Every excuse for tennis is contradicted by golf.

[FulhamFan]

ESPN has made it clear that showcasing americans is where the ratings are.
However most golf fans know about and follow Ernie Els, Vijay Singh and Colin Montgomery.

Then there's the argument that the stars like Federer and Roddick have to win slams to keep interest. However before tiger woods a different person was winning every golf major. And the designated stars like Phil Mickelson and David Duval went years before winning a major.

And yet the lowest events in golf get network coverage while the slams in tennis get marginal cable coverage. As I write this there are two golf events on NBC and CBS at the same time. But broadcasting roddick vs federer final live on cable is impossible?!

[kennycalhoo]

Respectfully, while I think it's easy for us to say that, it's also much different to broadcast on television, golf vs. tennis. With golf, you constantly have different shots, on different holes, and storylines of some people moving up, some moving down. I think that's what makes golf much more enjoyable for the "average person" to watch, because you're presented with 20 different characters, with 30 different storylines, in a span of 3-4 hours, while in tennis, you're watching a match for 2 hours, with just two people.
(please, don't shoot the messenger)

[zikmat]

Well, In France it's not much better !
We didn't have any coverage of Wimbledon on Public channel (while Grosjean and Mauresmo made it into semi finals) and we did have to cope with 3 weeks of live coverage (from 2 to 6 hours per day) of cycling, to see the same guy (Armstrong) win for the sixth time in a row... Exciting, no ??

[FulhamFan]

kenny,

actually your description of golf coverage is alot like the way grand slams used to be covered. There are 128 singles matches (men and women) going on in the first 2 days. There is more than enough stories for tv. However ESPN chooses to focus on the most boring one. Seeing the top seed advance in the 1st round is the most undramatic match to display.

The only time they would show an entire match was when it was interesting. Say like agassi ranked 124 vs sampras. However if it was sampras vs noname they would move to another match after he won the first set 6-0.

zikmat,

Here we had terrible coverage of the tour de france unless you had OLN. Lance Armstrong is probably the greatest american athlete in the past 10 years and for his record 6th tour he got about 5 minutes on tv. It wasn't even live.

[FulhamFan]

Last night they played some tiger woods exhibition match on ABC and the ratings sucked. If ESPN was really as serious about tennis(and the usopen series) they would of shown one of the night matches instead.

[dryeagle]

yeah, they did show Agassi-Fish which was played during the day. That was probably the best match of the day, why didn't they just schedule the match to be played on Monday night? Instead they had Hewitt-Bogomolov.