Golf Channel recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and President Mike McCarley said the cable net has a "tremendous amount of momentum as a business," according to a three-part Q&A with Martin Kaufmann of GOLFWEEK. McCarley: "If you go back 20 years, how far the channel has come is unbelievable. When it first launched, it was in 10,000 homes. ... Now we’re in more than 120 million homes in 80 different countries. The evolution in a relatively short period of time ... has been pretty remarkable." Excerpts of the interview are below.
Q: Tiger Woods has been the big ratings driver. How do you feel about golf as we’re beginning to approach the post-Tiger era?
McCarley: This year was a great example. Tiger was out for basically his entire season, and for Golf Channel, the rating for the year was exactly the same as it was last year, which was the best year in the history of the network. That’s a testament to a lot of things. There’s a lot of programming and production changes and improvements that have been made that are reflected in those numbers. And two, there are a lot of things in the game that are working well. The LPGA had a terrific year. There are things like the Drive, Chip & Putt, which was new. The NCAA Championships were back on TV. The “Arnie” documentary (aired). We had the highest-rated April in the history of the network, and there was no Tiger in April at all.
Q: What new initiatives will we see in 2015?
McCarley: One area where we’ll focus more because it’s an important piece of the fabric of the game is youth. So what we did this year with the NCAA (Championships) got a lot of people’s attentions, we saw a really nice lift in ratings, but more importantly we introduced the stars of the professional tours to the audience at a younger age. And hopefully that will start to make those kids more recognizable, so they ... arrive on the professional scene with more cachet.
Q: Do you foresee a time when we might see tours like the LPGA or Champions moving to the Monday-Wednesday time frame some weeks?
McCarley: Maybe. When we started our discussions with the NCAA, that was the first conversation we had. We both wanted to figure out a way to put it on television, but here’s what has to happen for us to do it. It took them a year and they came back to us and said, OK. We were able to get it to work. ... Now with streaming and our network is available to anyone in the country who pays a cable bill on any device they have, I think you’ll see more of it in the future. I don’t know when -- I don’t have that crystal ball. There are so many constituent groups that a tournament has -- the players, sponsors, volunteers. But NCAAs provides a nice blueprint for what that could be.
Q: Do you feel the need to do anything in response to Fox’s entry into golf with the USGA contract?
McCarley: No. Competition is part of broadcasting. In the sports world, there’s a handful of major [competitors] and there’s others out there, and I think the competition makes everyone better. I think the more exposure there is for the game of golf from more media entities, the better it’s going to be for the game. ... Ultimately, our job is to serve the viewer, the viewer will let us know one way or the other whether they like something or not. You can’t worry about what other people are doing; you have to be worried about what your job is, and that’s to serve your viewer (GOLFWEEK.com, 2/10).
