The Loop

US Open: ESPN coverage

June 20, 2009

If it's been a challenge for the Bethpage greenkeepers and the USGA ops folks, it's been just as much of a challenge to the broadcasters trying to make sense of it. Knowledge of this did not prevent Golf World reader Jerry McKenna from commenting on the commentators.

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Dear Editor,>

It's to bad that ESPN couldn't get Lanny Wadkins in the booth with Curtis Stange and Chris Berman. If they could have pulled that off they would have had the three worst golf announcers in the past 25 years on their broadcast. ESPN can and should do better.

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Jerry McKenna

Dublin, Oh

That's very cruel, Jerry, and with Father's Day just around the corner! Actually, I found Berman much toned-down this year, eschewing lame nicknames and trying to be well, like a golf announcer. I also found Curtis' comments yesterday on his consecutive Opens, and the pressure and physical demands of the second pretty interesting. One ought to keep an electronic scrapbook substitute candid quotes 20 years after the events for the empty ones they gave us at the time. But Curtis seemed rusty, I'll give you that. In the end, it was reassuring to hear the commentary of Johnny Miller on the ESPN re-cap show last night. Maltbie, Miller, Hicks...back on solid ground. My one beef is that we never got a graphic on exactly which players had completed exactly which portion of their rounds. It reminded me of the 1997 Ryder Cup, where the time delay coupled with rain delays left a lot of us completly disconnected from the event. I long for this thing to catch up....to the right number of holes and the right team of announcers.

--Bob Carney