Another one lost to ‘content’
USPGA Championship (Eleven)
IN all the time I’ve known him, Trump has said one thing which made me think ‘he’s got a point there’. The subject was the vote on Scottish independence and it was Trump who pointed out that if Scotland were to break away from the rest of the UK, it would have a massive effect on the British Open golf tournament. Several of the most fabled courses on the Open rota are in Scotland, so if the Scots were to break away this great event would be radically diminished.
Certainly it can be argued that this occurred to Trump because golf is the only thing he cares about, but it was still an interesting possibility that somehow nobody else had spotted or would admit to spotting — and to anyone who argues that sport is far too trivial to be mentioned in these circumstances it should be emphasised that the Open, the most storied of the golf “majors”, is probably the one point of regular contact the rest of the world has with Scotland.
Far from being trivial, it was therefore a matter of considerable importance.
Likewise, the absence of the last “major” of the season, the USPGA Championship, from its usual place on television last weekend is something that tells us much about the state of the world and not just the world of golf.
As regular readers will know, perhaps the first principle of modern existence is that anything that is any good is in constant danger.
So even if the PGA is no good for you personally, it has certainly been good for some people for a long time — indeed one of the immortal Irish sporting moments came from the victory of Padraig Harrington in the PGA at Oakland Hills in 2008, with Rory McIlroy winning it twice since then.
It was a good job, all the same, that these images were available to us, live on television. Even if it was Sky Sports, television is better than no television and it is certainly better than the “streaming” by some crowd called Eleven, which was the only way most Irish viewers could “access” the grand old tourney held last weekend in Missouri.
As it happened, Shane Lowry was in the frame. And there was Tiger, resurgent and playing every shot as if it were a personal rebuke to the dudes who had somehow organised it that his many followers in these islands would have to be scratching around the internet to see these marvellous deeds, not watching it on the big screen as the gods intended.
And as we dig deeper into the causes of this outrage, we realise it is rooted in some weird business whereby Sky couldn’t come to an agreement with the USPGA so the BBC secured the rights for last year but covered it so poorly it eventually ended up on Eleven.
Here Sky and the USPGA must be castigated for their abysmal executive failure, which is characteristic indeed of much executive activity across all platforms. Sky even has a “dedicated” golf channel and yet managed to lose one of the four majors. Not dedicated enough, it seems.
As for the BBC, its surrender of the aforementioned British Open to the aforementioned Sky was perhaps the definitive declaration of the end of the glorious era of public-service television, which had been its singular contribution to our civilisation.
The Open, four days of this tournament at the height of summer for about 10 hours a day, uninterrupted by advertising, was simply abandoned. Privatised, as it were.
Maybe they just thought it went on too long for modern folks. Certainly they had lost the awareness they’d once had of the grandeur of the “majors”, which were once described as “the Impregnable Quadrilateral” — because to win all four in the one season was thought to be almost humanly impossible.
So in this one vignette we see a perfect vision of corporate ineptitude and its effect on the common good, how something that was once the Impregnable Quadrilateral can become “content”.
And yes, there is a difference.