This is the final installment of GMT's series "PGA Tour Radio Daze." To read the first four parts or any previous GMT column, click here.
By February 1998, all of us who worked at the PGA Tour Radio Network offices on 14th Street in Atlanta were fully aware that the company was freefalling faster than Britney Spears, only without as much dignity. The sales staff we didn't have was producing no revenue as the expenses incurred from taking a team of 15 on the road to broadcast golf every week piled up higher than Snoop Dogg on Spring Break.
After weeks of threatening to keep the tech crew at home until they were paid for past work, Crawford Communications finally held firm the second week of February. We returned from the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines, a tournament eminently befitting of the last road trip which that incarnation of PGA Tour Radio Network would ever take. Not only did El Nino shorten the event to 54 holes, Tiger Woods and Davis Love III both finished a shot out of a playoff, leaving us with a Scott Simpson-Skip Kendall overtime which I'm not convinced either guy even remembers but am quite certain no one else does. Mercifully, Simpson ended it with a birdie on the first extra hole. PGA Tour Radio Network's traveling circus would end a few days later.
With the Tour headed to Honolulu for the Hawaiian Open and what with our trucks not being pimped out with , we'd planned to instead be in Tampa for the GTE Senior Classic. I, meanwhile, was clinging to what was left of the contract I'd signed the year before, specifically a clause that gave me every third tournament off. I was headed to Nashville for a few days of R&R with my folks when I got a call from one of my fellow announcers, , who had one piece of news I was expecting and one I couldn't have fathomed. The first: Crawford wouldn't be giving us a crew for Tampa. The second: we were doing the GTE anyway.
When the news from Crawford came, PGATRN CEO Warren Elliott notified Donna Orender, who at the time was in charge of the Tour's media arm, that we didn't have a leg to stand on. Orender had steadily risen in the ranks at the Tour, negotiating two landmark TV contracts in the Tiger Woods era that dramatically increased tournament purses and took rank-and-file Tour players into tax brackets they didn't know existed. It was Orender who originally signed off on the concept and creation of PGA Tour Radio Network and, more urgently, the one who'd be guilty by association if it went bust.
Rather than pulling the plug, Orender arranged for us to get the satellite coordinates from ESPN, which was televising the GTE that week. Randy Brown and I would call the action off TV from - a legendary sound shop in Atlanta where everyone from Aerosmith to Kanye has made music through the years - which was where we recorded all of our other programming. (We owed Doppler money, too, of course, but they hadn't yet shut us out.) The new plan allowed us to stay on the air and Orender to preserve her reputation before she eventually left the Tour to become . (I don't think we're the reason she left, but neither do I expect to see the unveiling of the WNBA Radio Network anytime soon.)
I remember being embarrassed at the thought of doing the broadcasts from an antiseptic studio nowhere near where the Tour happened to be playing that week. But a funny thing happened on the way to my public humiliation: the broadcasts actually sounded good. In fact, the overall sound was better than when we were traveling.
Here's why. When we were on site, I would throw it to one of our on-course announcers, who would call the shot from far enough away that the player couldn't hear him or her talking. The problem with that was that you also couldn't hear anything else relevant. You'd hear the announcer call the shot and, if you were lucky, the faint roar of the crowd in the distance.
Television, on the other hand, has an entire army of mic operators whose only job is to get as close to the players as possible. That natural sound is sent down a different audio channel than the one on which the TV announcers' voices are heard. So when we began doing the broadcasts from the studio, we were able to call the shot the TV network was showing us and have the rich, full sounds that are all part of a PGA Tour event. Suddenly, you heard one of us say, "Tiger Woods, second shot at 14" followed by the unmistakable thwack of club meeting ball. It sounded more like we were there than when we actually were.
Not that it was always easy. Because we were calling shots off the raw satellite feed - as opposed to the signal that comes over a regular television set - we were able to see the shots they were taping during commercials. A couple of times early on, we tried to call some of those. The problem was that we never knew when they were coming back from break. I remember setting up Randy Brown to call a tee shot of Mark Calcavecchia at the Honda Classic. He said something like, "Calcavecchia's tee shot is on its way?" Just then, the feed dissolved to black as NBC prepared to return from commercial. We had no idea where the ball wound up. Like the true professional he is, Brown didn't miss a beat and calmly said, "He's hit a fade." We still laugh about that call.
With finger firmly in dike, we proceeded with the in-studio broadcasts through February, March, and the beginning of April 1998. The bigger issues, such as being bankrupt, couldn't be masked with any sleight of an audio technician's hand. The second paycheck of April was the last one any of us would see from the ownership group that hired us and put PGA Tour Radio Network on the air 13 months before.
We kept doing the broadcasts each week without remuneration so as not to lose the affiliate base that had grown and stuck with us. We heard stories of Elliott negotiating the network's sale to Atlanta liquor tycoon Roger Kahn. Of course, we'd heard a lot of stories over the previous year and none of them had come true. Still, we held out hope that Kahn would buy the company and lead us into the Promised Land - or at least out of the unemployment line. In June, we heard those talks had - surprise! - broken off and that the deal was dead.
So it was on June 16 that we were summoned to the office on 14th Street. We assumed it was to be formally told the company had been dissolved and that we needed to clean out our desks. But strangely there was no sign of Elliott or anyone else in management from the previous regime. Presiding over the meeting was a new figure, Tommy Douglas, a business associate of Kahn's who'd been dispatched to tell us the radio rights to PGA Tour events were, effective immediately, property of Santa Rosa Broadcasters, a newly-formed entity owned by Roger Kahn which Douglas would head up. The deal to buy the company had indeed died. Instead, the PGA Tour withdrew the broadcast rights from the previous ownership, citing multiple and gross breaches of contract, and sold the rights to Kahn. Douglas told those of us assembled at the June 16 meeting that no one from the previous operation would be retained. But all of us were (wink, wink) welcome to apply for the same jobs with Santa Rosa the next morning at Kahn's office.
On Tuesday morning, I figured I was out of a job. By Wednesday afternoon, I was on a plane to San Francisco to anchor leaderboard updates at the U.S. Open at The Olympic Club, fully employed by Santa Rosa Broadcasters. As a bonus, Kahn graciously paid us for the weeks we worked for free under the old guard.
It stood to reason that a liquor wholesaler would know how to lift spirits, and Kahn certainly raised ours with his purchase. As the survivors began this second act, we had a new lease on life and office space. Santa Rosa moved the operation up I-85, north of Atlanta's famed Spaghetti Junction to Norcross where studios of our own were built to obviate the weekly trips to Doppler. We also had a new name and logo - PGA Tour Radio - which wasn't an especially drastic change but did attempt to distinguish from the erstwhile outfit.
We finally had reputable ownership and solid financial backing, and that meant we no longer feared finding pink slips in our paychecks. What we still didn't have unfortunately were people who knew network radio who could use the new resources to grow the affiliate base and bring in advertisers. I left for Golf Channel in the spring of 2000; PGA Tour Radio stayed on the air until 2002 when it finally folded about the same time Kahn lost a second consecutive bid for U.S. Congress. In 2005, Austin, Texas entrepreneur Kirk Coburn revived the concept - though it had no relation to the previous two ownership groups - when he created a satellite radio version, which begins its fourth season on XM (Channel 146) next week.
Ten years later, I still laugh when I think of the characters and chaos of PGA Tour Radio Network. Warren Elliott, the unctuous carnival barker whose knack for interchanging truth and fiction helped to both fuel and foil his dream, can still be seen around Atlanta from time to time. Most of the others landed on their feet in some endeavor besides golf.
I came out relatively unscathed from and generally grateful for my experiences there. Sure there were some tough times, like finding human excrement splattered across the bathroom of the corporate apartment they'd reserved for my family and me. But it's the faces, not the feces, of those former colleagues that I'll always remember from an adventure that history can't wait to forget.
Grant Boone is a husband, father, golf broadcaster, and sports journalist based in Abilene, Texas. His column appears on PGA.com each Wednesday and every day during major championships and other big events. He can be contacted at pgagrant@hotmail.com.
The views and opinions expressed here do not reflect those of PGA.com or The PGA of America.
