Other Side of the Scorecard A Year Behind the Scenes on the PGA Tour

Introduction: Golf 10 A.T. The idea for this book came out of a clock radio one morning in a hotel room in Chicago. In town to cover the Western Open, I was sitting at my computer drinking coffee and checking my email, with the radio dial (thanks to the room's previous occupant) tuned to one of the city's innumerable sports talk radio stations. That morning's guest was a local baseball beat writer. During the call-in portion of the show, the listeners were unconcerned about results, stats, and standings. Instead, they wanted to know about the reporter's close-quarters experiences with the players. Who, they asked, were the easiest to deal with? The toughest? Which were the nicest, and the nastiest? In essence, these were all variations on the same question:What are these guys really like? It wasn't surprising. Sportswriters and our television colleagues are expected to supply such inside dope at every impromptu conversational occasion -- in elevators, on airplanes, at cocktail parties. But hearing those questions often enough, it's hard not to notice in the subtext a subtle accusation -- that we media types aren't doing our jobs. Fans want from us a sense for the personalities of their favorite athletes. But they evidently aren't getting it from standard TV, newspaper, and magazine coverage. The athletes deserve part of the blame. Sports' new riches have made it unnecessary for them to use the press as a promotional tool. And why open up to strangers, when a stray unwise remark can result in brand-damaging embarrassment? But bland reporting is the media's fault, too. Publishers, editors, and TV execs -- claiming that in the Internet age, immediacy is everything -- care little about going behind the scenes, especially since it costs money to send reporters and camera crews to players' homes for in-depth profiles. And by keeping it short and sweet, they say, they're only giving their audience what it wants. Who cares if the voices on the hotel room clock radio argue otherwise? This book aims to satisfy, if only a little, that lingering desire for up-close-and-personal reporting. A fan myself, I believe that spectator sports are far less interesting, even tedious, without a real feeling for the people playing the games -- their backstories, habits, idiosyncracies, and their off-course preoccupations and behavior. Its goal, in other words, is to humanize at least a small group of professional athletes, and to provide a broader, richer, more personal context for the numbers they write on their scorecards. It's ironic, in a way, that the book's subject is pro golfers. Traditionally, these athletes have been far better than others at sharing their private lives. Arnold Palmer set the modern standard, hanging in hotel bars with reporters until all hours of the night. Similarly, Jack Nicklaus spent interminable periods standing in front of the scribes, answering their every last question. As recently as the mid-nineties, John Feinstein, who was then a generalist (and whose bookA Good Walk Spoiledwas, in a sense, a model for this one) could alight on the PGA Tour and expect unlimited time with a dozen of golf's biggest names. The players -- whose incomes, historically, lagged far behind those of their sporting peers -- knew that courting the press was the best way for their little boutique sport to garner extra attention. They indulged sportswriters in order to show fans that there was more to them, and to the game, than was immediately apparent. But that, along with everything else in the game, changed with the arrival of Tiger Woods. Woods' first professional tee shot, in August 1996, had the socioeconomic exit velocity of a NASA rocket. It carried golf far beyond its usual demographics, growing its spectator base across lines of class, age, and race. And that meant more money. Between 1996 and 2001, the Tour's television revenue, its primary purse-feeder, nLewis, Chris is the author of 'Other Side of the Scorecard A Year Behind the Scenes on the PGA Tour', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416537168 and ISBN 1416537163.