Behind the scenes
Many people believe that golf is the most difficult sport to cover. Think about it: The playing field is anything but standard. No precisely measured court or white lines of delineation. The playing field is a park, a wide-open expanse covering acres of competitive challenges. There are no timeouts and no clock. Play begins at ten-minute intervals, and players embark upon the playing field for their bid at the color red. (For the uninitiated, scores below par are noted on the Scoreboard with red numbers.) At any one time, 100 or more competitors may be playing on the same course, all on different holes. No orchestrated playing time here. So how does it get covered?
First, golf courses have to be technically prepped. That's just a fancy way of saying that you must run cable, and lots of it, in order to broadcast signals from the golf course to the television truck. A small army of engineers and cable-pullers usually invades on the Sunday or Monday preceding broadcast week. Tractor-trailers filled with several million dollars worth of cameras and technical equipment are deployed. The average telecast requires miles of cable, often two dozen or more cameras mobilized in a variety of ways, videotape machines, digital disc recorders, character generators, spotters, high-tech graphics gizmos (for those great images of super-slo-mo swings and golf balls squished against clubfaces at impact), and a control room staffed with some of the best producers and directors in the industry.
The staff is divided into two groups, known as above the line and below the line. Those with above-the-line duties are the folks who make the production and story-line decisions. I'll start at the top:
Producer: The producer is responsible for creating the story line of the event. Remember how different golf is from basketball, football, and most other sports. It may be the only sport in which the participant hits a stationary ball, but often at great distances. The better producers and directors are able to provide a variety of replays and isolated coverage of the action. It requires them to be intimately conversant with the game itself and to know all the key players. Although the story line is dictated by who is playing well, the viewer must be mindful that a dozen contestants or more may be newsworthy. The producer's task is to capture the players' shot-making efforts and to make the drama coherent to the viewer.
Director: The director is responsible for placing cameras at strategic spots around the course to capture the best possible angles of coverage. The director communicates with the camera personnel, the audio crew, and other technical people to provide insightful coverage of the action on the course. While the producer may say, "Let's go to Vijay Singh next on the ninth green," the director is responsible for readying those cameras and operators and for framing the shots that will most dramatically convey the action to viewers. The director also oversees the complex array of audio tracks, graphics, and limitless special effects.
Associate directors: One associate director supports the producer and director. Although titles may change from network to network, standard coverage usually involves an "iso" truck in which an associate director records coverage of shots that are central to the story line but not shown live. You might hear an announcer say, "Moments ago...." Taped coverage assures the viewer of seeing as many shots as possible in a sensible sequence to show and tell the whole story. Some producers favor using more taped shots than others.
A second associate director is known as the sundial, or timer. (Sundial is an inside joke, a nickname for one A.D. whose countdowns in and out of commercials were less than accurate.) Approximately 12 times in a telecast, the network breaks for at least 2 minutes of commercials or promotional announcements. Someone is responsible for giving a count out of the program action into the commercial time to make the transition appear seamless to the viewer. The same is true coming out of a commercial back to the center of activity, the remote truck.
Talent: The remaining critical element of the above-the-line team is the talent. That's us, the talking heads you hear on the air. The producers and directors provide the blueprint of the telecast, but the talent delivers it. We are the artisans who sell the vision. The National Football League might employ as many as four announcers per broadcast, and baseball maybe three, but the multiple broadcast booths in a golf telecast necessitate a team of announcers in this decidedly individual sport. Networks use up to eight on-air personalities to recite the golf action. Chemistry is key. Do you love Johnny Miller and Roger Maltbie? Jim Nantz? Mike Tirico? Lanny Wadkins? Paul Azinger? Maybe even me? Each network's team has a unique personality.
The 18th tower is the focal point where the host and key analyst hold forth. From there, networks differ. Some choose the analyst-per-green format a la CBS, erecting towers adjacent to the final few greens on the course. From these vantage points, the announcers have clear, above-the-gallery views and can call the action of a particular hole or report on a neighboring hole within view of the tower. ABC uses a secondary studio in which the talent view the monitor and report each shot played. All networks employ on-course personnel who walk with designated players and report on the action from the ground.
Technical personnel: The below-the-line folks are the technical people — camera and audio operators, engineers, and tech gurus. Of course, everyone involved in this tightly knit, interlocking puzzle is important, but one key individual brings it all together, being in charge of pressing the buttons that effectively determine which pictures and sounds go on the air. That person is the technical director. The burden of the end product falls to the technical director, who sits in the production truck next to the director. If you ever notice a glitch in moving from one shot to another or a graphic appearing and then disappearing hastily, chances are that the technical director made a mistake or got some bad information from the field.
All in all, when you add up all the above-the-line and below-the-line folks, the spotters, the runners, and the craft-services personnel (which is a fancy, entertainment-industry way of saying caterers), a network may roll into town with a production crew of more than 100 people — not to mention the satellite truck that beams signals from the remote broadcast site off a satellite, to the studio, and eventually to your TV set.
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