By Aron Carroll
Clubhouse Collective
As I was watching the Korda sisters play against Danielle Kang in the final group of the Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions, I couldn’t help but think of another pair of sisters. Those other sisters would be my daughters, Sam and Charlie (I swear they weren’t named after Tiger’s kids). And although they started the broadcast on the couch beside me, as Jessica’s putt fell on the first playoff hole they were nowhere near the television.
As the daughters of a father who is obsessed with golf, my girls have to endure a lot of golf on TV. One thing that my family can all agree on though is No Laying Up. While not all of their content is language appropriate for an 11 and 6 year old, they are some of my kids favorite golf videos to watch. That applies doubly when there is a female golfer in the group. They’ve seen the videos at Sweetens Cove with Lauren Coughlin, and the match the boys had with Annie Park and Madeline Sagstrom.
One of the first videos I showed them though was of Danielle Kang at the KPMG Pro-Am. Watching Danielle play was illuminating for my girls for a couple of reasons, and each girl had their own takeaways from it. My oldest daughter, Sam, was drawn to how much Danielle laughed and seemed to have fun on the golf course. For Charlie, she paid attention to how many times they used one of Danielle’s shots, because to her that meant that she was beating the boys. If you knew my kids, you would understand how perfectly that sums them up: Sam is our comedian and Charlie is our family’s answer to Kobe.
The fact that Danielle, who my girls love, was going to be in the final group with the Korda sisters was absolutely perfect for me. My wife and I have been accused by our kids of comparing them too often to the Korda girls. Although to be fair to us if your 11 year old daughter was 5’2” and her little sister was outperforming her on the growth charts, you might draw that comparison as well. But it goes beyond the height for us. My wife in particular draws on them for inspiration for Sam and Charlie.
While Charlie definitely has the Mamba Mentality, that doesn’t mean that Sam likes to lose. Sometimes a friendly competition can get a little heated and that’s when the Korda sisters get brought into the conversation. What my wife loves about them is that although they’re usually competing for the same thing they are always rooting for one another. From the outside looking in, they display the perfect amount of competitiveness and support.
All of this is what makes what happened on Sunday so disappointing. I had sold that final pairing pretty hard and the girls had bought in. So when they were repeatedly shown golf shots by Mardy Fish and Aaron Hicks, they started to lose interest. No disrespect to those guys, but to Sam and Charlie they might as well have been people picked from the parking lot. They didn’t know their resumes, and they didn’t care either.
Anyone with kids knows that commercials are prime time for distraction. That’s why I always set the DVR and turn the event on a little after the start time to avoid as many commercials as possible. The problem with doing that on Sunday was that I was constantly fast forwarding. First it was the commercials, then it was the interviews with the male celebrities. If you were trying to come up with a plan to alienate young female viewers, you couldn’t have come up with a better one than the final round broadcast.
So before long, I found myself on the couch alone. At first the girls started playing with our dog, but after a while they ended up in their playroom. I tried a couple times to get them back involved, but it was too late. And I’m not about to force them to watch golf on TV if they aren’t interested. It’s not their fault that NBC picks and chooses when it’s important to highlight the women in golf.
The shame of it all is that the Korda’s and Danielle really played some exciting golf down the stretch. And while they may have shown all of their shots that day, it was the way in which they were shown that lost my kids. The beginning of a broadcast is when you have a chance to grab your audience and that’s where they lost my household.
Upset, I fired up Twitter on my phone and started scrolling as I kept the tournament on in the background. And that’s where I saw that Big Randy from No Laying Up was just as fired up about the situation as I was. The main thing that he brought up was that just a month ago the Golf Channel and NBC had the hashtag #womenworthwatching attached to all of their scheduled tweets in regards to another event.
So what made women worth watching during those others weeks but not this one? Sure they showed all of the final group, but that’s about all they showed. You have 3 extremely marketable women in the marquee group, wouldn’t that seem like an opportune time to get some eyes on some of the other women that are playing that day? Every single person in the field last week had won the season before, so conceivably these are some of the better players on the tour. Show them to me! Or better yet, show them to the two little girls that have dreams to be on that Tour someday.
My girls don’t play golf because they want to be on TV someday. They play it because so many of the people in their lives play it. But I want to leave you with one more indictment of how women’s golf is presented on television. Last year at our local golf course I was pretending like the girls were about to win a tournament together. They acted how kid’s act in that situation and were hamming it up for my pretend camera, but what caught my attention was who they were shouting out. They weren’t pretending they had a TV audience, instead their pretend audience was watching them on No Laying Up’s YouTube channel.
Comments