While scrolling through the tv guide earlier, which seems to be the case every night recently, I saw that the Golf Channel had an hour long show with the title “PGA Tour Golf”. Considering it’s Wednesday, I assumed that it was a repeat of last year’s Valspar (Transitions) Championship final round since I’ve seen the Golf Channel do that before. Well it turns out that the Golf Channel made the great decision to actually show some of the pro am!

I only caught the last 15 minutes of it, but I caught a few interviews and a few shots from the players. Even with the short time frame, the announcers focused on talking about learning from what the pros were doing, rather than the standard commentary. They had a segment with Stewart Cink before he was about to tee off on a long par 3 (where apparently he’s had 2 aces during tournament play). Cink talked about how to approach a longer par three, and hit is tee shot, which was a little pull that missed the green to the left, and then dropped some knowledge when he noted that golf was all about managing your misses. The whole thing was sort of a mini playing lessons with the pros. The difference being that it was way more organic.

Now I doubt that many people are going to learn from what Cink had to say since everything that could be said, has been said a hundred times over. But being able to see the pros with their guards down is a way better use of air time than showing “School of Golf” or “Bagger Vance”, each of which sandwiched the hour of coverage. I really hope that the Golf Channel decides to expand their coverage of the pro ams in the future since it’s bound to be a ratings hit.