It's Open Championship Monday! Here's how to ignore all your work and watch live as Jordan Spieth goes for the first three legs of a Grand Slam.
For the first
time since 1988, and for just the second time in the championship's
history, the British Open will have a Monday finish. It's never ideal to
conclude any tournament on a Monday, whether it's a regular PGA Tour
stop or a major championship. The delayed conclusion is a blow to the
players, the tournament, the would-be fans and the media partners
carrying coverage who were expecting a Sunday evening finish.
The Open Championship has
several complications for the U.S. audience, the biggest being the
obvious time change. For dedicated golf watchers, the once-a-year
tradition of getting up in the middle of the night to watch a major is
desirable. It happens for just a few days each year and it's a fun
experience to try and develop the best method for grinding through it --
stay out all night, crash early, coffee, beer? The final two rounds are
a little easier because the leaders tee off at a reasonable hour in the
eastern U.S. and finish up sometime after lunch. Of course, ESPN just
doesn't expect that to extend into Monday.
ESPN, along with their sister
network ABC, have had rights to the Open Championship in one form or
another for 55 years, and they have the broadcast down to a routine. But
this year is their penultimate British Open. NBC, who just lost the
U.S. Open to FOX, had the winning bid for the British last month and
will take over along with their sister network, Golf Channel, in 2017.
So this is the ESPN crew's final call at St. Andrews.
It's enjoyable to poke ESPN and
they take plenty of crap for being an uptight conglomerate, but the
network has done an awesome job adjusting to the constant schedule
changes this weekend.
They keep adding hours and hours of coverage,
going live Saturday at 2 a.m.
when they weren't supposed to be on the
air until 7 a.m. When the play runs over,
and it had every day until
Sunday,
they stayed live until every notable golfer was in the clubhouse
or the entire round ended. Their talent has been great on the call all
week as well. It's been an admirable job and no shot or player of
consequence has been missed during this messy start-and-stop edition of
the Open.
Monday will be no different as
the network adjusted on the fly and will have a full final round
broadcast. They won't get the numbers they would have for the normal
Sunday finale, but the coverage will run for the same hours as their
typical Open final round broadcast.
They will go live at 6 a.m. ET, a
good three hours before the heavy hitters and last few groups on the leaderboard tee off at the Old Course.
Here are all your media options for Monday:
No comments:
Post a Comment