Golf fans to benefit from online technology

By Michael Hiestand, USA TODAY

Golf is unusually well-positioned to tamper with American productivity. Unlike sports whose big events are in prime time or on weekends, golf offers Thursday and Friday daytime play, a potentially helpful diversion from one's actual occupation during normal business hours. Going online to follow golf will change this season: The PGA Tour wants to show you, in real time, exactly where players have hit their balls.

Paul Johnson, vice president of new media for the PGA Tour, doesn't mince words about that innovation's significance: "It will be revolutionary! "

The idea is to give pgatour.com users instant access to so-called ShotLink technology, which uses handheld lasers to record, supposedly within inches, where balls have landed. That data, also provided to TV networks, create lots of new player statistics, like ranking players' putting efficiency from, say, 10-30 feet.

This season the Tour started with the technology on just three holes a tournament, Johnson says, but it will be used on all 18 holes by season's end and also will make its online debut.

The Tour, presumably, would like to charge users for the chance to look at maps of tournament holes and see where each players balls have been hit. And there might be some consumer demand, given that tournaments include hours and hours of play that never show up on any TV coverage.

But the online ShotLink data is only one element of several new media wrinkles the Tour will test this year. At The Players Championship starting March 21, the Tour will test whether people who come to the event also want to watch it on TV. It will put up about 15 TV screens around the course that will carry the regular coverage from NBC and cable TV carrier USA Network. But, Johnson says, it will be "content- enhanced television," meaning it will include extra elements such as updated onscreen statistics.

The Tour, which owns The Players Championship and the Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., course it's played on, already has used the event as a petri dish for media experiments. At the tournament, there'll be kiosks to see if fans want to stop and electronically look up stats and see taped video of tournament action. And this will be the third year where two cameras, along with announcers providing commentary, will provide Internet-only video coverage of the 17th hole — from 8:30 a.m. ET to 6 p.m. ET.

The Tour's online innovations, like so many other Web innovations, are meant to appeal to fanatics. Its site has begun auctions, which include trying to sell the flagsticks used at last year's Players Championship. The Tour's new wireless services give fans the ability to have players scores, even their tournament tee times for the following days, sent by text to their cell phones. Says Johnson, in a safe conjecture, "That's for huge fans."

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