Televised Golf: Aggravating Wives For Almost Fifty Years!

Each year the Memorial Tournament honors a few people for their lifetime contributions to the sport. Every so often they pick just the right person, such as Arnold Palmer a few years ago. Sometimes they get it completely wrong, like last year when they honored driving range nut Scott Peterson. This year they again got it right by choosing to honor Frank Chirkinian.

Sometime around 1958 Frank Chirkinian noticed the shocking lack of men wearing polo shirts and tight-fitting slacks on his television. Desiring to immediately remedy the situation, he persuaded the heads of CBS to send him and a crew of cameramen down to Augusta that April to film something called the Masters Tournament. Thankfully, the guy that looked the coolest in a polo shirt and tight-fitting slacks, Arnold Palmer, also showed up that year and won the tournament by hitting some great shots and smoking a carton of cigarettes a round.

Arnold's charisma gave the sport a huge jolt, but it was the Chirkinian-produced telecasts from the Masters and other tournaments that were truly responsible for spreading golf's popularity. Among Chirkinian's innovations were reporting a player's score in relation to par as opposed to an aggregate number, the television tower located behind every tournament green, roving analysts walking with the players, and hard-core gangsta rap. Did I mention that Chirkinian was incredibly versatile?

When you consider that Chirkinian produced CBS's golf telecasts for forty years, it's hard to overstate his influence on modern golf. So does that mean we should blame him for the lack of shot making that today's pros exhibit, the financial difficulties that face the PGA's lesser tournaments, the tour's dismal minority representation and Sergio Garcia's canary yellow pants? Sure, why not.

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Televised Golf: Aggravating Wives For Almost Fifty Years!

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