Faster than Tiger Woods’ club speed, the celebrating at NBC Sports turned to mourning.
The network had just wrapped up its coverage of the U.S. Open and, proud as a peacock, announced that the playoff between Woods and Rocco Mediate drew the largest Monday golf audience in 30 years: a 7.6 Nielsen overnight rating.
Then another announcement hit. Fresh from his dramatic triumph and his 14th major championship, Woods was finished for the season, with a torn knee ligament and a double stress fracture of his lower left leg.
NBC will broadcast three more tournaments this year in which Woods was expected to play, along with the Ryder Cup. It won’t generate these kinds of Nielsen numbers again. The Tiger effect is huge, “usually about a 50 percent bump” for non- majors, according to NBC Sports spokesman Brian Walker.
“He is the best draw in golf, because he doesn’t just attract fans (of the sport) but non-fans,” said Walker.
Woods going under the knife for knee surgery dramatically cuts the tour’s TV audience. In 2007, tournaments with Woods in the field averaged a 3.4 rating; tournaments without, a 1.7 rating.
This development also undercuts every tournament in which he was expected to play during the rest of the 2008 tour.
Preparations for the Travelers Championship in Cromwell, Connecticut, halted as players absorbed the news. This is Tiger’s world. They’re all just living in it and filling out the field.
“Thank goodness we’re not in a television-contract year, that’s all I can say,” Jason Gore, winner of the 84 Lumber Classic in 2005, said in an interview with the Golf Channel.
Driven mainly by rising TV contracts, Tour prize money has climbed from $70 million in 1997, when Woods turned pro, to $278 million in 2008. The tour’s latest broadcast deals with CBS and NBC, negotiated in 2006, run through 2012.
The only upside, said 10-time tour winner Kenny Perry, is that “it definitely will give the rest of us an opportunity.”
Otherwise, there’s only downside.
“It’s going to be tough for our sponsors and the tour,” he said. “Tiger is our tour and when you lose your star player it definitely hurts.”
The sponsors most immediately hurt by Woods’ injury are his own. Nike’s golf division is built around him; it counts on that swoosh being on his bag and cap. Gatorade has a beverage line named for him; Buick has, among other things, a tournament coming up next week that was counting on him.
The Buick Open, in Grand Blanc, Michigan, may have sold enough tickets in advance to cushion the impact of Woods’ withdrawal, according to tournament spokesman Robb Grainger. It will suffer from decreased walkup sales, however, and it doesn’t know whether Woods can go through with a pre-tournament clinic at Comerica Park in Detroit, to be attended by as many as 8,000 people.
“The show goes on,” Grainger bravely says, noting the tournament still has the attraction of a 50th anniversary, with 11 past champions in the field and John Daly to boot.
Still, ask CBS Sports how thrilled it is. The network carried the Buick Open in 2006, when Woods won, and got a Sunday afternoon rating of 3.8. In 2007, when Woods was absent due to the birth of his first child, CBS drew a 1.6 rating. (Tournament attendance was off 20 percent to 30 percent, according to Grainger.)
CBS had sold all its ad inventory for the Buick and its other two coming Tiger tournaments, the AT&T National and the PGA Tour Championship. Now it may have to offer advertisers “make goods” (free ads) to compensate for reduced audiences, according to John Bogusz, head of sales and marketing for CBS Sports.
Neal Pilson, former president of CBS Sports and now a broadcast consultant, cautions against regarding Woods’ absence as the apocalypse, however. The PGA Tour “is a very strong, financially secure sport. It has a highly attractive audience base of wealthy men who watch golf on a regular basis.”
The casual fans and non-fans will go away for as long as Woods does; they will come back when he does. His legend has only been burnished by winning the U.S. Open, in effect, on a broken leg. In the meantime, declares Pilson, the Tour, like Tiger, will limp along.
“There was televised golf before Tiger Woods, and there will be televised golf after Tiger Woods.”
