PROMINENT EXECS DISCUSS STATE OF GOLF IN SBJ/SBD ROUNDTABLE

Several Prominent Golf Execs Debate Issues Facing Sport During Roundtable Discussion

Pro golf, like other segments of the sports industry, is fighting cutbacks in corporate spending that are testing the ability of the tours to continue selling title sponsorships, of organizations like the PGA of America and USGA to hawk six-figure corporate hospitality at their championships, and of agents to secure endorsements for their clients. There are positive signs, though. The PGA Tour and LPGA have seen some renewed interest in the first half of this year with new sponsors, a few extensions and a new TV deal. The absence of Tiger Woods helped identify a new crop of crossover players, and the LPGA is looking at its most promising young stars ever. Those and other topics were discussed when stakeholders in professional golf gathered in SBJ/SBD's Charlotte HQs last month. Participants included PGA of America CEO Joe Steranka, CBS Sports Coordinating Producer Lance Barrow, USGA Chief Business Officer Pete Bevacqua, PGA Tour Executive VP/Communications & Int'l Affairs Ty Votaw, LPGA Tournament Owners Association President Gail Graham, Wasserman Media Group Senior VP Malcolm Turner, IMG  Senior VP & Global Dir of Golf Clients Clarke Jones, Octagon co-Managing Dir of Golf Giff Breed and LPGA Deputy Commissioner Libba Galloway.

Q: How would you characterize the state of professional golf?

Votaw: We’re obviously, as far as the PGA Tour is concerned, dealing with ... the economic environment that has gone south in a number of sectors. We feel very good about how we’ve been able to manage through it so far. We saw this coming -- perhaps not to this degree -- but we saw it coming late in ’07 and planned accordingly throughout ’08 relative to our own expenses and our own operations and were able to then build up our reserves for some of the fallout coming down the road. But we’re encouraged over the past 60 days where we’ve had a number of extensions announced with title sponsors -- Travelers, Accenture, Zurich, the HSBC Champions event in China and [SBS in Hawaii]. We have some nice momentum in terms of our title sponsorships and we’re optimistic that we’re going to come through the recession in as good a shape or better as we have in the past. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, but in past recessions over the last 13, 14 or 15 years we’ve come through in a stronger position than we went in and we think the potential for that is in this one.

Galloway: From our standpoint we’ve got a good product and there’s nothing wrong with the product, it’s the world around us. It’s how we manage that, and one thing that we’re doing is looking at our international footprint. That’s very strong. The rest of the world is facing a lot of the things that [the U.S. is] facing, but being able to play on different continents and different countries, I think we’re going to weather the storm and come out of it ahead.

Bevacqua: In the last 30 to 60 days we’ve seen a shift in the stigma that has surrounded golf from December into January and February starting to lighten up a bit. Corporate spending on golf has been the whipping boy of corporate excess, and I think that is starting to lessen. Not enough, not dramatically, but we’ve seen it with our four corporate partners and some of our hospitality clients. People are starting to be a little bit less concerned about the buzzword that’s out there -- the optics -- of being seen at a golf event and getting more comfortable embracing it. I think coming into the New Year with the TARP money there was certainly a mentality that said, ‘Let’s retreat and play low key,’ and I think that’s lessening. I think the big challenge for the USGA, the PGA Tour, the LPGA and the PGA of America is trying to make some educated guesses and predicting what corporate hospitality in the golf world is going to look like coming out of this.

Steranka: The traditional hospitality of 100-person, 200-person chalets, I think, is going to go the way of the dinosaur. People are looking for more experiential entertainment. Tournament golf, with the pro-am format, delivers a lot of that. The good news is that side of hospitality has the lowest margin of all the things that you sell. You’re just doing some discounting by bringing in 200 corporate guests and hoping you make it up in merchandise and everything else. So we’re looking at smaller units, more interactive units and putting the corporate guests closer to the ropes, or something inside the ropes.

Barrow Says Golf Sales At CBS Sports Have Been OK

Barrow: Things so far at CBS Sports look pretty good. The sales for golf have been OK. Obviously with the automobile industry and the financial industry down we’re losing some of those ads. It always seems like in golf, with us, that someone else takes its place, and luckily that has happened this year. It has not really affected our production at all, which means personnel, cameras and the technical part of it. We’re being smarter about how we’re doing it. We’re taking away from some tournaments and heading to some other tournaments, but other than that it’s not affected us that much.

Turner: I think at its core golf remains a very attractive property. It still has global appeal, unique brand building opportunity, a really positive image in the marketplace, and because of that we need to use this period as an industry to reevaluate and reassess our value proposition to the marketplace. I think five to 10 years from now you can still have a growth story in golf. It may not be chronological growth, but when you look at the core product it’s still attractive.

Jones: The foundation of professional golf is very solid. It’s been proven over how many years, maybe back when Arnold (Palmer) shook (Mark) McCormack’s hand 50 years ago. As Arnold said at Bay Hill, ‘It’ll come back.’ Companies have proven that the return on investment is something that is beneficial. That said, maybe things got a little out of control outside of what we can control and the things around us have made the industry look inward in how it can do things better. … I think the people who are spending are going to be smarter and this is a good period to re-evaluate your business, which could be good for golf because the model works.

Breed: We’re using this to hit the reset button on how we present it. One of the things we’ve done is to enter into a partnership with one of our sister companies, the Martin Agency, to help us tackle the challenge of how athletes matched with properties can help the companies sell more of their goods and services. And how can an event or athlete be woven into the entire fabric or marketing plan that those companies are looking at. We still remain a passion-based marketing operation, whether it’s with our consulting group or our athletes and personalities area. We’ve invested significantly in our technology side with Twackle, and we’re doing a number of different projects with broadcasting to 3G devices, toolbar development.

Q: Two of the biggest mainstream news items in golf in the last six to eight months were the LPGA’s English policy and Barney Frank’s issues with the banking industry and golf. Does golf have PR issues?

Votaw: I think the Barney Frank situation was a little overblown, but that doesn’t mean we’re not dealing with the consequences of it being overblown. Barney Frank has been educated as to the economic and charitable impact and you’ve seen a lot of the rhetoric toned down over the past several months. Same with John Kerry. Those are the types of things that from a PR and government relations perspective the PGA Tour has a degree of difference in its approach and how to handle these types of things. We think, in terms of Washington, you can’t compete with Barney Frank in terms of the bank of microphones that he has access to versus the bank of microphones that Tim Finchem has access to. It’s a question of making sure that when you do respond to these types of things that you do it in a way that increases the likelihood of success.

Jones Stresses Importance Of Charity To PGA Tour

Jones: It goes back to the perception that Congress and John Kerry had that it’s a boondoggle for Northern Trust in L.A., which it wasn’t. It probably goes back to AIG before that -- not talking about golf -- but, again, it’s a perception. Is it your responsibility? No, but it would be nice if you guys understand the business model of what is working on the PGA Tour and how important charity is. It’s the perception that they had the bank of microphones and there’s no message that’s been rescinded, just the rhetoric has been toned down, but they’re moving onto the next news cycle.

Steranka: That’s different for us. We’re a game played by gentlemen and ladies. We conduct ourselves with a certain degree of etiquette and, fundamentally, that won’t change. But we don’t have an attack dog. Think about it, those comments were made and whether it was MSNBC, even Fox, they all piled on. We don’t have the relationships in Washington, D.C., for somebody to say, ‘Barney Frank should look in the state of Massachusetts and realize that it’s a $2 billion industry in the state of Massachusetts and it employs 50,000 people.’ We haven’t played that game, and we haven’t had those relationships, and we do have to get in the game and get in those relationships so we can respond more immediately.

Bevacqua: I think one of the more primal disadvantages we have is if you walk around the streets of New York City and you compare that to five years ago when it was jackets and more casual pants and slip-on loafers, it’s a very buttoned-up look right now. It’s wingtips, suits and ties. Put the Saturday and Sunday of golf away. The economic viability of golf is Monday through Friday for these events and the big disadvantage golf has compared to other sports is you’re requiring a CEO or CFO or higher up people in a company to disappear for a day on a Monday through Friday. I think that’s going to be increasingly difficult to justify and people are going to be more scared to do that.

Votaw: The question is, What do we do about it? I don’t think we should apologize that golf is good for business. In those situations, whether it’s a client or attending an event, business is conducted on a golf course. There’s skepticism about that among the 280 million that don’t play golf in this country, but there’s no question that golf helps business get done. I think we should not apologize for that.

Q: What will the LPGA and PGA Tour schedules look like 3-5 years as far as the number of events, location, etc.?

Votaw: I think it’s going to be a market-driven schedule. Whatever the market will bear. We will do as good a job as we can of exploiting the marketplace relative to what playing opportunities we can provide to our players. It’s as simple as that. If the market will bear 47 tournaments, our schedule in four years time will look like 47 tournaments. The sponsorship environment, our ability to become more of a global brand, that goes into what the market will bear. That will influence what our schedule will look like. I think the answer is that we’re going to continue to market our sport in such a way that we’re going to maximize the number of playing opportunities as much as we can -- whether it’s 47, 46 or 45 -- it’ll be a function of what the market will bear.

Galloway: I agree to some extent, but I think what we’ve learned from history is even if the market were to bear more tournaments I’m not sure we’re going go in the direction of adding as many tournaments as we possibly can. We found that around 35 tournaments is a good number. I think we can see 35 tournaments five years from now. It may be that we see a few more internationally.

Steranka Wants Golf To Continue To Diversify

Q: Assess the state of diversity in golf.

Steranka: At the PGA of America we subscribe to the premise that golf, to maintain its relevance and remain a contemporary sport, has to look more like the face of America. We’ve seen growth in women’s participation but equal growth in the number of women who are senior directors or above at the PGA of America. We’ve seen growth in people of color working in various positions in the PGA of America.

Votaw: Diversity is an area that I think you can do more. It’s never enough. If you look at the PGA Tour it is enthusiastically supported. You start with our minority internship program that came about in the '90s, and out of that we have hired a number of people at the PGA Tour or placed a number of people in the golf industry. We’re very proud of being able to do that. Whether or not those numbers translate into senior management is a question that is going to take some time. Just like diversity in playing golf on the African-American side. Everybody looks at the statistics that there are 12 African Americans on the LPGA and PGA Tours in 1976 and today there’s only one: Tiger Woods. But it took 20 years for Earl Woods to develop Tiger Woods. The PGA Tour has been a very active in getting the First Tee off the ground. ... There are more African Americans, there are more minorities playing golf at the junior levels, the high school levels, the college levels than there were 10 years ago. We see that continuing and the First Tee is part of that success story. We’re going to continue to do the kinds of things with our internship program and in making sure that we maximize the opportunities for women at the PGA Tour.

Turner: This requires an ongoing initiative and an ongoing commitment rather than just a commitment in a given year, but I really believe I’m here today as a result of the PGA Tour’s minority internship program. I was part of its inaugural class. The leadership and vision and commitment of Deane Beaman and Tim Finchem and Gary Stevenson and others gave me an opportunity and it was up to me to make the most of that opportunity. But this is something that you have to be committed to over time. It’s a process. Change doesn’t happen by osmosis.

Q: Golf needs to do a better job of …

Steranka: Communicating the depth and breadth of the 28 million people who play and the economic impact of the playgrounds they play on. We are a huge positive force in America and we haven’t told that story.

Barrow: How valuable professional golf is to the communities they go to and how valuable they are around the world in what they bring to the areas they go to. They help and they give to people, and I don’t know if anyone has ever told that story as much as it should be told. There are so many people that give help because of golf, either directly or indirectly.

Bevacqua Feels Golf Has To Conform To Cultural Time Shift

Bevacqua: At the participatory level, golf has to do a better job figuring out how to conform to a cultural shift in time. The day of people taking five hours on a Saturday or Sunday is getting more and more difficult. I think other sports -- through no work of the leagues -- people can get together and play three-on-three basketball for 20 minutes or two hours. Golf somehow has to figure that out. I don’t have the answer, but jamming an 18-hole round into a busy American lifestyle is going to be a challenge going forward from a participatory level.

Votaw: The diversity of the golf organizations represented in this room is sometimes its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. We have a lot of alphabet soup that goes on in terms of the number of organizations that have roles in the sport, and being able to bring all of those interests and all of those different organizations together on issues that are common to each of them and that are not always easy to identify. Two examples in the past 18 months have presented themselves. One is golf’s anti-doping program that was done collectively among all the leading organizations through the World Golf Foundation. And the second thing is the initiative to get golf in the Olympics. I’ve never seen unanimity in our sport on a particular issue like we’ve seen on golf in the Olympics.

Turner: The Tiger effect. For those events that don’t have Tiger, I think, need to focus on having higher aspirations than being just a golf tournament and really working to be an important event in that community. Focusing on building a unique brand in the marketplace, knowing the tour’s schedule and some of the unique programming that you can calendarize your tournament throughout the year, the unique experiences that you can create on site and market, etc., such that you don’t have a model that success singularly hinges on the names in your field.

Galloway: How to make golf more appealing to the non-golfer, whether it’s as a spectator sport or participatory. As much as I think the life skills are so important and make golf a great game and we all appreciate it, the people in golf appreciate it because of the life skills, it doesn’t do a whole lot to get an 8- or 10-year-old to play golf or watch golf on television. Somehow we need to get a little more pizzazz and get that 13-year-old watching golf or playing golf instead of playing soccer or watching football.

Q: What is the general state of sponsorship? How are things changing?

Steranka: You’re getting a flight to the higher quality events. Doing more, deeper, with fewer things and that’s primarily going to be short term as people constrict budgets. You’re just going to make the money go to the most important things on the priority list. Since there’s less money you have to work harder to get it.

Votaw: And it’s the value proposition. It’s like optics, it’s a buzz word, but the elements of that value proposition is what’s put golf in good standing. And companies that understand that and aren’t afraid of the optics can justify the business decisions that go on in sponsoring an LPGA event, a PGA Tour event or a major championship. … We’ve been fully sponsored because it works for these companies that do these events and sponsor these players. Global reach, track of audience, image of our sport, charity impact. All of those make a difference to a sponsor when it’s making a decision about associating itself with our sport, whatever the platform is.

Turner Feels Sponsors Have Taken A Defensive Posture

Q: What about inventory? Are we still in the days of photocopying the same deck and sending it to five agencies or is it more customization?

Turner: There’s no question the inventory will change. Overall, I think there’s no question these sponsors have taken a defensive posture recently in the marketplace. But the conversations that we’re having with brands, we’re starting to see more and more brands play a little offense in the marketplace. For properties, the problem with that is it’s more of a four-corner style offense of biding their time and conserving their power, so there is some prolonged decision making. But sponsors without question are asking for more flexibility, more customization, newer opportunities in terms of expanding the fan experience off the course in some areas like new media.

Jones: I think it’s a buyer's market. The landscape has changed. Maybe it was a seller’s market a while ago. You have to be smarter about what you’re presenting because you want to lower the risk of the spend for the new partner or the renewal. I don’t know when it’s going to end, but it’s challenging. At the same time you’re sharpening your pencil to make sure what you’re agreeing to with a new partner is providing for both parties, whether it be an event, a player, a governing body, can work. Obviously a win-win deal is better for everybody. It is challenging, but right now this environment is healthy. I think if you can get by the optics and do the value play you’ll find partners.

Bevacqua: What we’ve found with our partners is that you almost have to work together so there’s flexibility on both sides. You have to recognize the problems they’re facing and the problems we’re facing and say, ultimately we’re in this for the long run. And if that means circling the wagons in ’09 for the sake of a long-term relationship, then that’s smart. The country’s going to come out of this and golf will follow and these companies will follow, and it’s better to dial it back a notch in the best interest of the USGA and our corporate partners so we can come out of this in a stronger position. And you’re forced to be creative. And if there’s anything that’s exciting about this, it’s that. 

Galloway Says LPGA Must Be Flexible With Sponsors

Q: Is there a model for how this could be re-jiggered? Will we shift away from corporate sponsorship or does the mix stay the same?

Galloway: If you look at a pie chart, we’re all different. From our standpoint ticket sales are not a big slice of the pie. Corporate sponsorships are, and I think they will continue to be. We don’t necessarily look at that as a negative. It’s kind of like people saying 2009 is tough; 2010 we have to look at things in the long run. In the short run we have to be flexible with sponsors, try to ride this out and hope we maintain the ones with long-term relationships. But I really see corporate sponsorship in our world continuing to be an important part of it.

Steranka: They say in times like this you need to be real close and give your sponsors hugs, so let me give you a hug. (Hugs Barrow). I love you, Lance.

Jones: What about the challenge of the title sponsor who has to spend the money on the ad units? Let’s take the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship and the majors out. Golf ratings are not great.

Steranka: Ah, they’re OK.

Jones: You think they’re great?

Votaw: Great is a relative term.

Steranka: The size and certainly the quality of the demographics are good.

Votaw: It’s always been that. … Our core is the core 35 million golfers who aren’t watching, by the way, they’re playing golf on Saturday and Sunday. But then if you take it to the outer band, we certainly have the ability to expand your audience in a compelling way. The challenge is the attractiveness of the demographic goes down to certain people who advertise in our telecasts. It’s not a question, and ratings are just one metric, but you keep coming back to the elements of the value proposition. The attractiveness of the audience is something that has always been present in golf’s sponsorship and advertising story. That, I think, is going to continue.

Barrow: I think in this day and age, you talk about the media, and I always claim we are not the media. ... We’re business partners. We’re paying to be there. We’re not the newspapers, the magazines. We’re business partners. We have nothing to do with the media. I said that in front of the players in San Diego. I think the problem we’re having in golf -- and I remember when CBS Sports was involved with NASCAR, the France family, every time they would come visit with us, the first thing they would say was between us and golf, NASCAR has all its stars playing every weekend. I’m not saying Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson or whoever else you want to talk about should play every weekend. That’s not feasible. But I think what happens now, especially on the PGA Tour, you’re getting to where you have the haves and the have nots in terms of golf. ... I think ratings over the last year-and-a-half have been horrible in golf. Horrible. And I don’t care about the demographics. ... I think we have a real issue of how do we turn around that perception that there’s really only one guy out there that means anything. It’s true. We can all wrap it up in a nice box, put a bow on it and say we have great stars out there, we have great players and this and that. And we’re kidding ourselves, in my opinion. We’re kidding ourselves about that. There are great, great players. ... But Tiger is the one and when you don’t have Tiger the perception becomes reality that you have a second-tier tournament, and that’s what I experience as I travel around the country covering golf for CBS Sports.

Votaw Believes Events Can Earn High Ratings Without Tiger

Votaw: Tiger does spike ratings, but I’ll also submit to you that we wouldn’t have been sponsored for the last 20 years, wouldn’t be fully sponsored now, if you were absolutely correct in your feelings. ... You had an event at Riviera, the Northern Trust Open, with Fred Couples coming down the stretch and had a chance to win that event, had one of the highest ratings in the last seven or eight years. And Tiger didn’t play in that event. Zurich, no question didn’t have a strong rating, but I will tell you, what people focused on over the past six months when Tiger was out was that the ratings for events that Tiger had traditionally played in, but he didn’t play in the second half of ‘08, those ratings declined. But events where he has traditionally not played, those ratings have been remarkably consistent over the last five or six years, in comparison to other declines in other sports, especially. ... I think ratings are one metric, and there’s an inordinate amount of focus on ratings amongst a number of people as a reflection on the popularity or viability of the sport. Clearly our ratings are such that we’re making money for our partners in CBS and NBC and the Golf Channel, and we feel we’ll continue to be able to do that based on what we bring to the table in terms of our sponsors underpinning your telecasts, and we think that will continue.

Barrow: I took over golf at CBS when Tiger came to the forefront, and I’ve always said Tiger is great for golf because people come to golf, watch golf. Tiger takes golf from the third or fourth or fifth page on the newspaper to the front page of the sports, sometimes to the front page of the newspaper. People come to golf and they see Tiger and they see Phil and then they see Camilo, Sergio, Harrington and Duffy Waldorf. It brings people and they go, I like Tiger, but I like this other player also. I think it’s great, I just think that sometimes all of us in golf are fighting for something when he’s not there.

Bevacqua: But hasn’t golf always been that way? In any sport, yeah, there might be the marquee team, but there’s always the marquee person or people. So whether it’s Tiger or Jack Nicklaus or Norman, Ben Hogan, there’s always people who go beyond the traditional golf audience and get everybody else there so they can meet the Lee Trevinos.

Barrow: When we did NASCAR, for example, there was Dale Earnhardt, but here was Jeff Gordon and Darrell Waltrip and Buddy Baker and A.J. Foyt and all these guys. When Arnold came along, here came Jack. When Jack was at the top of his game, here came Watson. Here came Trevino. Here came all these guys. I’m not for sure if we’re there. Believe me, it’s the greatest sport played in my opinion.

Steranka: Tiger is the greatest sports celebrity in history because Jack and Arnold had a universe that had three television stations and you got your news a couple times a day, in the morning from your newspaper and at six from Walter Cronkite. In today’s world to get that attention shows how big he is. (MLS Commissioner) Don Garber or (Leonard) Amato, who just left AVP, the people who run track and field, they’re dreaming they have problems like golf has with Tiger and non-Tiger events. We’ll figure it out.

Votaw: Part of it is the model, as well. To come back to our good, our good, dear friends in Daytona Beach, the France family. If golf was only shown on Sunday for four hours like NASCAR is, I think our ratings would have a different story. That’s not what our model is. Our model is a lot of inventory over four days.

Jones: That’s why I brought up the model and the title sponsor. When companies are doing their media evaluation I subscribe wholeheartedly to the known tight demographic. It’s great and we all agree on that. The way you go out to sell new companies to be part of the PGA Tour or the LPGA Tour. We’ve talked about it internally, when those companies sit down and do the media evaluations, ratings come up.

Graham Says There's A Responsbility For LPGA Players To Give Back

Q: There’s been a lot of talk about more player access. Are there too many demands on the players these days?

Jones: I don’t think there’s too many, I just think they need to be balanced. I think the players -- male or female -- are independent contractors and sometimes people lose that focus. They can’t do everything. But I think when the commissioner sets the tone for the year that some things need to change, or some different things about allocating time. Sometimes it piles up. It depends on who you are and how successful you are on the golf course and what the demands are, your sponsor portfolio and what they’re asking you to do. What the media wants you to do. Most of these people have families and you kind of forget that they travel 25-30 weeks a year.

Graham: When I was a rookie on the LPGA tour, Kathy Witworth stood up at a player meeting and told every player, ‘You have a responsibility to this association. One is to perform as a golfer. The second is to entertain.’ And so you had to learn to balance that yourself. Balance is key, especially when you have a top 10 or top 30 player, the demand for that player is huge. But at the same time there’s a responsibility to the association to give back a little bit. LPGA Tour players are fantastic about that.

Q: Is it the media’s job to get the golf message out?

Jones: You are going to be writing about the current events in the sport ... but is it your responsibility? No, but I think it’s a message that can be written about that maybe hasn’t been written about in the past.

Galloway: And when you write about the charity and the pro-ams and the things that the PGA Tour and LPGA have done, look all over the country at charity fundraisers in golf. There are five or 10 charity fundraisers every week in cities all across the country and that charity number has got to be tremendous, but I don’t read too much about that in the media.

Steranka: That number is bigger than all the sports combined and just like the operational number -- $28 billion in golf operations is bigger than all the team sports operations combined. We have to say that, and we have to say it consistently. ... You have to make industry relations -- whether its PR or government relations -- part of our business model and that hasn’t been the case. We’ve only done it tactically in the past.

Q: Can you justify the ratings? Can you justify a media package that can reach $3M?

Votaw: It happens every week. We’re selling it every week.

Q: If there’s further ratings erosion can you continue to justify it?

Votaw: If you look at college basketball when we were growing up ... they had one college basketball game a week, with Bill Walton playing Notre Dame every week it seemed. You had one time to watch college basketball and the rating for that was outsized to what a typical college basketball game is today on ESPN on a Wednesday night. But you do the cume for the overall rating for college basketball [and] it dwarfs what it was 30 years ago with Notre Dame against UCLA. And because of that the media value over an entire platform has expanded, and the number of eyeballs that reach that platform has expanded, [and] it continues to sell. You can’t look at one rating point.

Breed Discusses Importance Of Alternative Media

Breed: To your point, Ty, television now isn’t the communication vehicle it was back then. The alternative media is unbelievable, which again puts more pressure on figuring out how to leverage an entire property throughout the entire communication platform that the brand is trying to develop. Money is going to gravitate toward the top ideas and those are ideas that encompass everything.

Q: Will golf continue to see rights fees in the next round of negotiations?

Votaw: Who knows?

Steranka: I would say yes from the PGA of America standpoint.

Votaw: There are a lot of variables. Our deal is through '12, and who knows where we are in the economy then. Who knows where we are in the performance of our business partners between now and then, and what their appetite is. But if you look at the history of the sport in terms of hours of programming, amount of inventory to sell against those hours of programming, and the ability for the tour to deliver sponsor underpinning to those telecasts, if we do our job in the appropriate way, we should see continued growth whether it’s at the same rate, double digits or single digits. Whatever the growth is, I think that if we continue to do the historical job that we’ve done, we’ll do that, but there are a lot of variables that are out of our control, just like there are in today’s environment.

Galloway: And it may come from different sources. If you look at what’s happened with the Open Championship moving from the networks to ESPN, the BCS going to ESPN, maybe we’re going to see more cable and less network?

Jones: Not to speak for Barry Frank and Alastair Johnson, who did those deals for the R&A from IMG Media, that goes back to being smart and putting a better package together for the R&A. I’m not familiar with the BCS package, but for the R&A the digital ecosystem that was created for the R&A and the traditional television platform of ESPN, I don’t think anyone could have predicted that package even a year ago. Which is different than the tour and their 43 events on the PGA Tour.

Bevacqua: And it’s interesting, too, when you said digital media you talk about the event on Monday through Friday component and perhaps there is a bit of a perception disadvantage. In digital media there is an unbelievable chance for golf to take advantage. Thursday and Friday, when people are at their desks, are unbelievably valuable from a digital media standpoint. Saturday and Sunday to a much lesser extent. So I think the next breed -- we’ve already seen them -- of television deals and rights fees is going to be bundling all of these assets.

Q: What about access? There was the miking experiment with NBC.

Barrow: Which was our idea many years ago. One thing that’s great about dealing with professional golfers ... is it's usually more of a controlled environment. If I get back to my office today and I decide we need to talk to whomever out there (on the course), I’ll just ask our feature producer to go find Sergio and ask him a couple questions about whatever the story might be. So I think it’s great working that way.

Votaw: We started to track that this year, actually, in terms of the number of requests. The PGA Tour team went up to New York and met with Lance and a number of people. One of the many comments that a focus group produced was that fans want to see more of our players on camera talking contextually about what they’re doing. So we began a process by which we deliver players to our TV partners Thursday through Sunday. We’ve had success rates in the upper 90s as far as players being delivered, talking to Lance’s crew before they go out on the course about whatever they want to talk about. Primarily where they stand in the tournament, how they feel, etc. So that’s something that we continue to deliver. Nobody tells our players’ stories better than our TV partners. A lot of our fans want to know who these people are.

Jones: Humanize them.

Barrow: I think that’s what it goes back to. They can play golf and they’re great professional athletes, but what do I know about them? There’s a story with every golfer that we do on the LPGA or PGA Tour. The commissioner asked players to commit to more events in December. Is there any data on whether players have picked up more events?

Votaw: You have to really evaluate at the end of the year where we are relative to players doing that. We’ve had some success this year in the first quarter with players -- there hasn’t necessarily been the top 39 have played more, 10 have played less, and the rest have played the same number and that’s somehow a reflection of them not listening to the commissioner. That’s not how it was intended, and that’s not how we’re going to evaluate success going forward.

Galloway: We had a player meeting the first of the year and talked to the players about what’s going on in the world around them, and we’ve got to go the extra mile. Our players have always been some of the more approachable, accommodating, accessible athletes in sports, but I think they got the message that night we had 90 players show up at the pro-am party. We went to Asia not long after that and we said, go the extra mile, please show up after your round and have lunch in the sponsor’s hospitality tent, and they did it. I think it’s being noticed and from everything I’ve heard, the same thing is happening on the PGA Tour. They’re getting it and going the extra mile.

Graham: I think the LPGA players have really stepped up in committing to events that they haven’t played before and going there knowing that perhaps a sponsor is in renewal or they just want extra help this year. Sponsors are exceptionally excited about seeing those players at those events.