Monday, September 30, 2002
Spare a thought for Steve Ryder, the journeyman sports broadcaster for the BBC.
He’s just spent the last three days covering the Ryder Cup (no relation), without being able to bring us any live coverage, because the Sky Sports schemers had the rights.
Poor Steve, normally enthroned on high above the 18th green, was left standing beside an outside broadcast truck in a car park, anchoring a meagre late night highlights show.
And his audience fared little better. While Philip Price (voted Pontypridd Man of the Year in 1997) was delivering a big blow of the whoop-stick to Phil Mickelson (ranked no. 2 in the world, more than a hundred places above him), golf fans across the UK and Ireland were pacing the room listening to it all on BBC Radio 5 Live.
Radio golf commentary beats radio tennis but is less rewarding than watching snooker on a black and white TV. Whispering summarisers stalk the players up the fairways, but you never feel you’re part of the action.
The crowd tells you the fate of a putt before the commentators can, and majestic drives or masterful chip shots are reduced to a list of distances and club selections.
When things get tense, you want be shown not told – let me see David Duval hiding behind his Oakleys and Sergio Garcia leaping like a loon. Instead we get Alan Green trying to sound knowledgeable and sundry ex-pros joshing with each other.
And the players aren’t even getting paid for this. They normally work on Sundays for a million dollars a time, but just this once they’re playing for pride. So Sky are the only people making any money.
And going to the pub to watch it was not really an option. If a football match is a poem, this competition is a sprawling Victorian novel requiring a three-day commitment to get a sense of all the characters before the drama reaches its unlikely conclusion. Arriving in time to see Paul McGinley go in the lake would be like only reading the last chapter.
So while the unfancied Euros were beating the odds, we were left to imagine it all in less than glorious MentalVision. Our golfers won, but as viewers we’d already lost the Ryder Cup.