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Good or bad, focus always on Tiger for golf reporters

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An excerpt of my latest column for Poynter.org.

******

At one time, Robert Lusetich didn’t cover golf for FoxSports.com. He covered Tiger Woods.

Lusetich was assigned to all of his tournaments in 2009. Part of it was due to a book he was writing on Woods, but it also was the result of the insatiable appetite for all things Tiger. After winning his 14th major at the U.S. Open in 2008, the countdown was on for Woods’ inevitable march to Jack Nicklaus’ record 18 major victories.

So if Woods was teeing it up in competition in 2009, Lusetich was there to write about it.

“Tiger moves the needle, not just in golf, but in the world of sports,” said Lusetich of the unique assignment.

The all-Tiger-all-the-time coverage hardly has dulled through the years. The nature of the beat, though, has changed for Lusetich and his fellow golf reporters.

Once again, Woods is the main focus at this week’s Masters. However, the story now has morphed from him making a run at history to chronicling what could be the end of his run.

Woods’ one-time brilliance almost seems like a distant memory in light of his stunning downturn. Forget about winning the Masters. With his short game mysteriously gone, it will be an upset if he makes the cut.

“Has there ever been a story like this in all of sports?” Lusetich said.

Indeed, the Woods spotlight could be so intense, if a player shots a 59 in the first or second round, he might not get mentioned until the fourth graph.

ESPN.com’s Gene Wojciechowski knows Rory McIlroy is going for his third straight major this week, and fifth before the age of 26. He is well aware that there are numerous stories to tell about other players.

Wojciechowski, though, still intends to empty his notebook on the player now ranked, incredibly, 111 in the world. He isn’t going to apologize to any critics who contend there’s too much Woods coverage.

“If you believe every athlete’s career is a three-act play, then this is Woods’ third act,” Wojciechowski said. “Just because he isn’t winning majors doesn’t make Woods any less compelling a story. I’d argue it makes it more compelling. You can legitimately ask the question: Is Tigers Woods done? Reasonable minds can disagree on the answer, but the question itself is telling and fascinating.”

 

Book review: The good, bad and ugly of Billy Martin, baseball’s ‘flawed genius’

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An excerpt from my Chicago Tribune review of Bill Pennington’s fine book. Highly recommended.

******

In the epilogue, Pennington writes that a case could be made that Billy Martin merits consideration for the Baseball Hall of Fame for his brilliant work as a manager. Yet as the book’s title points out, Martin was a “flawed genius” with many demons that probably kept him from reaching Cooperstown. However, if there was a Hall of Fame for baseball’s most colorful and compelling characters, Martin would be a first-ballot selection.

Martin’s career cut a huge swath through baseball history. He was the scrappy second baseman on the great Yankees dynasty in the 1950s. He learned the game from famed manager Casey Stengel, and his late-night antics with future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford were the stuff of legend. Pennington writes, “The whole bunch of them were Mad Men before 21st century television writers created ‘Mad Men.'”

Then beginning with Minnesota in 1969, Martin embarked on a memorable 16-year managerial career with five different teams. He won at every stop, often engineering dramatic turnarounds. Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa said Martin was “unmatched” in the dugout. However, his fiery personality, usually fueled by excessive alcohol, always assured he wouldn’t be around for long.

Martin was at the center of baseball’s most bizarre soap opera. Yankees owner George Steinbrennerhired and fired him as manager five times, seemingly unable to shake his addiction to Martin. It became so comical that the pair even mocked themselves in a famous Miller Lite ad.

Pennington, now a sportswriter for The New York Times, had a front-row seat for much of The Billy and George Show as a Yankees beat writer for the Bergen (New Jersey) Record. He recounts the time Martin tried to escort him outside of a hotel “to settle our differences.” The next day Pennington recalled Martin couldn’t remember what made him so mad.

Pennington writes of the complex Martin: “I discovered that Billy was without question one of the most magnetic, entertaining, sensitive, humane, brilliant, generous, insecure, paranoid, dangerous, irrational, and unhinged people I had ever met. … Billy’s emotions, ever so apparent, would seem to make him an open book, but his actions left a different impression, one both undefined and hauntingly mercurial.”

Big rating: Duke-Wisconsin gets job done for CBS

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The rating might have been higher with an undefeated Kentucky, but Duke-Wisconsin still scored a big number for CBS Monday.

The game averaged 28.3 million viewers, up 33 percent from last year and the highest for a NCAA title match-up since Arizona-Kentucky in 1997 (28.4 million). It peaked at 33.4 million viewers between 11-11:15 p.m.

Overall, the entire tournament averaged 11.3 million viewers for the multi-platform telecasts, the most in 22 years (12.7 million viewers in 1993).

In local markets Monday, Milwaukee dominated with 59 percent of televisions in the area tuned in to watch the Badgers.

Coming clean: Kentucky did move needle with huge ratings

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My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana:

******

Since it is Masters week, it seems like a good time to point out that I hardly am perfect when it comes to my predictions. Now most of you already know that, namely many of my former editors and my wife.

My most infamous blundered occurred when I covered the 1997 Masters in my first tournament as the Chicago Tribune’s new golf writer. It coincided with Tiger Woods, then 21, playing for the first time at Augusta National as a professional.

Trying to be bold, if not edgy, I did a column detailing all the reasons why Woods wouldn’t win the tournament. There was a learning curve at Augusta, I wrote, and he hadn’t even made the cut in the two times he played as an amateur. The Tribune then bannered my analysis on the front page of the sports section with the headline, “Why Tiger won’t tame Augusta.”

Well, as Maxwell Smart would say, “Missed it by that much.” Four days later, Woods not only tamed Augusta with a still-record score of 18-under, but he also won by 12 shots. In a mea culpa, I wrote the headline for my prediction column was the worst in the Tribune since “Dewey defeats Truman.”

To this day 18 years later, especially around the Masters, I still get reminded of that ill-fated column. The Tribune’s Teddy Greenstein even referenced it in aWoods story last week.

The Woods column seems especially relevant in light of my latest miss. On March 17, I wrote a column in this space questioning whether an undefeated Kentucky “would move the needle” with viewers during the NCAA tournament. I thought I sensed some Wildcat and John Calipari fatigue and that there was a certain buzz missing during their undefeated title bid.

In the spirit of coming clean, I need to pull another Maxwell Smart. Kentucky didn’t just move the needle; the Wildcats almost broke it.

Sports viewers joined Ashley Judd on Kentucky’s bandwagon, generating some of the biggest ratings for the tournament in two decades. An average of 22.6 million viewers tuned into TBS to see Wisconsin end the dream on Saturday night. That was the highest rating for a Final Four semifinal since 1996 (Kentucky-UMass) and up 39 percent from last year’s national semifinal.

Yep, “Missed it by that much” again.

Several factors came into play. I woefully underestimated how much sports fans love to watch a team or an athlete make a run at history. Kentucky’s attempt to become the first undefeated team since Indiana in 1976 was an enticing storyline.

The bigger appeal, though, might be the David vs. Goliath aspect. Americans always are drawn to the underdog, especially when the giant seems to be invincible. You almost could feel the country getting behind Notre Dame and then Wisconsin against the Kentucky Goliaths on successive Saturday nights. It all became must-watch TV.

There also was another factor involved, and it didn’t necessarily have to do with Kentucky. Perhaps the best thing to happen to coverage of the tournament was the CBS-Turner Sports deal in 2010. Instead of CBS being the exclusive outlet for coverage, causing viewers to miss certain match-ups, every game now is carried live on the various platforms.

The set-up empowers viewers to make their own choices, giving them the option to leave a blowout for a better game. As a result, the combination of quality and quantity sucks in more viewers, including non-traditional sports fans.

So while some of the strong ratings were due to Kentucky this year, a large portion continues to be the tournament itself. Year after year, it delivers a bounty of compelling games. There’s no such thing as a sure thing in the NCAAs, as the Wildcats know all too well after Saturday night.

Wisconsin prevented CBS from getting its dream Kentucky-Duke final on Monday. The game definitely would have delivered a blockbuster rating. Still, the Badgers are an appealing team in their own right, and Coach K going for title No. 5 still should make CBS very happy when the ratings come out on Tuesday.

As for me, I won’t make the same mistake when Calipari and Kentucky reload and make another run at history one of these years soon. However, I can’t say the same about Mr. Woods.

Given the sad state of his game, I think I am safe in predicting he won’t win the Masters this week. If Woods still has the yips with his short game, he wouldn’t even win a member-guest.

Now if Woods somehow pulls off a miracle and tames Augusta, well, it probably is time for me to find another line of work.

White Sox, Cubs announcers eager for prospect of calling meaningful games

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An excerpt from my Tribune column:

*******

Steve Stone laughed and then repeated the question.

“Is it easier to do a baseball broadcast when the team you’re covering is doing well?” said the White Sox TV analyst. “I will say this. It is a lot easier for my partner.”

News flash: As the Sox go, so goes Ken Harrelson’s mood. Stone is looking forward to a year in which “Hawk” doesn’t feel as if he has been grounded.

That sentiment applies to the TV and radio announcers on both sides of town. A prosperous offseason has the Sox and Cubs hopeful to dive into something that hasn’t been on the menu for a while: Meaningful games, especially late in the season.

“Every broadcaster will tell you, good games, good team, that stuff is the dessert,” Cubs TV play-by-play voice Len Kasper said.

It has been a long drought for Kasper since the Cubs’ last winning season with an 83-78 mark in 2009. Since then, Kasper has been on the call for a team that has averaged 92 losses in the last five seasons.

Basically, the season seemed to be over shortly after opening day as the Cubs drifted toward irrelevance. Nobody’s going to throw a tag day for people who get to talk about baseball for a living, but it is significantly more challenging when there is zero buzz in the ballpark.

“It’s harder to try to keep people entertained,” Kasper said. “I don’t want to say it becomes like spring training, but the mindset for a game in September with a fourth-place team against a fifth-place team is different than doing a game with playoff implications. We do feel it in the booth, there’s no question about it.”

 

Cubs get love from national TV; Not so much for White Sox

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An excerpt from my Tribune column on how things are not equal in Chicago:

*****

The Cubs and White Sox each lost 89 games last year. Both teams were lauded for making bold moves during the offseason. Expectations are high on the North and South sides of town.

Yet only one of the Chicago teams is scheduled to be featured prominently on national TV during the first portion of the season. Care to take a guess?

In the some-things-never-change department, naturally it is the Cubs. The networks are ready to ride the Theo Epstein train this year while taking a wait-and-see approach on Rick Hahn’s work with the Sox.

The Cubs were tabbed for the much-hyped major-league season opener Sunday night with their game against the Cardinals being shown on ESPN2. The “Baseball Tonight” crew will converge on Wrigley Field for special coverage and the network’s top team of Dan Shulman, Curt Schilling and John Kruk were on the call.

Meanwhile, the Cubs also are scheduled for five national games on Fox, including three Saturday prime-time telecasts.

As for the Sox, not so much. They don’t have a game listed on ESPN‘s Sunday night schedule and their only Fox telecast thus far is a Saturday night game against the Tigers on June 6 at U.S. Cellular Field.

Now these TV schedules aren’t set in stone. ESPN’s Sunday night slate is listed only through May with the exception of two additional games in July. Fox has a “schedule subject to change” disclaimer, so the Sox should get national coverage if they perform.

Of course, therein lies the difference between the two teams: The mere promise of a dramatic turnaround has the networks salivating to get in on the Cubs’ action.

*******

“Like the Red Sox, the Cubs have fans scattered throughout the country,” Shulman said. “For TV, the teams that move the needle are the Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, Cardinals, Giants and Detroit. Those are the top-echelon teams. Everyone else has to fight for more national TV.”

The White Sox are in the “everyone else” category. Schilling, though, is high on the Sox’s moves. He hopes to see them pop up on ESPN’s Sunday night schedule.

“They’ve got some fun players to watch,” Schilling said. “If they win, they’ll find a way to get on TV.”

 

 

New era: WBBM, ABC7 ready for Opening Day as new broadcast outlets for Cubs

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An excerpt from my latest Tribune column:

*******

At this time last spring, the chances of WBBM-AM 780 and ABC-7 becoming broadcast outlets for the Cubs were about as unlikely as the team being able to sign Jon Lester for $155 million. A year later, both stations are preparing to air games featuring the new Cubs ace.

Note the lineup changes, as the 2015 season officially brings a dramatic shift in the broadcast landscape for the Cubs. WBBM takes over as the new flagship radio station, ending WGN-AM 720’s run with the team, which seemed destined to go on forever.

“It does seem a bit surreal,” Ron Gleason, WBBM’s director of news and programming, said of the swirl of Cubs-related activity at the station.

Meanwhile, ABC-7 is scheduled to air 24 games this year, starting with Cardinals-Cubs on April 8. Mark Giangreco, who has been the station’s sports anchor since 1994, never envisioned working for one of the Cubs’ TV stations.

“I’m old-school,” Giangreco said. “I grew up with NBC doing the AFL; CBS doing the NFL; and ABC covering the Olympics. I freaked out when that all changed. It’s a different world now. Everyone is divvying up their rights. It does feel weird.”

Indeed, ABC-7 was a surprise destination when the Cubs concluded their TV package in December. WGN-9 still is in the rotation, airing 40 games, and it will produce five others for WPWR-50. Comcast SportsNet will cover 87 games. Fox and ESPN are scheduled to televise six games so far.

An idea for MLB: Schedule full Sunday of Opening Day games

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My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center. Any thoughts?

*******

Opening Day always has been a very special day for me. Baseball brings the promise of spring, even though winter seems to linger into mid May in stupid-weather Chicago.

My first vivid memory of Opening Day was in 1968 when the White Sox opened at home against Cleveland. I was an 8-year-old just beginning my obsession with baseball. Somehow, I always seemed to manage to will myself to get sick so I could stay home from school to watch the season opener. And it wasn’t some wimpy cold. I had a conveniently-timed string of mono, measles and strep throats in successive early Aprils. I couldn’t have been happier with my 102-fever as I settled into the couch for a day of baseball.

The record shows Cleveland, behind Sonny Siebert, slaughtered my Sox 9-0 in the ’68 opener. Yet that hardly dimmed my enthusiasm, as 47 years later, I am eagerly awaiting another White Sox Opening Day.

However, there’s a problem. The Sox open Monday afternoon in Kansas City. I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t miss work even when I do get sick. As a result, I won’t be able to watch most of the game.

I am sure plenty of other people are in the same boat. MLB has scheduled 14 openers on Monday, and all but three are at night. Many of those fans will be working or commuting home during those games. It never made sense to me that this glorious day always is on a weekday.

Here’s a way to remedy the situation: MLB should schedule a grand Opening Day festival on the Sunday between the NCAA Final Four semifinals on Saturday and the title game on the following Monday. Start with noon games in the East and go through ESPN’s Sunday night telecast.

Technically, there will be an opener on Sunday night, as St. Louis-Cubs kick off the 2015 season on ESPN. That’s great, but what about the rest of the day?

From a TV perspective, the Sunday afternoon on Final Four weekend might be the deadest of the year. It definitely is my least favorite. After several Sundays of March Madness, there’s the letdown of not having any big college basketball games to watch. It is the Sunday before the Masters, so no compelling golf. The NBA and NHL are grinding down their endless regular-seasons, desperately waiting for the infusion of the energy that comes with the playoffs.

Meanwhile, if the weather holds true to form, the false spring will prevent a significant portion of the country, including those stuck in Chicago, from enjoying outdoor activities. Like me, they are homebound just dying to watch some interesting sports programming on this empty Sunday.

Given all those variables, it makes so much sense for MLB to go with wall-to-wall openers on that Sunday. Baseball fans would devour a slate of Sunday Opening Day games, and a high volume of non-traditional viewers likely would tune in because the sports TV programming is so weak on that day. Who knows, perhaps some of them would get hooked and become more avid baseball fans?

With the right marketing, MLB could make Opening Day Sunday into a quasi-national holiday. No need to miss work or stay home from school. Everyone would be able to enjoy the great pitching match-ups of No. 1 starters and the unique color and pageantry that come with Game 1 of the 162-game season.

I broached the Sunday Opening Day concept to MLB. Spokesman Matt Bourne said new commissioner Rob Manfred and his staff are exploring ideas with the schedule.

“All areas of the schedule are under review for the 2016 season,” Borne said in an email.

The commissioner already has done some forward thinking on the back end of the schedule with a recently announced plan to have the final games of the season on Oct. 4 all start at the same time.

“If a game impacts another game, they’re all occurring at the same time, so no team would be put into a lame-duck situation because their fate already had been decided by an earlier result,” said Tony Petitti, MLB chief operating officer, in a Los Angeles Times story.

“If we do have games coming down to the wire, we want to make sure we maximize that day.”

Sounds like a great idea. Clearly, Manfred is a progressive leader who is open to new ideas.

MLB, though, would have to do some juggling to implement the Opening Day Sunday concept. ESPN has an exclusive deal to air baseball’s season opener, serving as a stand-alone game on that particular day. Note: It hasn’t always been on a Sunday. In recent years, openers have aired on Wednesday and Thursdays.

Perhaps a solution would be for ESPN to telecast the season opener on Saturday afternoon prior to the Final Four game, or on the previous Friday night? In both cases, it would be wide open in terms of sports TV competition.

Listen, I know I don’t know all the variables involved here. There are people who get paid a lot of money to figure out this stuff. Maybe this concept can’t be worked out.

However, it still is something that should be considered. At a time when all sports think out of the box, a special Opening Day Sunday package would create a much-needed buzz for baseball. Besides, that Sunday is just screaming for baseball to seize it.

Nothing would please this old fan more than on Sunday, April 3, 2016, when it is 38 degrees and drizzling in Chicago, to be able watch a full day of games starting the new season. Unlike when I was a kid, the only fever I’d have would be baseball fever.