Wednesday, August 30, 2000
'Bighorn' surpasses ratings
for Miller on 'MNF'
By HOWARD FENDRICH
AP Sports Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Maybe ABC should consider
putting Tiger Woods in the “Monday Night Football” booth.
Big audiences tune in to watch the world's
best golfer, no matter the setting — and his match-play outing
against Sergio Garcia pulled in better ratings than comedian Dennis
Miller has produced in his three NFL telecasts.
ABC's broadcast of Garcia's 1-up victory
over Woods in Monday night's live, made-for-TV “Battle at
Bighorn” garnered a national Nielsen rating of 7.6 with a
13 share.
That's an increase of 10 percent over the
6.9 rating and 12 share that ABC drew for last year's match-play
contest between Woods and David Duval, who at the time was ranked
No. 2 in the world. That “Showdown at Sherwood,” which
Woods won 2-and-1, was the first live network telecast of a golf
event in prime time.
Ever since he won the 1997 Masters, Woods
has been changing golf's standing as a TV commodity. His recent
run of dominance on the course has helped lift his sport's ratings
the way Michael Jordan lifted basketball's.
And now golf can compete with football,
at least when Woods plays.
The Woods-Garcia exhibition, on from 8-11:30
p.m. EDT, drummed up better ratings than the 7.2 the network's
“Monday Night Football” averaged for its three preseason
games with Miller making wry references to everything from the
pope to Sylvia Plath.
The ratings for the first two football games
probably suffered slightly for starting an hour early, at 7 p.m.,
because of the political conventions.
The ratings for “Bighorn” increased
each half-hour it was on the air.
The telecast extended a half-hour beyond
the originally scheduled TV finish time, and the latter stages
were played under the lights. Woods joked ABC would be pleased
they went the distance; match-play ends once one player has an
insurmountable lead.
“We made it to the 18th,” he said,
“which I'm sure the producer of the show wasn't against.”
No TV producer would ever shun the chance
to show more of Woods, who has won three straight majors and four
of the last five, bringing more and more viewers to their sets.
When he won the U.S. Open by a record 15
strokes in June, NBC's telecast drew the highest Sunday rating
for the tournament since 1981. His victory a month later at the
British Open — to complete his career Grand Slam at 24, the
youngest player to do so — helped ABC pull in that tournament's
biggest ratings for a Sunday. And his victory at the PGA Championship
this month helped CBS get that event's second-highest final-round
rating ever.
“I don't want to sound like a broken
record, because virtually every time a network executive is quoted
after a Tiger Woods event they say the same thing, but he is an
incredible ratings-generating machine,” ABC Sports vice president
Mark Mandel said Tuesday.
“Bighorn” did not have the allure
of two big-name golfers. Garcia was selected to face Woods about
six months ago, when the Spaniard was looking like an up-and-coming
star.
Now, after a rough season without a victory,
he's ranked 15th.
Garcia got the nod because of the animated
way he often plays, such as in the 1999 PGA Championship when
he ran across the fairway and leaped into the air as he chased
a shot on the final day. He lost the PGA to Woods by one shot.
Each rating point represents 1,008,000 television
households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 100.8 million
TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use TVs that tuned
in to the program.
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