoke those words eloquently and used them sparingly, especially when he was calling live golf. As a producer I felt he was the perfect “traffic cop” knowing his role was to get the viewer from one golf shot to the next and leave the “analysis” and “opinion” to the golf experts. I had the pleasure of being his producer and “in his ear” on dozens, but too few, occasions and they were always among my favorite shows. For my money Brian Hammons was one of the best play by play people the channel ever had and when Brian Anderson left TGC for Major League Baseball and the Milwaukee Brewers, Hammer became THE best.

The TOUR he broadcast was irrelevant, the parade of partners who sat beside him or worked the ground around him was also unimportant because Brian Hammons treated every broadcast and every other broadcaster with respect and that respect was evident in his work. There is no telling why the folks in Orlando decided to make 2015 Brian’s last year. Budget cuts are almost always the public reason but I would hazard a guess there are play by play guys, not of Hammons’ caliber, still employed by the network and making more money. An elephant in the room could be that Brian was one of the very few remaining “original hires” still on the payroll as Comcast/NBC Universal works to completely transform one of the amazing success stories in the history of cable television.

Whatever the reason one of the most trusted and respected voices in television golf is off the air until and unless he finds another well deserved gig. I hope that happens sooner rather than later because until it does the golf fan is the real loser as a result of the Golf Channel’s self-inflicted, double bogey.

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How Halloween 2015 Helped Start To Restore My Faith In Society

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Keith Hirshland

If you’ve visited this site before you know, on occasion, I tend to fall into the “old guy’s lament”. You know the one, it usually starts with something like, “things were so much better” and finishes with “back when I was a kid”. These sayings, in all their various forms, almost always come from the mind and the mouth of someone with more days in the rear view mirror than on the road ahead. I’m that guy now and whether you agree or disagree I believe I’ve lived the life and earned the right to say it.

I am also, without reservation, the first one to say that many things are not only better these days but they are MUCH better. Cars, football, computers (it was called a Texas Instruments pocket calculator back then), golf equipment and television sets are just a few. In fact when I think about the things that were “better back in the day” my thoughts wander away from the stuff that’s made to the stuff that made us. We played, we ran and we walked to school, sometimes a mile away, with our friends or, heaven forbid, all by ourselves. We hung out at the Dairy Queen or the ballpark or the library or the playground sometimes until we needed the illumination of the streetlights to help get us home.

When we got home we did homework, or called our “girlfriends” and buddies from the rotary phone and then maybe we turned on the TV to watch The Monkees, The Flinstones, or Gunsmoke before we went to bed, on more than one occasion, with a book. There wasn’t a voice constantly screaming out of a speaker that somebody on one side of an issue is always wrong while the person on the other side is always right. I don’t remember people shooting up school yards, military bases or movie theaters to get attention. We looked up to our favorite ball players but true respect was reserved for parents, policemen, firemen, teachers and even Senators, Congressmen and school board members. Nowadays we have mass shootings almost monthly, movie directors calling cops “murderers” and professional psychologists going on national television suggesting parents shouldn’t demand their children apologize but instead have the children come up with what they think should be the appropriate punishment for a perceived wrong. As New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick would say, “Nurse!”.

We felt safe, we loved our parents and respected them, as well as other authority figures, and on or within a day or two of October 31st we went around the neighborhood to fill a bucket with candy, quarters or, if you went to one house, dental floss. We trick or treated. When I was little I did it with my parents, as I aged I got together with my brothers and my friends and their friends. It was fun for hours and when we got home we dumped all our booty out onto the living room floor and separated it all into “keepers”, “traders” and “tossers”. If we were lucky it lasted for weeks.

Fast forward to today and we find people taking their kids to the Mall to get Halloween candy or something called “Trunk or Tweet” where families gather in school or church parking lots and go from car to car, each containing bags of Halloween goodies in the trunk, to get the goodies. That’s what substitutes for trick or tweeting in today’s society. So imagine my delight at what my wife and I experienced on Halloween 2015. Let me set the stage by saying we don’t get trick or treaters on our street. It’s not because our neighborhood is populated by grouches, it’s simply because we live in a rural part of New Jersey and our street has no sidewalks. If you can’t get from house to house, you can’t get candy. My in-laws, on the other hand, live in a condominium subdivision that not only has sidewalks but plenty of families with children so we decided to celebrate the holiday at their house.

I was in charge of the candy supply and spent a good half hour at a local drug store making my selections. I knew I had to get the good stuff, and enough of it, because my wife’s parent’s “neighborhood cred” was on the line. “Back in the day” we got full sized candy bars, packs of gum and Lik ’em’ Aid but today candy makers now feature big bags filled with individual little bags and boxes of Skittles, Junior Mints and assorted varieties of M & M’s. Others are full of individually wrapped pieces of licorice, malted milk balls and miniature candy bars. I bought nine bags knowing we couldn’t run out and hoping there might be a morsel or two left for us.

Candy acquired we planned to head over to the in-laws late in the afternoon but that changed when we received a text from them around 3 PM that stated simply, “they’ve already started.” We hustled into our costumes (my wife a Duke football player and me Tim Lincecum) and headed out with hopes of delighting as many kids as we could with savory treats. We had no idea how many there might be. Upon arriving we opened some of the bags and poured the contents into a big wooden bowl, then we waited.

We didn’t have to wait long to witness an amazing display that made my mind wander back to when I was a kid. It started with a couple of kids, a princess and a witch, that turned into a steady parade of Spidermen, Jedi Knights, scarecrows, ladybugs, policewomen, firemen and other assorted ghosts, ghouls and goblins. The cream of the costume crop was a young lad who roamed the neighborhood as a mad scientist’s experiment, holding a jar that contained his severed head. Most kids came with parents (some dressed up too) and fewer came parent less in small groups, but they kept coming to the door, huge smiles shouting “trick or treat” when they arrived and “thank you” as they left for the next door. What started as an assumption that we had plenty of candy soon turned into a realization that we might actually run out and we enjoyed every second.

Then it got dark and the shouts, smiles and sweets collecting stopped. Now I remember when I was a kid the trick or treating didn’t end when it got dark, in fact that was when it was just getting started. It wasn’t better then or worse now, in fact, I’m more than okay with what I witnessed on Saturday afternoon and early evening. It was kids and parents celebrating Halloween, NOT at the Mall or digging through somebody’s car boot, but going door to door, saying hello to the neighbors (some, like us, who were in costume too) and being social. It made us smile and for a moment, at least as far as I was concerned, gave me a glimmer of hope about what’s in store for the future.

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Ten Things I’d Tweet If I Was Still On Twitter… Volume Thirty Four

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Keith Hirshland

Did anybody honestly think Daniel Murphy was a superstar

Harold Reynolds would be twice as good if he said half as much

Lucas Duda is a defensive liability for the NY Mets

Historians will mark a time when Erin Andrews was on tv

When sports come on my wonderful dog heads upstairs… Where did I go wrong

The first Kate McKinnon MasterCard commercial was clever, the second one is awful

Can’t watch commercial of the day… Geico Peter Pan

Good for FOX saluting director Bill Webb

What was the last team to lose two straight World Series

As Alex Rodriguez enters this baseball fan reaches for the remote

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Ten Things I’d Tweet If I Was Still On Twitter… Volume Thirty Three

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Keith Hirshland

It’s more than a little said that to a generation of people Walt “Clyde the Glide” Frazier is only known as one of the creepy guys in the Just for Men commercials

I think the Mets have three or four major league position players

Alex Gordon, Ben Zobrist, Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer could all play “cousins” in the Deliverance remake

Happy Nevada Day everybody

I love baseball but the baseball season should already be over

Nice FOX… Did we really need a close up of Moustakas yelling “F U B*tch” at Noah Syndegaard? What genius made that decision?

Anybody notice the NBA season started

Hope all my buds working the NYC marathon have a good race

I’m hoping for a few more “golf days” this year

Any chance Kevin Harvick or Joey Logano get “wrecked” this weekend

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Ten Things I Would Tweet If I Was Still On Twitter… Volume Thirty One

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Keith Hirshland

Congrats to the KC Royals. See what happens when you don’t have to play the SF Giants

Is there another meaningless PGA TOUR event this week

Is there extra security around FOX Sports power sources tonight

Why did Mike Huckabee get so much time at the latest Republican debate

The sports related “looks like” game on the Dan LeBatard show is one of the best things on radio

Alex Rodriguez is still on drugs… He thinks home plate is 60 feet 60 inches from the pitcher’s mound

Do yourself a favor and check out a documentary called Never Long Gone about a talented group of musicians from Montana.

I’m still eating bacon!

Politicians that say they will “change the culture in Washington” are full of it

If Colin Cowherd interviewed Chris Matthews they both would have to wear wet suits

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Ten Things I’d Tweet If I Was Still On Twitter… Volume Thirty

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Keith Hirshland

“High Voice Payton Manning” is the one playing for the Broncos so far this year

I love the reports that claim Colin Kaepernick has “lost the 49ers locker room” who cares? That locker room stinks

Shaq and Charles Barkley should be on every network’s studio show, regardless of the sport

Networks that broadcast golf should immediately employ the “NASCAR non-stop” action during commercials

Who pulled the plug on FOX? Will Matt Vesgergian and John Smoltz trend on Twitter

Ned Yost is still a boob

Would they let ME in Kaufmann Stadium with those stupid moose antlers

Sal Perez is a stud

There is no sport less exciting than regular season NBA

No matter how many times FOX promotes Colin Cowherd it won’t be watchable

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Ten Things I Would Tweet If I Was Still On Twitter… Volume Twenty Nine

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Keith Hirshland

I am a huge baseball fan but they should NOT be playing the first game of the World Series on October 27th

Can’t watch commercial of the day… The one that says you should take a drug to relieve the constipation you suffer cuz you’re taking opioids… Geez

Sorry Mets fans but Matt Harvey is your worst starting pitcher

Joe Buck should call Dollar Shave Club

I’m still pissed Kevin Harvick is still eligible to win the NASCAR championship

Donald Trump says “tremendous” a lot

Find an Elmore Leonard book today and read it. You could start with Get Shorty

The knuckleheads that say they need to “roll back” the ball in golf should focus their attention on “raising the rim” in the NBA

I hope Brian Hammons gets a network TV gig
If Major League Baseball hitters are so go why don’t they always just beat these shifts and “hit it where they ain’t?”

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