ESPN – the once and future king-maker or hoisted on their own petard?
Walt: So ESPN is done with PGA coverage in 2006 – further proof that the E matters way more than the S up there in Bristol.
Tucker: What are you talking about – Finchem and the PGA jacked the price up way too steep so they walked away. They’ll be fine – it’s the PGA that could be in trouble. Going with The Golf Channel as their third major network instead of ABC or ESPN is crazy and a major risk.
Walt: If they had paid more attention to the S, they’d still have the PGA in their portfolio.
Tucker: What’s up with all the letter references – I feel like I’m talking to my 3-year old over a bowl of spaghettios with letters.
Walt: The “Entertainment and Sports Programming Network” – in this case, and in most cases with ESPN the last 10 years the E is running the business. It’s all about entertainment, they could care less about the sports part of it.
Tucker: Sounds like they know their audience – in the age of attention deficit disorder and teens that multi-task between instant messenger, cell phones, text messages, iPods, Tivos, and Gameboys, and that’s just while they’re going to the bathroom – you’ve got to bring entertainment into the equation or they’ll change the channel or worse yet, hit the power off button.
Walt: Well, that explains why the largest cause of damage to cell phones is dropping them into toilets. It doesn’t quite explain why my teenagers manage to lose the Tivo remote about twice a month – if that little box is so important, you’d think they’d take much better care of it, no? Moving on, my point is that by focusing on the entertainment side of the business, the Sportscenter team screwed the golf team.
Tucker: How do you figure?
Walt: Well, ESPN has coverage of early-season and late-season PGA tournaments, as well as early round coverage on Thursday and Friday of some of the larger tournaments. This year ESPN has the Mercedes Championships at Kapalua, the Sony Open, then they take several months of weekend coverage off before returning after all the majors have been played with September-October coverage of the Bell Canadian Open, the 84 Lumber Classic, and the Valero Texas Open. And remember, ABC owns 80% of ESPN, so ABC tournaments like the British Open, the Tour Championship, and the WGC-American Express Championship are all part of the extended ESPN family.
ESPN had a couple ways they could play golf on their flagship program – SportsCenter. As many as 88 million people a month watch SportsCenter – more when malcontents like T.O. or whiners like Barry Bonds say anything, sneeze incorrectly, or pass gas in a crowded room, less when there’s just scores and highlights. So when it came time to cover golf tournaments, SportsCenter decided not to cover events, instead they decided to cover Tiger.
Tucker: You just said that more people watch when there’s controversial stuff attached to it. Surely you can’t expect them to lead with facts and figures when entertainment pays the bills.
Walt: I’m not disagreeing – and don’t call me surely. My point isn’t to second-guess their choice. My point is that the choice they made had a tremendously negative impact on all the golf coverage that their own network, and their parent company through ABC, was putting on the air. By highlighting Tiger’s performances over the leaders in tournaments he wasn’t winning or on the leaderboard, they were telling all of those 88 million viewers that any tournament Tiger wasn’t playing was less important and not worth watching. Over time, any tournament Tiger wasn’t leading was less important, and even more amazing, over time courses where Tiger wasn’t winning got accused of being improperly built because they could not help identify the greatness of Tiger over a 72-hole tournament. So for those of you that have now fallen asleep with your hand on the Tivo pause button, the same tournaments that ESPN was saying “hey, don’t watch this – Tiger’s not leading and/or he’s not playing” were frequently being covered by ESPN and ABC.
It goes deeper than that – there were a lot of little subtleties that cropped up over the course of the years. The “Notables” section of golf coverage where those big names not on the leaderboard could be highlighted went from covering a few notables not in the hunt to being Tiger’s personal playground. Back in the day, the notables side of the page would include a handful of notables and a score – over time ESPN took this to a new level of Tiger-centricity (a real world, though not yet in Wikipedia) with an increasing number of Tiger-related stats and comments. The “Notables” section that would previously read “Norman -3, Woods -3, Duval -3, O’Meara -2, Faldo -1” would now read “Woods -3 4 birdies, 2 bogeys, 4 drives of over 300 yards, 2 ridiculous pin positions that caused lipouts on par putts, and a partridge in a pear tree.” Useful information, but wouldn’t it be great to see what the rest of the notables shot?
But wait, there’s more, wait until I’m finished with this thought and I’ll include a fine set of ginsu cutlery for only $19.95. How about those highlight reels where Tiger shoots 72, your leader shoots a 64, a guy makes an ace, and the highlights shown are Tiger’s tee ball in the left rough on # 1 (only his superior scrambling saved par), Tiger’s missed 25-footer for birdie (he missed putts like this all day), Tiger’s majestic 8-iron from 195 that spins back off the front edge (can you believe that, he flew an 8-iron 195?), Tiger’s putt for par on 18 that goes all around the cup and drops, then a single shot of the leader burying a 12-footer for birdie on # 14 (obviously that’s why he’s leading – he’s got a hot putter), and last but not least coverage of the hole-in-one as if it’s an everyday occurrence (there have been 3 aces through the Nissan Open in 2006 – you’ve got a better chance of shooting something less than 64 than you do of making an ace). This kind of stellar coverage further reminds, or worse yet convinces viewers that there’s no need to watch anyone but Tiger and there’s even less reason to watch a tournament without Tiger in it.
Tucker: Which is pretty much right – it’s great that he plays so few tournaments – I’ve got so much more available time on weekends to play with the kids and clean up around the house. That’s a win-win situation for all parties from where I sit.
Walt: Not so fast, Hercule Poirot, you master of deduction. Here’s where it’s not a win-win. Most of the tournaments that ESPN (and ABC) cover are those tournaments without Tiger. So everytime they’re busy running “Tiger-reels” cleverly disguised as “highlight reels” they’re just pouring salt in an open wound and turning the knife on their ESPN colleagues. Not only is that downright mean, it doesn’t make any business sense at all. Why would you let one business unit run over another one so obviously and do nothing about it? From where I sit, the ESPN Golf team was hoisted on their own petard.
Tucker: Whoa – petard, isn’t that that funny looking
mustard? Whatever it is, hoisting
someone on it doesn’t sound like a great idea – could be painful – I think I
pulled a groin just thinking about it. And
nice Agatha Christie reference with that Poirot quip – and your wife says you’re
as funny as a closed refrigerator, she’s wrong, you’ve got it all over that
fridge. I will say you’ve obviously been
watching too much Masterpiece Theater – you need to get out more. And stop with the open wound and knife
comments – I get queasy at the mere sight of blood, so we can just put an end
to that whole discussion. Now as for the
question about business units getting along, well welcome to corporate
Besides, I don’t think the groups aren’t getting along. I just think they’ve got different organizational goals between the SportsCenter and Golf teams that they can’t quite get aligned. The SportsCenter team is all about king making – they want to anoint the next king so they can tear him or her down and then find the next king. The Golf team wants to actually cover the individual golf events – the leaders, relevant storylines, and emerging players. So Golf wants to tell the story of the event for the week – SportsCenter just wants to find a personality folks can latch on to so that 88 million viewership increases.
Walt: Right – I’m with you there, mon ami. The goals may not actually match up that well. So here’s the question – why do they go through the whole king-making, tear-down, make-the-next-king sequence?
Tucker: Were you born yesterday? That’s how the 88 million viewership was created – you’ve gotta give people a reason to watch beyond just scores. By making T.O. bigger than the NFL, they can cover him 24/7 and people will watch – even if he’s just pumping iron in his driveway or making a complete idiot of himself at a press conference with absolutely no substance. By making Barry Bonds bigger than major league baseball, they can generate enough interest to have a designated “Barry Reporter” and then go one step deeper and create a new reality TV show opportunity. This is all about “share of eyeball” – how much of each viewer’s TV viewing for the day can they get to their network of channels? It’s like share of stomach for the soda guys, but a lot less messy and with no clean-up required if your stomach share starts to create issues.
That’s the great thing about king-making, there’s always another king you can make – if one guys gets boring or has nothing going on that’s entertaining, they can go on to the next guy, or gal. Danica Patrick’s hot because she’s got a top-5 finish at Indy, she’s in, with apologies to old what’s his name that actually win. She cools off, we’ll go with Big Ben and Jerome Bettis, even though Willie Parker and Hines Ward had at least as much to do with the Super Bowl run. David Toms wins the Sony with straight drives and precision irons – boring, let’s talk about Bubba Watson’s 350-yard drives. Then let’s ignore Bubba when J.B. Holmes unleashes mammoth drives and a 7-shot win at the FBR. If they don’t keep making different kings, people will stop watching.
Walt: Right, so their main vehicle for viewership is king making, and constantly replacing old kings with new queens and even newer kings. Sounds like a vicious game of Texas Hold ‘em – kings, queens, and I’m sure there are some one-eyed jacks somewhere down the river for me to go all in on, but I digress. Now here’s the hoisted on their own petard part for those of you that are mildly slow or downright remedial – the exact same tool has been so badly abused in golf and had they used it properly they could have created a situation where every tournament has a story to tell and all kinds of kings and queens emerge with frightening regularity.
Stay with me now – from 1996 and the “Hello world” press conference through today, the press – and particularly ESPN – has given Tiger king status for the entire time and never bothered to take it away or give it to anyone else. Tiger became the best player, most entertaining player, best driver of the ball, best iron player, best wedge player, best bunker player, best putter, best course management practitioner, and most mentally focused player on tour. He was king of all kings – even through those, ahem, relatively dark patches like 1997-99 and 2002-2004. Duval could’ve been king of something with wins in 13 of 39 tournaments in 97-99, including a Players Championship. Roadkill on the way to anointing the once and future king – and besides Duval only did all that because he knows Tiger. O’Meara wins 2 majors in a row and all he can get known for is being “Tiger’s mentor on tour.” Four first-time winners in the majors in 2003, including Furyk and Weir – no problem, roadkill as we compare it to the fluke year of 1969. Tiger retains his status. Vijay goes for 9 wins and almost $11 million in earnings in 2004 – no problem, he was just keeping the # 1 ranking warm for Tiger. So instead of making many kings, ESPN chose to make one and ignore the rest, and that’s why people stopped watching tournaments Tiger didn’t play and even started turning off tournaments he was in if he wasn’t in contention. So the over-hyped synergy that groups in an organization can create by working together were completely ignored, bypassed, and thoroughly tossed out with the trash at ESPN and because of that it made no sense for the golf team to try and cover PGA events.
Tucker: Don’t worry, ESPN’s got the next part of the strategy all dialed in.
Walt: How’s that?
Tucker: They’re already making the next king, and you saw the early results at the Sony. Michelle Wie will be the future king/queen of golf – she’s 16, she hits it nine miles, and she’ll be winning on the LPGA, PGA, and possibly other tours in the next 5 years.
Walt: How do you figure all that – she’s won nothing yet, and she has a long way to go to catch the LPGA teen stars Paula Creamer and Morgan Pressel, not to mention the reigning queen Annika Sorenstam – then maybe she can go chase the PGA guys. She may be great later - for now she's all potential. And what if you’re wrong – what if she doesn’t start winning everywhere?
Tucker: She’s only 16 – she’ll get it dialed in. And if I’m wrong, no problem – ESPN will just start with the “Michelle Wie – too much too fast” and “Michelle – what went wrong” pieces on Outside the Lines and other shows, including SportsCenter. She’ll be the queen whether she wants it or not. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll start with Cheyenne Woods – she’s Tiger’s niece so we can get more coverage of Tiger in everytime she wins. There’s your synergy for the once and future king maker – you can keep that petard of yours, but make sure not to hurt anybody with it.
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