Sports At Politics

Due to the inability for Turner Sports's Bleacher Report Live (B/R Live) sports streaming service to allow everyone who had paid to stream the Tiger Woods vs. Phil Mickelson exhibition golf match yesterday because of a technical glitch affecting the purchase function of the B/R Live streaming service, B/R Live ended up providing the Tiger/Phil match for free to anyone with an internet connection: BREAKING: Source says Turner execs decided to give Phil-Tiger match away for free on B/R Live streaming platform (instead of $20 charge) when purchase function broke down to point where those who bought had trouble getting in. — Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) November 23, 2018 While the Tiger/Phil match itself was a classic, with Phil winning the match after four extra holes were needed to decided a winner, the match was a total disaster for Turner Sports and their B/R Live sports streaming service. The business model of the Tiger/Phil match as it relates to the B/R Live streaming serv...

I apologize for the delay in writing this blog post, but next year's edition of the Tour Championship, the final event of the PGA Tour's FedEx Cup Playoffs, will follow a completely different format than the format in use for this year's Tour Championship. Under the current format, the top 30 players in the FedEx Cup standings immediately prior to the Tour Championship were invited to play in the Tour Championship, which is currently a conventional stroke play event, albeit with a small, but very elite, field of golfers. Prior to the start of the tournament, a points reset was conducted in such a manner that anyone who is eligible to play in the Tour Championship has a mathematical possibility of winning the FedEx Cup, which is the trophy that the PGA Tour awards to the PGA Tour season champion, and those in the top five in the FedEx Cup standings prior to the Tour Championship are mathematically guaranteed to win the FedEx Cup if they win the Tour Championship. Under the...

Think of this single blog post as a three-part blog post about recent developments at the intersection of sports and politics. First, golf legend Tiger Woods generated some controversy after he refused to either praise or condemn some of President Donald Trump's policies, but asked Americans to respect the office of the President of the United States : The full exchange, with a New York Times reporter, was barely a minute long. Asked about his relationship with Trump, Woods reflected on their history playing together (including most recently last Thanksgiving weekend): "We've played golf together. We've had dinner together. I've known him pre-presidency and obviously during his presidency.” Then Woods was asked about whether his relationship with Trump was an implicit endorsement of Trump’s policies toward immigrants and people of color? Treading cautiously, Woods said he felt compelled to respect the office. "He's the President of the United States....

Golf fans in the United States are accustomed to televised golf tournaments being produced by either CBS, which has several decades of experience producing television productions of golf tournaments, or Golf Channel, which is a 24-hour cable channel devoted to golf ( except when NBC can't find another channel to air NHL ice hockey playoff games on ) that is owned by NBC's parent company, Comcast, and produces NBC's golf telecasts. Both CBS and Golf Channel are known for high-quality productions of golf tournaments. However, the broadcast rights for the United States Golf Association (USGA) national golf championships, including the U.S. Open and U.S. Women's Open, are currently held by Fox, which doesn't have a lot of experience covering golf tournaments (they've held the USGA broadcast contract since 2015) and only airs a few golf tournaments per year on Fox and its co-owned cable sports channel FS1. Fox's golf tournament coverage tends to have a lot more...

Kim Jong-il, the now-deceased former North Korean dictator and father of current North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, once claimed to have made holes-in-one at five different holes at a golf club in North Korea , although that feat probably never actually happened, since a single hole-in-one in a round of golf is rare, even at the professional level, and actual instances of multiple holes in one in a single round are extremely rare. I'll let you guess who is also exaggerating about their golf scores...: LPGA legend Suzann Pettersen is fond of the sitting U.S. president. But she's not so sure about his handicap. [...] "He cheats like hell," the 15-time LPGA Tour winner said. "So I don't quite know how he is in business. They say that if you cheat at golf, you cheat at business." Pettersen also said the president must pay his caddies well, as drives that are headed for the woods always ends up back in the fairway. She also mentioned his fondness...