Tuesday, August 22, 2000
PGA final round overnight ratings best
ever
By HOWARD FENDRICH
AP Sports Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Tiger Woods keeps winning, and so do the
networks that televise golf's majors.
His duel for the ages with Bob May at the PGA Championship drew
the event's highest preliminary TV ratings on record, bolstering
a trend of unprecedented audiences for Woods' unprecedented triumphs.
CBS Sports' coverage of Sunday's final round, when Woods finally
put away May in a three-hole playoff, got a big-market overnight
rating of 10.0 with a 23 share.
That means about 10 million homes tuned in, and 23 percent of
TVs that were on during the 1:30-7:45 p.m. EDT broadcast were
tuned to CBS.
The rating is 30 percent higher than the 7.7 overnight that CBS
got last year at the PGA, when Woods beat Spanish sensation Sergio
Garcia by a stroke.
That 1999 overnight rating was the previous best for the final
round of a PGA Championship since at least 1986. CBS's overnight
records don't go back beyond that year.
Sunday's telecast peaked, naturally, during the playoff, pulling
in a 17.6 overnight with a 33 share from 7-7:30 p.m.
The victory was Woods' latest full of “firsts.”
He's the first player to win consecutive PGA Championships since
1937, and the first to win three majors in a year since 1953.
Woods also became the first player to own the scoring record in
relation to par at all four major championships (he shares the
PGA mark of 18 under with the unheralded May, of course).
When Woods 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 — by
eight strokes 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.
The Sunday overnights for each of those were bettered by the PGA,
which was 33 percent higher than the British Open and 14 percent
higher than the U.S. Open.
When Woods won his first major title by a record 12 strokes at
the 1997 Masters, CBS got a record 14.1 national rating.
Each rating point represents 1 percent of the nation's estimated
100.8 million TV households, and the overnight ratings for the
PGA Championship were based on the country's 47 largest TV markets.
National ratings will be released later in the week.
The share is the percentage of in-use TVs tuned to the program.
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