As televised sports go, golf provides more than the usual number of challenges. For starters, golf is almost all downtime. During a typical tournament round, which lasts anywhere between four and six hours, players spend the majority of time doing three boring things: planning shots, walking to and from shots, and standing around while other players hit shots, and a typical tournament, they do this for four consecutive days. Visually, this just doesn’t work. The golfer’s swing and shot—the only real visually dynamic moments of action in golf—comprise just a small portion of a round. The rest is walking, waiting, and planning shots—nothing interesting enough for television. By cutting from player to player golf producers maximize the number of shots shown to give viewers a roughly synchronous experience of the tournament. Tournaments themselves occasionally do produce strong narratives: the best golf television happens when the tournament leaders make important shots at roughly the same time.

In addition to its technical anti-spectacle, golf tournaments are emotionally muted events, to say the least, and golf commentators are accordingly understated. When Tiger Woods sinks a long putt and pumps his fist, sending fans into a frenzy, it’s but a small episode in a dozen hours of weekend TV. In most cases, the professionals we see on television are a calm bunch. You can’t really blame them: unlike many other competitive activities, where athletes can gauge their opponents directly, golf isolates golfers from their opponents. Unless they regularly look at a scoreboard, which many are loathe to do, a tournament golfer cannot always be sure of his or her position in the tournament, leading them to adopt the philosophy that they are “playing against course” and not the other players.

Golf television1 compensates for its inherent lack of dynamic visual content and the emotional restraint of the players by attempting to endear audiences to the players, which is accomplished through the invention and circulation of narratives about the players and the tournament. In this respect, golf is like all major sports TV. Fans who know back-stories about a few of their favorite players experience their sport on television in a different way than non-fans do. For that matter, the way anyone makes sense of sports is dependent on their knowledge of the game and whether or not they have played it. NASCAR fans literally see a different race than I do; their “text” is denser than mine because the visuals work as cues to a series of scenarios requiring choices by the drivers and pit crews. For the serious sports fan, little may be required in terms of commentary and visually dynamic activity on the screen, because that fan comes already primed. If sports industries want build new fans, though, they must cultivate them, and they must reach beyond their events to attract and maintain them.

One of professional golf’s four major events, the Master’s Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club illustrates golf’s dependence on its players and their stories, and it also shows how the golf industry struggles over the way golf is portrayed. Often caricatured as a symbol of negative characteristics of “the South,” the Masters tournament draws the largest golf television audience of the year. For golf fans, it’s an exceedingly difficult ticket to find: the waiting list for passes to attend the event in Augusta, Georgia closed over thirty years ago. Most of us watch the Master’s on television, and we will forever.

However much the players, the club, sponsors, or other members of the golf industry would like to control the perceptions about Augusta National and its famous tournament, they have never been able to do so. The club goes to great lengths to monitor and manage the rhetoric of tournament coverage, including renegotiating its contract with CBS each year, which gives it a commanding position from which to change its representation. The club manages the language, commercial sponsorship, and the smallest details of production. During broadcasts, announcers must call those attending “patrons” and not “fans” or, as one unfortunate announcer put it, “a mob.” Augusta enforces these rules with an iron fist, forcing CBS to fire Gary McCord, a colorful on-the-course commentator, after he joked that a difficult area of the course was littered with “body bags” and quipped that the greens were so fast they must have been “bikini waxed.” It also limits commercialism: during weekend coverage, the club requires that CBS air only four minutes of ads per hour (the norm is 12) and it has on two occasions, in 2003 and 2004, run commercial-free on the weekend.

Though it enjoys an authoritative position in sports, Augusta has always had its critics, a condition generated by its popularity and visibility in the sports world and the largely negative perceptions of its elite, white, male membership. In 2002, feminist groups garnered a great deal of pre-tournament coverage with a well-executed protest of the club’s all-male membership policy. The campaign did not result in female members at August National, but it succeeded in embarrassing the club, it forced discussions of gender equality, and a few tournament sponsors and some members backed away. Moreover, it stole time from golf stories, such as the one about Tiger Woods, already a two-time champion. Woods is very important to the Masters and the Masters is very important to Woods. The tournament was one of the last to invite or qualify a black player, when Lee Elder qualified in 1975. According to David Owens’ The Making of the Masters, Elder’s qualification, because it came a year before the tournament, sparked a long and intense exploration of race, golf, and the south that required considerable effort by both and Elder club officials to manage. After Elder, and until the late 1990s, however, the only black people you would see at Augusta National, with few exceptions, were the ones carrying the clubs.

Just as Augusta celebrated Lee Elder and patted itself on the back for breaking a racial barrier in 1975, Tiger Woods’ arrival as a professional in 1996 was celebrated and promoted as sign that golf was no longer just the bastion of white male elites. In the early years, Woods delivered, giving golf a dynamic, winning player and a symbol of social change all in one package. This was good TV. Over time, people began to say that Tiger Woods transcended race, but what really happened is that his winning enabled the construction of a story and persona that was almost exclusively about golf. For the golf industry and the sports media, his steady accumulation of major tournament victories was the equivalent of the late 90s market bubble—he won so early and so often that all of the hype, product endorsements, and grandiose predictions surrounding him seemed justified. Despite the promotional army at his side, he mostly avoided questions about race relations and social change, almost guaranteeing that the story was always his golf. With each tournament win, with each step closer to owning all the major golf records, Team Tiger molded his image as an e-raced exemplar of hard work, discipline, and competitiveness. Given the force of his gifts and his remarkable ability to earn money for everyone, Tiger Woods more or less shaped his own image, and he really had no critics. It’s important to remember that with the exception of a small shoe line, Nike did not manufacture golf products until Tiger came along. They’re an entrenched player in the golf club, ball, and apparel markets today because of him. Woods had the upper hand and he controlled the narrative. The last time he missed a long stretch of tournaments, TV ratings dropped a whopping 47 percent.

Somewhere in a CBS Sports office in New York, a network official is laughing a wry laugh. Tiger returned to golf at this week’s Master’s Tournament, his first golf appearance since news of his adultery hit the web four months ago. Now the problem for golf TV is not so much that it is boring, the problem is that it’s exciting in all the wrong ways. How will CBS address Woods’ philandering and his stints in unspecified “rehabilitation” programs? Given Augusta National’s traditional insistence on tight lips, we can expect a great deal of discretion from Jim Nance and the other commentators. They will make allusions to Woods’ “off the course problems,” but little more. Talk about an elephant in the room.

In terms of which stories are told about Tiger Woods, everything starts over at the Masters. His career will now be framed as pre-and-post sex scandal. Giving short interviews without addressing questions about the scandal is unlikely to stop the questions and the search for stories about his affairs.

Team Tiger would like nothing more than if the story of Tiger Woods is always the one about a golf prodigy who chases and surpasses the record for major golf wins set by Jack Nicklaus. For now, at least, CBS Sports is likely to comply. But in the long term, outside of the small universe of professional golf, the only thing that will prevent scandal coverage is if Tiger wins golf tournaments. Nicklaus won 18 majors, and, so far, Woods has won 14. Before the scandal, Woods was on pace to pass Nicklaus and secure his place as golf’s greatest player. As he returns to golf this week the record takes on new meaning, because if he does not surpass Nicklaus, it will be attributed it to the scandal, and the legacy written will be one neither he nor his benefactors saw coming.

Paul Achter is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Richmond. He played on the golf team at Concordia College-Moorhead and earlier at Sauk Centre (MN) High School, where his team won back-to-back state championships.

Image Credits:
1. The challenge for golf is to make the game interesting to newcomers without losing what is distinct about it.
2. Tiger’s fist pumps are legendary, but they are relatively few.
3. Lee Elder’s qualification generated intense interest in the Masters and of racism in golf.
4. Jack Nicklaus winning at Augusta in 1986.

1. I refer here to “stroke play” and not “match play” events. The match play style is a form of head-to-head golf, where players are placed in a bracket and play one-on-one matches until a winner is determined. Stroke-play golf is by far the most common format in the professional game.

This tendency of the media not only to fail to reckon with the new realities of American society, but actually to further distort them is a major problem for an American trying to comprehend his [sic] ‘global village.’ In fact, the need to break through the media-created corporate fiction is one of the major motivations and themes of new journalistic works.1

We need to look no further than Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin in the 2008 Presidential campaign to begin to understand the importance of Saturday Night Live (SNL) to American political culture. In the second half of NBC’s life, SNL has become one of the network’s most recognizable shows. Its contribution is especially evident when we trace out the influence of the news parody segment, “Weekend Update,” which has been skewering newscasters, political figures, and media culture generally for almost 35 years.2

“Weekend Update,” like much of SNL, saw itself as a show talking back to the media, as “television’s antidote to television, to all the bad things–corrupt, artificial, plastic, facile–that TV entertainment had become.”3 The show sought this influence in a period of heavily publicized official corruption: it’s not a coincidence that the segment, which Chevy Chase hosted on SNL’s first show, debuted on the heels of Nixon’s resignation over Watergate and Johnson’s lies about Vietnam. These abuses of power led not only to widespread disappointment with Washington politics and politicians, but to a kind of skepticism about journalism and questions about its capacity to check political power. Hellman’s observation above reads as a pretty good paraphrase of the frustration expressed about the Bush administration by people from across the political spectrum during the post-9/11 years. What’s most surprising is that he was writing in 1981. The underlying question, then and now, was fundamental one about democratic practice and the press: how was it that the “fourth estate” had failed to expose the lies and corruption of another presidential administration?

Using a model practically invented by SNL, today’s news parodists respond to new anxieties about the failure of the media to check and balance the government.
In the past ten years, direct descendants of “Weekend Update” have gained increasing visibility and influence in American public culture, and taken “fake news” to new, if sometimes awkward places.4 In an apparent effort to appeal to younger viewers last year, CNN debuted its parody, Not Just Another Cable News Show, and around the same time, the normally stuffy and erudite Huffington Post launched an Internet news comedy site, “23/6,” which scored a viral video hit during the 2008 presidential campaign. Not all news parodists have met with success, especially when they were created by mainstream, dominant news channels: Fox News tried and failed with The 1/2 hour News Hour, and CNN’s D. L. Hughley Breaks the News lasted just a few months. The success stories tend to come from more humble origins: The Onion, whose response to 9/11 drew critical praise, is a veteran in fake news that has grown its offerings (from print to online and television) and expanded its business operation nationally in recent years. On cable, the E! Network’s quirky The Soup, in its 14th year, continues to cultivate a steady following by poking fun at celebrity news, talk shows, and reality TV. It’s worth noting that the critical and commercial successes in the genre are on cable, most obviously, Comedy Central, home of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report.

Just because everyone is doing it does not make the news parody revolutionary. What’s happened since Chevy Chase’s first “Weekend Update” segment in 1975, though, is bigger than the quantity of shows. While critics have denounced Stewart and other comics for using an “inferior” form of commentary, little has been said about the news parody’s power to make paying attention to politics something desirable and worthwhile. The appeal of news parody is not just in its cultivation of a hip, ironic “detachment;” it is that it can make politics, and caring about politics, cool.5 In this sense, it’s more like the news than we think. In fact, mainstream news shows and the parody shows use comedy in strategically similar ways.

This helps explain why ABC’s Sunday morning political talk show, This Week With George Stephanopoulos, would borrow monologues from nightly comedy shows–including Weekend Update, Stewart and Colbert–in a segment called “The Sunday Funnies.” While the title of the segment suggests that ABC is putting the comedians in their place, its use demonstrates that Stephanopoulos “gets it” and affirms the cultural cache of comedy. This “discursive integration” of news, comic, and political discourse is also apparent in The Daily Show, where the host is continually alternating between personas, from a scolding parent and voice of reason (especially in his dustups with CNN’s Crossfire and CNBC’s Mad Money), to an inquisitive student, and back to mocking, partisan, and detached.6 After the opening segments of the show, for example, Stewart interviews a guest, who is sometimes a movie star promoting a film, but very often an elected official, writer, or an expert in an area of politics. During the Bush years, an eager Stewart could often be seen leaning over his desk toward his guests during these interviews, positively aching for some kind of insight into the problems of the world. When this guest is a presidential candidate, and Jon Stewart is asking about global climate policy, he is engaged in a traditional form of talk show journalism. As Geoffrey Baym has pointed out, the discourse of news, politics, entertainment, and marketing have become almost inseparable, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.7

If the Watergate scandal proved that mainstream journalists were powerful and relevant, it also showed how dependent citizens are on a strong and powerful media. Television reports from Vietnam proved that Presidents could easily fool the mainstream media. That Watergate investigations or TV footage unearthed scandalous behavior only stoked more skepticism–if in this case the media “missed it,” than how much malfeasance was going undetected? Such questions created the need for a “new” journalism:

A who, what, where, when, why style of reporting could not begin to capture the anger of a black power movement or the euphoria of a Woodstock. At best it could give the external shape of such events, and even in this effort it did not possess the immediacy of television.8

The “new journalists” worked more self-consciously when they reported, employing literary devices and placing themselves in the “scenes” they wrote about. In other words, they invited attention to the act of creation of the news as they reported it, eschewing objectivity as an ideal and changing how journalism was done from the inside. They worked to “get between” us and the news in productive, if sometimes idealistic, ways. In the same way, today’s news parodists are valuable for their capacity to equip audiences “to read through and filter through, political information as it is presented” (104) and provide us an avenue of participation in a variety of public spheres. It is to this tradition, that Stewart, Colbert, and the others owe a debt of gratitude to Saturday Night Live, and to “Weekend Update.”

Image Credits:

1. “Weekend Update” news desk.
2. Sarah Palin on “Weekend Update.”
3. Stewart with Senator John Kerry during the 2004 Presidential campaign.

Please feel free to comment.

1. Hellmann, John (1981). Fables of fact: The new journalism as new fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, p. 6.
2. “Weekend Update” was not the first nationally popular news parody; among comedians that honor probably goes to Will Rogers.
3. James Miller and Tom Shales, Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, 2002, p. 15.
4. For example, Jeffery Jones’ Entertaining Politics, Lisbet van Zoonen’s Entertaining the Citizen, Jonathan Gray’s Watching With the Simpsons.
5. Although “cool” has before referred to a mode of detachment that can encourage opting out of politics, when popular discourses identify with the values and beliefs of particular social movements, the rhetoric of cool can also bolster political involvement. See Jeff Rice, The Rhetoric of Cool, pp. 38-39.
6. Geoffrey Baym, “The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism.” Political Communication, 22 (2004): 259-276.
7. Baym, 262.
8. Mills, Nicolaus (1974). The New Journalism: A historical anthology. New York: McGraw-Hill: xvii.