Golf’s most prestigious tournament kicked off Thursday with a lot of fanfare around the return of Tiger Woods. While The Masters’ main storyline centers around Woods’s comeback, some in the media are criticizing how the worldwide leader in sports is covering it.
During Thursday’s episode of The Common Man & T-Bone Show on The Fan 97.1 in Columbus, OH, both host took a jab at how ESPN covers The Masters, calling the network out for not having full coverage on-air until the afternoon and compared it to Fox only airing the last few innings of the World Series.
“I try to find The Masters on TV, flip on ESPN, flap, not there,” Mike Ricordati said. “Tiger is playing right now, The Masters must be on television someplace. Then someone came in and said they don’t start coverage until 3 or 3:30 on TV. This to me is the equivalent of hey, I want to watch the World Series, but we only show innings 5 through 9, sorry.”
If your a golf fan and don’t like how The Masters is covered, remember that the coverage of the first eight holes did not begin until 1993 because of resistance from Augusta National and tournament organizers. The same problems with how the tournament should be covered is still a big issue today.
“Here’s one thing I don’t understand, like on Golf Channel, they are airing nothing,” Ricordati said. “This is your biggest event. Wouldn’t you want to give people as much of the event as you can?
“Oh, I mean they want to but the Masters and Augusta don’t want it out there. They think it’s saturates the market too much. They think less is more and they turn down millions to have broader coverage.”
The two then discuss why the people running The Masters are old fashioned and antiquated in their ways.
“Everyone that runs The Masters is rich guy flexing on us. They are looking at ESPN like ‘I guess we’ll let you show some of The Masters but not all of it,'” T-Bone said. “We don’t need your stupid coverage of this thing, everyone knows how great it is. If you walk in with your cell phone, I think they punch you then shoot you dead on sight. I get it’s the tradition, it’s The Masters its the whole thing but your right Mike, this is a bunch of people who run that place who say we don’t care if you don’t like it, don’t come, we got plenty of people that want to be here.”
Though ratings were up for the 2021 edition of The Masters, netted an average final-day audience of 5.59 million viewers and a household rating of 3.4. However, the 2021 ratings were the lowest for a regularly scheduled Masters tourney in the modern Nielsen ratings era.
