Reverse Tiger question

It's 17 at Warwick Hills. It's only newsworthy if someone throws a dead body on the green.

 

I wonder if there's something to this. I know when I turned on the tournament today and saw Tiger was leading by two, I switched to something else. I've seen that story before.

 

If it'd been a watermelon thrown on the green, would Fuzzy Zoeller have been the primary suspect?

 

Like any other story, its placement depends on what else has happened -- both locally and nationally.

 

to me, tiger is like michael jordan. casual fans and non-fans were still interested in jordan, regardless of game outcome, so i thought it would be important to include his point total, even when the bulls were just a boldface in an nba roundup.

there are golf purists, golf fans and then people who just care about tiger. i think tiger winning any PGA event is front-sports news unless there's so much local-interest stuff going on that it gets trumped. and then, we'd reefer to it. people just care about him and what he does.

 

My local paper did a tease and put the story on Page 8. Prominent tease, but inside nonetheless.

 

If Rich Beem wins the tournament (and he won a major), it goes inside unless it was El Paso or Las Cruces (I just happen to know he is from that area). If Tiger wins it, put it on 1C. It's Tiger Woods and even people who are baseball, college football, hockey, or basketball fans are interested in Tiger Woods.

Let me put it this way - if you are going to tease this on the front page of the paper, what would you tease ahead of Tiger Woods winning a tournament. Maybe a big local story, maybe if the local major league team was in first place or had a winning streak (and I'm not even sure that would be more interesting to the entire readership), maybe NASCAR in big NASCAR areas where there isn't a major league baseball team.

But teasing Tiger on the front page of the paper would seem to be the most likely way to get people to look at the sports section.

 

A 100,000-plus circ paper near me had Tiger's win as a three-graf brief in small type on Page 2.

 

Wow ... I guess I'm not in another paper's shoes, but that seems way, way, WAY underplayed by any measure.

 

SF ... the paper in question is generally very, very tight with space (four-page midweek sections are the norm), but yeah, I thought at the least it deserved its own story somewhere in the section. It didn't need to be buried in briefs.

 

What part of the country you're in, whether it's a big golf area and how much else is going on obviously have something to do with how you play this story, especially since the Buick Open is a mid-level event at best. That said, it's hard to overlook the fact that there is some historical significance and he did beat a pretty good field that included Furyk, Vijay, DiMarco, Toms, Daly and several potential Ryder Cuppers. It wasn't as ho-hum a victory as some are saying. Furyk actually tied him on the back nine.

 

That's true, but even Furyk said it was misleading. He had just played one of the easiest stretches of holes on the PGA Tour - 12-14 - and Tiger still had them coming. Furyk knew that, to have a chance, he probably needed to be at least two ahead of Tiger at that point.

By the way, if you are going to be cheering for the U.S. at the Ryder Cup, keep in mind that Vaughn Taylor complained that playing the first two rounds with John Daly and Mike Weir was difficult because the gallery was "distracting". Granted, Daly's wildly popular and Weir had a large group of Canadians following him - Warwick is only about 30 minutes from his hometown - but if he's having trouble with a Friday crowd at the Buick Open, he's going to love the Ryder Cup.