Golf isn’t the easiest sport to broadcast, and FOX Sports surely found that out on the shores of Puget Sound
After inking a 12-year broadcast deal with the United States Golf Association worth a reported $1.2 billion, FOX aired its first major golf tournament in history at the 115th U.S. Open from Chambers Bay.
GeekWire had a chance to visit FOX’s production truck at the Chambers Bay “broadcast compound,” where directors, producers, editors, technicians, and many more spent several consecutive hours each day helping put together the broadcast.
In terms of pressure and intensity, producing live sports — especially golf, with so much action going on at the same time across a huge landscape — certainly ranks up there with other high-stress jobs. Employees have to be on their game for hours on end and there is barely even time to go to the bathroom.
“That’s what commercials are for,” says Ed Delaney, executive vice president of operations at FOX Sports, as we stood inside the truck.
The video above gives you a taste of what it’s like inside one of these live sports production trucks. Steve Beim, the director, controls which camera to air, and for how long a given shot lasts. The producer, Mark Loomis, pays attention to the overall feel of the broadcast and helps drive any necessary content changes.
There are a host of other employees in the truck doing everything from creating replay segments to queueing up graphics. And of course, there are hours and hours of preparation that go into producing a major sporting event on live TV — knowing where all the cameras are, understanding what player to show at a given time, fixing any technological bugs, communicating with the play-by-play and color commentators, etc.
“This is as big as it gets,” Delaney said.
Despite some neat tech additions like ball tracers, drones, and microphones inside holes, it was not difficult to find criticism of FOX’s coverage following the four-day event. For example, NYTimes columnist Richard Sandomir wrote that FOX seemed like an “amateur” at times with its coverage, referencing “numerous unforced errors” like poor commentary and inconsistent graphics.
“Whatever Fox promised the United States Golf Association about how it would change the way the U.S. Open is televised and marketed may have to wait,” Sandomir wrote. “Its innovations — from shading the greens to show Chambers Bay’s undulations to embedding microphones in holes — felt hollow with the basics not yet mastered.”
Spencer Hall at SBNation called it “fundamentally bad TV.” He wrote, “Even the casual sports omnivore dropping in on a slow weekend could tell that this was bad TV made badly and at great expense”
There are certainly a host of improvements FOX could make for next year’s U.S. Open, and it will be interesting to see what types of changes the network makes.