This week, the world’s best golfers are playing in the last major of the season, the 94th PGA Championship, on the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, S.C.
ESPN.com’s golf team is all over the event and editor Kevin Maguire is coordinating the coverage, which he breaks into two simple parts.
“There’s everything up until the first golf shot is hit, and then there’s everything after,” he said.
“Before, we try and identify storylines and things that people are going to be interested in,” he said. “And of course so many people want to know about Tiger [Woods] so we always have some element of Tiger coverage.
“A lot of talk is about the course and the conditions, because a lot of these majors, save for the Masters, are at places that people don’t see on a yearly basis.”
ESPN.com ran a piece on Monday by senior golf writer Bob Harig detailing the ins-and-outs of Kiawah, and followed that with a video with reporter Michael Collins interviewing the course’s head golf pro.
“One of the interesting things he told us is that there is no prevailing wind on the course,” Maguire said. “Getting those kinds of insights will help people when they’re watching the broadcast or following the coverage online.”
Harig, Collins and senior golf writer Farrell Evans also conduct live chats on the first three days of a major week.
“That lets the fans get to know them and ask real specific questions about what’s going on,” said Maguire.
Once play begins on Thursday morning at a major, “that’s when it gets kinda crazy,” Maguire said.
Collins conducts the Golfcast live analysis all day on Thursday and Friday, providing a service to golf fans who might be at work on their computers but not able to turn on a TV.
“And then from there, a lot of it is just covering what happens,” he said. “Whatever the main storylines are, that people are going to be talking about and you’re going to see the highlights of on SportsCenter, that’s what we try and focus our coverage on.
“There’s always breaking news and things that are going to change even the best-laid plans, and we just roll with the punches and pretty much expect that to happen. But we try and have a baseline of coverage that we can accentuate with live stories and news as it happens.”
