In covering U.S. Open Final Qualifying, 'Golf's Longest Day' is Golf Channel's most exhilarating

"I always look at these things, and to me there's three facets. There's the lightning in the bottle story, right? Improbable as hell, but that has a direct lineage to me right back to 1913 and Francis Ouimet at Brookline. Then you have the young upstarts, these kids that are coming in just brimming with confidence. The world hasn't beat 'em down yet. And then you've got the old timers who are trying to capture a past glory. And so it's all about hope."
—Matt Adams, Golf Channel

The accidental quote of the day comes from Zach Bauchou, a 29-year-old Korn Ferry Tour player with a history of close calls who, eyes brimming, attempts to hold it together as he speaks about qualifying for the 2025 U.S. Open at historic Oakmont Country Club. Just off camera, the Golf Channel's Matt Adams asks one last question: Who's the first person you'll call when we're done? Bauchou manages a couple more words—"probably my wife, and then my dad"—before he turns away and seems to laugh and cry at the same time. His voice rises an octave or two.

"I didn't know I'd get this emotional," he says. "Holy shit. We gotta be done."

The question of how Bauchou arrived at that moment has a simple answer—he beat a bunch of other golfers to live out the dream of qualifying for the U.S. Open. But the question of how that obscure moment aired on TV to tug on the heart strings of golf fans is significantly more complex, and involves more than 100 people across the country putting together, piece by piece, the most intricate golf production of the year.

It's a lovely cool day in Durham, N.C., as noon hits, and the Golf Channel crew is four strong, starting with Adams, the talent, who stands on the patio at the Washington Duke Inn overlooking the tree-lined fairways of Duke University Golf Course, patiently waiting his first hit. Next to him is Sarah Rodriguez, the field producer, who leans against the stone wall looking at her laptop and will be in communication all day with her borough chief Mark Zaner back in the buzzing production room in Stamford, Conn. Mike Ochse stands behind the camera pointed at Adams, and beside him is Ramon Hernandez, the second cameraman, who will soon spring into action and hit the course looking for highlights—a true one-man-army, trying to be in the right place at the right time to serve the greater show.

This is one of 10 sites where on Monday, 732 golfers competed for 47 spots in the U.S. Open. The USGA's official name is "Final Qualifying," and Golf Channel had a team at all 10 locations, ready to broadcast from noon to 2 p.m., Eastern and then again from 4 p.m. to midnight. (In that endeavor, they're aided by LiveU, a company that uses bonded cell technology to allow the transmission of high-definition TV using cellular signals and precluding the need to have a satellite truck at every location.) Adams and his team in Durham were one small part of a complex jigsaw puzzle, and the conductor of the orchestra, executive producer Matt Hegarty, stood at the heart of the nerve center with a job that bore at least a passing resemblance to air traffic control at a major international airport. The relevant comparison in the world of televised sports is something like the NFL's RedZone, but the closer analogy is election night—returns pouring in from across the country, all contributing to the big picture result.

Despite its staid image, golf can be enormously difficult to produce for the simple fact that unlike any other sport, there are 18 venues to cover at a single event. And that's probably understating it, because those venues have a tee, a green and a fairway that are far apart, which means that the act of cutting to relevant action involves a staggering amount of filtering and quick decision-making. Spend a few minutes inside NBC's production truck with producer Tommy Roy, as I did a decade ago, and you quickly understand why the minute he leaves that hot seat after hours of high-stress triage, he never wants to make another decision in his life—his wife knows that he won't even pick a restaurant.

There are fewer cameras at each site for Final Qualifying than at an ordinary PGA Tour event (for the first time this year, Golf Channel sent two cameras to some venues, which allowed for more traditional fairway-to-green coverage during the dramatic playoffs), and that simplifies matters in one way. But Hegarty's challenge is that instead of just one course, he has to manage 10, and he doesn't have the advantage of spotters or the scoring team that populate your average tour event.

The solution is a hierarchical system that attempts to funnel information upward before it gets the OK from Hegarty to go on TV. Ten borough chiefs in the production room with him are in constant communication with the 10 on-site field producers, who keep them abreast of the biggest stories playing out at their course and organize the reporter and cameramen in an effort to capture those moments when they happen. Early on, the focus shifts between sites in a pre-planned manner, with four or five sites taking priority each hour before giving way to the others. Rich Lerner is the ringmaster, taking the broadcast on and off air back in the studio in Stamford, while a pair of two-man teams, also in the studio—Damon Hack and Tripp Isenhour, and George Savaricas and Brendon de Jonge—are responsible for five locations each, including highlights, analysis, and play-by-play at the most dramatic moments. Meanwhile, the on-site reporters chase down interviews with qualifiers, which, Hegarty points out, often end up being the most emotional, poignant moments of the broadcast.

As the day develops, the tenor of the production flows from narrative to action.

"We'll lean on what we think are some of the best stories going," Hegarty says. "And then as the day evolves, we'll shift to people on the bubble, and people who are close to the cut line, and focus our coverage on that. There's still plenty of storytelling, but it will be more and more covering golf, especially this year with more cameras."

In an effort to watch this play out in real time, I spend four hours with the team in Durham and then leave to watch the rest on TV. In between, walking nine holes with Alex Smalley (who ends up missing earning one of the seven spots available at Duke by a shot), the challenge of distilling a day like this into a legible TV package is clarified—once I'm far enough away, there's a sense of isolation, and it's not easy to get back. Meanwhile, the score updates on the USGA site are halting, and it's tough to get a sense of who's winning, or where they are on the course. From there, the task of covering 732 of these golfers in 10 spots around the country, with at most two cameras at each site, takes on new and more daunting proportions in my mind.

When the broadcast begins at noon, I watch on my phone from the Washington Duke patio as Lerner sets the stage from the studio. Research for today has been ongoing for weeks, starting with a 15-page document assembled by the channel's research team and sent to talent, which serves only as a jumping-off point as they hunt down the most intriguing stories at their site and adjust based on results. After a quick group shot of the 11 on-site reporters—10 qualifying locations plus Eamon Lynch live from Oakmont—the four hosts (Hack, Isenhour, Savaricas, De Jonge) make their first appearance, with Isenhour nodding to the "UPS driver, high school golf coach, and a dentist" who has the same opportunities as the big names competing in the "most democratic major championship."

From there, a map graphic of the ten sites segues into field reports from each, starting with Kira Dixon in Canada, then Brentley Romine in New Jersey (who later raced back to Stamford in less than two hours to help the research team), and then to Adams in Durham, whose voice rings out on the patio a good 15 seconds before it shows up on my phone screen a few feet away. This is the "storytelling" portion of broadcast, with hours to go before it became apparent who might advance, and Adams leads with Ryan Armour, the 49-year-old former PGA Tour winner trying to rediscover the magic, and from there to Bill Haas, with some strong quotes from Jay Haas ("you have an opportunity to play in the U.S. Open, so it's worth the pain"). After he kicks it to Ryan Lavner in Atlanta, Adams and Rodriguez the field producer hash out some issues with his microphone, and then Rodriguez hits the course with Hernandez to seek out highlights while Adams tracks the leaders and prepares for his next hit.

When I see him again during the short afternoon break, Adams is under the shade of an umbrella, surrounded by paper, making notes for his first opening hit after the resumption of coverage at 4 p.m. Adams uses a bullet point technique—attempting to memorize will only screw you up, he tells me—and he has material on Miles Russell, the 16-year-old who was near the top of the leader board and became the youngest player ever to make a Korn Ferry Tour cut last year (Hernandez had captured footage of him walking the fairway, which played as Adams spoke). In the meantime, Adams has connected with Duke golf coach Jamie Green to get some color on Bryan Kim, a cello-playing econ major and rising junior at the school threatening to qualify. Both end up missing out by a stroke, but Adams has set the stage for two potentially great stories as the early evening settles in.

At that point, I say goodbye to Adams and head home, bound for my couch, to digest the product in its intended form.

For company, I have a group of golf-nerd friends on my laptop screen populating the Slack we use to stay in touch. I ran an informal poll Monday morning trying to gauge their level of interest in the "longest day" program. Of the 35 who responded, only two of us planned to watched more than an hour of coverage, six said they'd watch less than an hour, seven said they wouldn't follow at all, and the majority, 20, said they'd just check the scores. That surprised me, considering the level of golf fandom, but as the night wore on, it was clear that far more were watching and engaging. The best compliment I can give the coverage is that a follow-up on Tuesday morning revealed more than a few converts who said they'd be back next year.

Personally, I found the coverage to hit its high points in two places. As Hegarty predicted, the interviews with winners, particularly the unlikely ones, were resonant. Adams, at Durham, sensed the well of emotion about to break in Bauchou and asked the perfect question at the perfect time. Similar moments happened with James Nicholas in New Jersey (we won't soon forget his fiancée, America), and late in the night with Matthew Vogt, the dentist Isenhour had referenced at noon, who lost his father two months ago.

The golf itself was another peak, and the new two-camera coverage paid dividends in the playoff at Columbus, where Max Homa faced his brutal end, and so did Jim Knous, leading to the best studio exchange of the night:

Savaricas: You grind for 35 holes to put yourself in position and a 3-foot putt on the last decides your fate.

De Jonge: That's going to be a restless night's sleep for Jim Knous.

Later, we got the incredible duel between Zac Blair and John Peterson in Springfield, Ohio, ably narrated by Hack, the steadiest hand at the helm. The sense of place was deeply felt too, between the loblollies of Durham, the palm trees in Florida, and the best venue of all, Wine Valley Golf Club in Walla Walla, Wash., which looked like a combination of far north Scotland and the surface of the moon.

If anything, I wanted them to lean further into the faster pace and the hectic election night aesthetic. I had joked with Hegarty that they should borrow Steve Kornacki for the night, and there were slow moments that felt like they could have been filled with quick, energizing field reports. (A small example: after a three-over opening round at Duke, Alvaro Ortiz posted a 28 on the front nine of his second round, which included an ace on eight, en route to qualifying. Even without footage or Ortiz, it felt like a quick hit from Adams would have been worth the time to build suspense, and if you layered these on top of each other from each site, it could take on a satisfyingly breakneck rhythm.) A few of my friends sounded the familiar "show more golf" refrain, although the challenges inherent to the production make this one tougher than your average tour event. The magic wand most of us wanted to wave was to remove the speed bumps and hit the accelerator on what makes the day so special—more energy, more urgency.

In general, though, it struck me as a success not just in terms of the challenges inherent to the sprawling format, but in the simpler metric of being a fun, compelling watch for a golf fan ahead of the U.S. Open. The "longest day" is one of golf's best hidden stories, and television is its best stage. Translating the sprawling magic to a single screen is the alchemical standard on which the Golf Channel is judged, and at it best, the team there captures the day's chaos while preserving its wild nature.