In terms of television, I have always found myself way behind
the times.
The last series program I watched regularly while it was
broadcast was Hill Street Blues. I do not recall watching
any other program at the time. I lived in West L.A., and I knew
some members of the cast of that show, not an unusual situation.
Before that, I’d have to go back to Mary Tyler Moore and
M.A.S.H.
Nowadays, true, I watch a lot of TV. (I’ve gotten into one of my
non-reading funks again.) Modern cable micro-programming has
enabled me to watch almost nothing but golf. Does regular viewing
of Golf Talk Live count as series television?
Network promotions during commercial intervals keep me up with
what mainstream TV has to offer. A Digital Video Recorder has let
me and my wife sample this and that, if we should feel like it. (We
have lately been catching up with episodes of The West
Wing; shows you how far behind we are.) I was successfully
tempted to watch an episode of the then-new Desperate
Housewives, and found it clever enough, though I never watched
again.
Such promos have kept me well aware of the trend toward
“reality” TV, shows like Survivor and The Great
Race. They really do look awful.
UNFORTUNTELY, IN THIS OFF-SEASON FROM REGULAR GOLF, I have been
captured by one of The Golf Channel’s reality TV offerings, The
Big Break, specifically Big Break VI: Trump National.
The Golf Channel itself, it must be said, has enthusiastically
embraced trash TV. Back when it started, TGC was a purist’s dream.
Instruction, highlights, occasional tournaments the networks didn’t
carry, old golf shows recycled, and long, long interviews.
From the standpoint of oral history alone, it was priceless.
Luckily for TGC, in its early days, Paul Runyon, Gene Sarazen, and
Sam Snead were still alive, and were willing to talk. Even more
luckily, those guys could remember everything.
It has been sad watching the inevitable corruption. They’ve got
a sports talk shout show, The Grey Goose Nineteenth Hole.
There’s The Natalie Gulbis Show, starring the post-teen
LPGA babe of the same name in rapid jump-cut sequences showing her
shopping, meeting celebrities, and taking off her clothes. The
Daly Planet, where cameras follow John Daly around, amounts to
much the same thing, except that Daly keeps his clothes on. Peter
Jacobsen had a show for a while.
But The Big Break has become TGC’s signature show. New
hour-long shows are aired at 9:00 EST Tuesdays, following a repeat
of the previous episode. Then they show episodes again, forever.
Some nights there is nothing on TGC but BB.
One of its “challenges” has become a TV icon: breaking the
window. Everybody wants to break the window. Even Tiger Woods, in a
show called PGA Grand Slam Clinic, broke a window.
“The window” is a pane of glass, about three by three feet, set
in a frame on a pole at head height. A contestant’s name is painted
on the glass. The contestant’s rivals set up with club and balls 25
yards away and try to hit a golf ball through the frame, breaking
the glass.
Woods took one shot to get his range, then broke the glass with
his second. Most of BB’s contestants, who are lower-level
would-be pro golfers, male and female, take half a dozen or more
shots. The Big Break, however, does not stop there. The
celebrity Big Break shows feature pro athletes or show biz
people. The guys from Hootie and the Blowfish were so hapless the
show faded out, mercifully, glass intact. At least that’s how I
remember it, because I faded out, unable to watch any more.
THE LATEST SHOW, TRUMP NATIONAL, took place at Donald
Trump’s Los Angeles area golf course of the same name. The series
started with a group of men over 50 (thus eligible for the
Champion’s Tour, which offered a couple of selected exemptions for
the winner) and girls under 30, most of them on the Duramed Futures
Tour and aspiring to the LPGA Tour (the LPGA gives the winner two
exemptions).
Throughout the multi-week course of the show, the contestants
vie with each other at hitting golf balls into target circles on
greens, driving long, putting from various distances, and
eventually actually playing golf holes. One by one, women and men
are “eliminated” (“the heartbreaking eliminations,” as the promo
says). In between shots, contestants are interviewed, and they all
know how to be interviewed. We are all TV heads, it seems.
You, as a viewer, are meant to develop a rooting interest in one
or more participants, and I guess people do. I guess a lot of
people do. Because one of the common threads in the interviews with
eliminated participants (they often get to “come back”) runs like
this: “I can’t even walk down the street now, so many people know
me from The Big Break.”
IF NOTHING ELSE, THE SHOW DISPLAYS, by inference, how good pro
golfers really are. BB participants — at least the ones
on Trump National — are scratch players, capable of
playing even par golf. Bri Vega, the eventual female winner, won
the Massachusetts Women’s Amateur tournament. And they are nowhere
near as good as the players you see on the pro tours. Nowhere
near.
The men were mostly a sympathetic lot, perhaps because they were
older and weathered. The women — well, let’s just say I found Bri
a bit of a pill. (I liked Rachel, the goofy-looking girl from
Australia.)
As of last night, it was over. And I sat, wondering at myself
for having watched the series and musing on what I thought of it
all. Something had been tickling at me, something it reminded me
of. And then I got it.
The Big Break is Queen for a Day, the old
1950s weeper. On Queen, the producers would select some
hard-luck housewife whose daughter was stricken with leukemia and
whose husband had lost an arm in an industrial accident, on and on,
endless misery. And they’d give her stuff and make a big fuss over
her. Back then, the program winner mercifully disappeared with her
new washer and dryer and bedroom suite. Nowadays, the winners of
The Big Break stick around.
They appear on other TGC shows, like Golf With Style. A
few more programming wrinkles, they could make a career of this.
Regular golf does not look so promising. When BB
contestants take their shot at the pro tours, their prize for
winning on the show, they tend to shoot ten over par and miss the
cut.
Never fear. The Golf Channel will always report their results.
I’m just waiting for the first BB winner to get slammed
for income tax evasion.
