Golf on TV: More exciting in the production truck
Bethpage Black
Tiger Woods
Phil Mickelson
On the course and on your TV screen, golf is the most sedate of sports, a place where birds often are the loudest creatures heard - even at notoriously raucous Bethpage Black.
But inside the crowded, high-tech room that guides the coverage lurks a paradox: The calmest game is anything but that for the people who must make sense of it on television. One TV executive compared it to a duck - serene on the surface, with feet furiously paddling out of sight.
Which is why it helps to have a producer who admittedly is "addicted to adrenaline.''
So Tommy Roy said Wednesday during the calm before the Bethpage storms as he showed me around the NBC production truck emblazoned with the "Sunday Night Football'' logo.
The NFL truck is the network's flagship, and the Open stretches its capacity as much as any task.
Drew Esocoff, who directs NBC's NFL games, stopped by Friday and marveled at the controlled chaos.
"To me, the only event that's more complex is the Olympics,'' said Roy, who has produced the Open for NBC since 1995.
(Even when ESPN is televising the tournament, it uses NBC's production team and equipment.)
The challenge was evident during an hour in the truck late Friday morning. Spread before Roy and director Doug Grabert were 20 screens, divided into as many as nine smaller windows each.
That is what is required when you deploy 53 cameras to cover an event with multiple balls in play and no breaks in action during commercials.
"What's different about golf than football, baseball, basketball is those sports have one ball,'' Roy said. "And when you do a Patriots game, you know Tom Brady is going to be the story.
"Here there are 156 players and the story could be any one of them. Now, likely it is going to be Tiger or Phil, but you just don't know where they're all going to come from.''
Thus while viewers at home watched seamless transitions from shot to shot, in the truck Roy yelled "wipe'' to order the ESPN logo to swoosh across the screen, often just in time for the next big shot.
At all times, shots not seen live are recorded for future use.
During a 10-minute break in which ESPN went to a SportsCenter report, Roy grew noticeably impatient, rocking in his chair, wiping his brow and folding his arms as Phil Mickelson looked for a ball he lost in the woods, with America unable to watch him.
Then it was back to the action, and back to what Roy thrives on - a TV puzzle that is impossible to get exactly right.
"If you're doing a football or basketball game, you may have 15 cameras, and at any one time at least five of those cameras are on the ball,'' he said. "If one of them messes up, you just take another.
"Here, we have one camera on 16 that's following the ball, and if he loses it in the sky, it could be the most important shot of the championship and we don't have it.''
The cameras are only part of it. Roy also is in frequent contact with announcers spread around the vast course, both in towers and on foot.
The adrenaline helps. "When we get to Sunday afternoon and it's our 30th hour on the air, you have to have it,'' he said. "And that's the most important hour, when you have to be your sharpest.''
Roy, whose father was a golf pro, said it is a blessing to cover the sport in the Tiger Woods era because "he's made golf cool, quite frankly.''
If not Woods, Mickelson would be a fine consolation prize as an ongoing story. Roy muttered "hit it, hit it'' as Mickelson tried a birdie putt on No. 12. He slammed the table when it missed.
Roy gathered himself quickly, because there were several dozen other golfers to keep an eye on.
As he said Wednesday: "It's a challenge every single time.''
