The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Sedentary future for spectators?
IF YOU’LL tolerate my selfindugence just for a moment to get to the point, the press box at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff is the worst sited of any such facility at a modern sports venue I’ve experienced.
It’s on the very lowest of the three tiers, meaning you’re about at the players’knee level. You therefore can’t really see any of the formations, which when covering rugby is sort of important.
So in my several visits to the wonderfully atmospheric Millennium to watch Scotland — of which last month’s was easily the most painful — I find myself watching almost the entirety of a live game on the stadium’s enormous TV screens to get some clear idea of what is going on.
It makes for a surreal experience — but it appears this rather strange way of viewing a sporting event is exactly what the R&A have in mind for everyone at the Open Championship from now on.
This year at Hoylake the Open promises to be surely the most hi-tech sporting event staged within these shores and perhaps in all of Europe. It’s all a bit ironic, because last time at Hoylake in 2006 the R&A reacted to new technology like a Luddite over a weaver’s loom.
The first year that camera phone technology actually became reasonably useable was 2006. It’s amazing to think this was just eight years ago.
Coupled with great weather and enormous crowds not all accustomed to tournament golf etiquette, chaos ensued. The final round was conducted in a deafening deluge of clicks from mobile phones, to the fury of champion Tiger Woods.
The R&A promptly banned all mobiles from the Open until Lytham in 2012, when they suddenly did a complete about-face.
Smartphones were now allowed and punters trusted — generously — to silence their ringtones and camera clicks. The reason was the stuffy old R&A were really keen on developing their phone apps.
The club’s techie nerds have been upping the ante ever since and this year it’s about to hit saturation. After last year’s trial of four LED screens showing scoreboards and highlights, at Hoylake every hole but the last, which is retaining the famous yellow scoreboard by popular demand, is to have one.
All stands— 25,000 seats in all with a new “stadium arrangement” around the 18th green — will have their own wi-fi routers to ensure that highlights put on the Open’s free app to their own “pretendy” onsite TV station can be streamed direct to seated spectators’ smartphones.
Effectively, you’ll be able to watch the BBC’s pictures while being at the event.
Given the slump in numbers at Muirfield last year, it’s not entirely surprising that the R&A want to enhance the spectator experience and, to be honest, for £75 a day they had to. But will something be lost?
Golf at the Open is a unique spectator event. For a start, the vast majority of the galleries actually play the game themselves.
Secondly, it’s a moveable feast, with people traditionally scurrying about the links following their favourites hole to hole.
The rush of people about the course on an Open Sunday probably gets your average health and safety inspector fainting dead away, but it is part of the great fun of the best day in golf.
Thirdly, the noise at an Open, the cheers floating over the dunes, is an integral part of the atmosphere. There’s surely no other sporting event that can get a cheer or a
“Highlights put on the Open’s free app... can be streamed direct to seated spectators’ smartphones.”
groan for a scoreboard changing but it happens all the time at the Open, and indeed also at the Masters.
Over in Georgia, they’re holding fast to tradition. You can’t take a mobile phone on the course at Augusta National during championship days, even if you’re wearing a green jacket.
The spectator experience seems to be just fine there — the comparatively reasonable prices for food and merchandise help — without screens and smartphone apps.
I’d like to think that the Open crowd are still of a vintage where they prefer to be racing about the dunes, straining to see over heads and being a proper, organic part of the championship.
Unlike most other spectator sports, golf doesn’t lend itself to being sedentary with your face constantly focused on a phone screen. One hopes that the R&A don’t plan to have us all stuck in our seats in the future.