The blind leading the bland.

John Bland is not only one of the best golfers that South Africa ever produced but the five time winner on the Champions Tour (formerly the Senior PGA Tour) bears a name that could be used by literally hundreds of players on the major tours on both sides of the Atlantic.

A quick question, and no looking this up on Google either, who won the PGA Tour event at the weekend? Okay, go ahead and Google it and then have a look at the Top 10 while you are there. Then after you have said "who the F*#@k are these guys" to yourself come back here and we'll move on.

Golf has a problem and its quite a big one. The standard of play on tour in the USA and Europe is staggering and the level of competition is immense. There are at least 100 players or more who enter regular tour events who believe they have a better than average chance of winning. The standard on the Nationwide Tour is at such a high level that its tour graduates tend to arrive on the main circuit ready to win.

All of them can play at a level which almost renders their exploits meaningless. How often do you watch an event and see shot after shot of staggering precision or prodigious length? It has got to the stage where a player as gifted and decorated as Nick Faldo will describe how Spike McRoy will play a shot that the five time major winner himself would never have attempted in tournament play.

Jeff Overton occasionally wears a daft hat, that seems to be about it!

The problem is one of engagement and interest. How can anyone genuinely get caught up in the excitement of a final round where identikit professional golfer A (in a Titleist hat) is battling it out with identikit golfer B (also in a Titleist hat) for the enormous novelty check? As a college golfer, Sunday's winner, Jason Bohn, won a million dollars for a hole-in-one at a charity event. He immediately turned professional, took the cash and hasn't looked back. Runner up, Jeff Overton, kept his tour card in 2008 by finishing 21st in an event less than two weeks after an appendectomy. From now on, Bohn and Overton will be 'Lucky Bastard' and 'Appendectomy Guy' but will I have any interest in watching them play golf? Would I even be able to pick them out as I surfed onto the Golf Channel on any given Thursday afternoon? If Bohn wasn't carrying a suitcase with money sticking out of it or if Overton wasn't seeping from his side or constantly showing people his scar, the answer would be 'no'!

This is the problem. If you have no Phil or Tiger, Ernie or Paddy, you have almost no way of selling your event. So this week, I have decided to provide a service to the readers and potential tour promoters by giving you reasons to watch a number of lower profile golfers over the next few weeks and months. No longer will John Bland have to lend his name to an army of hugely proficient yet completely invisible players.

Stay tuned for golfer number one later today............

Green Rice

He's a 47 year old golf professional, that is nothing remotely out of the ordinary. The fact that this golfer is making his pro debut on the Nationwide Tour three years before being eligible for the Champions Tour is most certainly outside of the ordinary.

Jerry Rice is 5 years on from his NFL retirement where he quite literally re-invented the position of wide receiver (there was no 'Yards after the catch' statistic before Rice came along). As I write this, he is on the practice range at TPC Stonebrae in preparation for round one of the Fresh Express Classic, the latest stop on the second level Nationwide Tour.

Rice would like to lead the Tour in yards after the shot

It would have been very easy for Rice to simply play in his charity pro-am on the Wednesday before the main event, but the offer of a sponsors invite to the main tournament was too tempting to turn down. So the former NFL legend begins a second professional sports career at the age that most normal human beings begin to contemplate their impending retirement options.

Rice has always pushed himself harder than any coach or trainer would, his off season conditioning program is legendary. It comes as no surprise to learn that the best receiver in the NFL today, Larry Fitzgerald, is a Rice devotee and has based his fitness program on the one that allowed Rice to play for two decades and four Superbowls. That same level of dedication will be needed if he can make the transition from a very talented amateur to touring professional.

Shooting 68 (his best ever round) in a pro-am is nothing to be sniffed at, but reproducing that type of score in consecutive rounds will be the very minimum that Rice will need to make the half way cut. One thing the future Hall of Famer is not short of is confidence and self belief, but does he have the technique, the repeatable swing and the short game to make any sort of dent in the leader board? I decided to scour YouTube to find out. While the video below, gives you some idea of his technique it does feature a midget challenging Michael Jordan to a game of one-on-one basketball and therefor it is a 'must see' clip.

Rice is approaching this endeavour with the same application that he displayed every time he put on pads and a helmet. Making the cut this weekend would be as remarkable as almost anything he ever accomplished on the football field.

Stiletto give away

Our friends over at www.golfishardtv.com decided to feature the tool on their video blog on Sunday.



If you want to enter their competition, please check out their site for all of the details.

The future of live golf doesn't include The Golf Channel

It's Masters week hooray! But wait a minute, for those of us not lucky enough to be there, what does that really mean? Well let's start with our friends over at the Golf Channel.

[Live Update: As I write this 'Live at the Masters' is broadcasting on the 'all-golf all the time' channel. Notah Begay is the current expert talking head, he is billed as a 'Two time Masters participant', yes really.]

Scratch the surface of the Golf Channel's Masters coverage and you will quickly discover that it has almost nothing to add to the build up of this wonderful event. All the evidence would suggest that their contract precludes almost any actual coverage of the live action early in the week at Augusta. Occasionally we are given furtive glimpse of the practice ground in the background at which point, all ones mental powers are then required to work out who is hitting balls in the distance and the thoughts of the on-air 'talent' are ignored. So the coverage may be live but it is so merely so GC can say it has 1000 hours [this is a made up figure] of live coverage during Masters week. But do we really want 'complete Masters coverage' with an hour of analysis from Fredrik Jacobsen or Jodie Mudd?

[Live update: Our 'live' coverage now features a pre-packaged feature on Ernie Els]

The strict control of the broadcasting rights at Augusta make all of this somewhat understandable. The fact, however, that regular tour events are restricted to 4 hours of afternoon coverage on Thursday's and Fridays, on the specialist channel solely dedicated to the sport, is beyond baffling. As a fan of the game and a relative newcomer to the USA, I simply cannot get my head around the lack of live PGA Tour action on a channel specifically created for the purpose. Is it too much to ask for coverage of an entire days play on a golf-only channel?

SPEED TV, the dedicated motorsports channel, has recently developed programming for the NASCAR demographic as opposed to the actual motor racing fan. This includes NASCAR based cooking and talent shows. Is this the future of the Golf Channel? Will we soon see shows about changing the oil on your Lear Jet or get 'specials' on how to get chateau neuf du pape stains out of your Bentley's upholstery?

The Masters Commitee has a incredibly tight grip on all broadcast coverage and commercial exploitation of its magnificent event. Augusta's own online event coverage is quickly becoming the benchmark for the future of sports broadcasting. There is no doubt that it will only grow in popularity as broadband HD delivery improves and the platforms on which we can receive it expands. We really cannot be too far away from a time when the fan can get live streaming Hi Definition coverage, of whatever pairing they chose, delivered straight to his or her Blackberry or iPhone/Pad.

This growing trend for rights holders to take control of the delivery of their events, and accompanying message, is raising some red flags within the Networks. There is a genuine concern amongst the Networks that they are paying huge sums of money for a diminishing number of actual rights. The NFL, NBA and MLB will no longer be able to justifiably charge eye popping amounts for live rights to their events when they now have their own dedicated Networks. As this trend continues, we could end up with networks having extremely limited live rights with tight restrictions on what they can show and can't show.

Despite the evidence below, Sky Soccer Saturday is a ground breaking live show that delivers a lively results and up to the second reports service on all of the professional soccer played on Saturday afternoons in the UK. In order to promote live attendance at games, the games governing body, the FA, does not allow any live coverage of games that kick off at 3pm. The best the network can offer is a tantalizing view of the crowd and occasionally a blank corner of the pitch as a background to the frantic and always upbeat live reports. Except in this case, now watch closely, this could well be the future of 'live golf' on The Golf Channel.

Don't forget that there are still 50 (that's fifty) Stiletto Green Tools to be won right now.