The Golf Channel makes a double bogey on Solheim coverage

The Golf Channel scored a distasteful double bogey for their coverage of Sunday's single matches in the Solheim Cup. While the play was exciting, TGC let the out of the drama balloon about every five or six minutes.

It appears that TGC has abandoned the coverage of golf for the broadcasting of commercials. The statistics provide the cold hard truth. In the five and a half hours of broadcast time when there was actually golf being played (11:00 AM to 4:30 PM EDT), TGC ran commercials or self-indulgent promos 24% of the time. The actual numbers are here: 330 minutes of broadcast time with 82 minutes of commercials. (Yes, we sat through the whole broadcast and did the agonizing math.)

One could tell we were heading down Commercial Lane in the first fifteen minutes of coverage. Match One featuring Creamer vs. Pettersen began play at 8:05 AM. Within a minute of the two ladies walking off the tee, TGC went to commercial for three minutes. When TGC returned, we had the privilege of watching a tape delay of Creamer's second shot. Tape delay! One match on the golf course and we can't get a live shot. And this commercial onslaught continued for the next five hours.

And if you think TGC doesn't have a couple of favorites, you are sadly mistaken. If you wanted to watch Creamer, Wie, or Kim, you were in golf heaven. [Which brings to mind the Solheim promo which aired several times on Sunday featuring Captain Beth Daniel leading her team from the corn fields of Illinois onto the playing field, all ala Field of Dreams. Would it be too much to say this was corny?] In the first three hours of coverage at least 75% was dedicated to the previously mentioned three ladies. TGC virtually shunned nine other matches. The Kristy McPherson vs. Catriona Matthew match teed off at 11:50. Two hours into their match we had still not seen a single shot of the match. The first tiny glimpse of the match occurred at 3:10 PM on their fourteenth hole. Twenty-eight minutes later Matthew had won the match.

It all seemed like twelve matches was too much to handle. We were provided a very limited quantity of overall match updates. One would think total match updates would be put on the screen just before each commercial. At least at that rate we would have been updated half a dozen times per hour.

The Golf Channel should not post this score for handicap purposes.

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