This week’s 111th U.S. Open at Congressional Country Club will be one of the most widely covered tournaments of all time. Led by the NBC Sports Group, ESPN, ESPN Radio and Sirius-XM, there will be extensive coverage of the Open on a national level with there will likely be nothing left to chance and no storyline uncovered. Tommy Roy, the man in charge of producing the Open, told me that Congressional does offer some challenges.
“We will have 55 cameras and a blimp covering all the action,” Roy said. “But the biggest challenge we have is keeping track of 70 players and following storylines on the fly. Do we take Phil Mickelson’s putt on the 15th for a par live or Lee Westwood’s putt for an eagle on the 7th? Everything has to be done quickly but we have a great crew of broadcasters and technicians that have this down to a science and we love a good challenge. We were happy to get clearance from FAA to get the blimp up so we will have great aerial shots of the course and the city.”
Locally, Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic (part of the NBC Sports Group) will be doing extensive coverage on all of their newscasts, along with extended coverage starting at 6:30 every night featuring Chick Hernandez and former Maryland basketball coach Garry Williams broadcasting live from Congressional.
All the local news outlets (4, 5, 7, and 9) will all have expanded news coverage from the tournament with NBC4 airing the action live Thursday through Sunday. It should be noted that TV coverage on Thursday and Friday will have ESPN airing the action in the morning (10 a.m.-3 p.m.) before turning the coverage over to The Golf Channel on NBC.
On the radio, both 980 AM and 106.7 FM will have extensive coverage
live from Congressional and ESPN Radio and Sirius-XM will offer live hole-by-hole coverage of the entire event.
The weekend will see The Golf Channel on NBC having exclusive coverage Saturday, starting at 2 p.m. and Sunday’s action starts a half-hour earlier at 1:30 p.m. The Golf Channel will have plenty of off-the-course live news coverage that will air both Thursday and Friday starting at 7 p.m. They will have an early and late show on the weekends with Saturday’s “Live from the Open” starting at 11 a.m. and then Sunday it will start an hour earlier at 10 a.m. The Golf Channel will air extensive coverage after both Saturday and Sunday’s rounds on NBC.
For those at work, you will be able to follow the action on broadband at NBCSports.com and ESPN3.
Examiner columnist Jim Williams is a seven-time Emmy Award-winning TV producer, director and writer. Check out his blog, Watch this!
