'Nasty Nick' Bringing Cheer to New Season

A PGA Tour season that never seems to end begins officially Thursday at the Mercedes Championship in heavenly Hawaii. For six-time major championship winner Nick Faldo, the start of the 2007 schedule also represents a new beginning as the most visible television voice of a sport he once dominated with his play, despite his often dour demeanor.

Back in the late 1980s and '90s, the metronomic Englishman frequently lived up to his moniker in the British tabloids as "Nasty Nick" or, among many of his playing peers as "Nick The (rhymes with stick)." When Faldo won his final British Open title, his victory speech that day included a gratuitous slap at the golf media he classlessly thanked "from the heart of my bottom," and his post-match press conferences often were contentious, if he bothered to show up at all following a poor round or a lousy finish.

But now, in the first decade of the 21st Century, all of that apparently has been forgotten. Faldo has become yet another pill of an athlete who has morphed into one of those guys sportswriters like to say has learned how to "say hello when it's time to say goodbye."

He's been hired by The Golf Channel, which will carry the Mercedes and four other tournaments for a full four rounds, as the cable network's lead analyst, a position he'll also occupy on another 20 weekend events broadcast by CBS Sports. Faldo will replace Lanny Wadkins, a disappointing successor in recent years to the now retired Ken Venturi. Wadkins allegedly left CBS because he was offered a lesser role on the telecast and also wanted to play more golf. Yeah, and don't we all.

Faldo is hardly the first jock jerk to make the transition from the playing field to a broadcasting booth. Bill Walton, who literally used to run away from reporters when he wasn't actually insulting them as a college and professional basketball player, has carved out a swell career as an idiosyncratic analyst on the NBA.

And Sterling Sharpe, a former Green Bay Packer wide receiver Chicago Sun Times sports columnist Rick Telander once described as "the rudest athlete this media creature ever was forced to attempt to interview," is somehow still gainfully employed by the NFL Network after a long and not terribly distinguished career as an ESPN analyst. Sharpe, the antithesis of his delightful little brother Shannon, has even refused to do interviews long after he quit playing the game, not that anyone would want to talk to him anyway considering his vacuous on-air presence.

Thankfully, there are still some television executives with long memories who basically refuse to put the bad boys (and occasionally girls) on the air. Fox Sports President Ed Goren is one of them, telling Sports Illustrated recently that "if a guy has basically boycotted the press through his playing career and all of a sudden wants to join the media in his post playing career, my tendency is to feel that's a bit too little too late."

At The Golf Channel and CBS, that's not the been the case with Faldo, and perhaps with some good reason. Toward the end of his playing career on the PGA Tour, when his skills had eroded and a top 20 finish was a cause to celebrate, Faldo seemed to undergo something of a personality transplant, particularly when he began playing regularly in the U.S.

Suddenly, it was "Nick The Nice," a hail-fellow, well-met guy who did mock swoons when putts failed to go down, put his arm around an opponent walking down a fairway and more than occasionally smiled for the cameras and became a rather charming, jocular presence in press tents around the country the few times he played well enough to warrant a post-round news conference.

He got his big chance when ABC Sports hired him a couple of years ago and paired him in its golf booth with the affable Paul Azinger, who seemed born to do golf commentary right from the start. The two of them, prodded by play-by-play man Mike Tirico, brought out the best in each other and exhibited the sort of chemistry television types can only dream about.

Sadly, ABC and its corporate cousin ESPN, are now essentially out of the golf business, save for their contract to keep the British Open (with Faldo in the booth, by the way). Instead of having many of its regular season events covered Thursday and Friday on the so-called sports leader, ESPN (or previous partner USA Network), the suits at PGA Tour headquarters in their 2006 round of TV negotiations decided they'd rather have all early round tournament coverage on The Golf Channel, which the tour partially owns.

On many levels, it was a decision the tour may live to regret, sort of like putting their senior Champions Tour on cable CNBC several years ago, then watching the ratings plummet like Enron stock in the late 1990s. The Golf Channel allegedly is available in about 75 million homes, compared to ESPN's nearly 100 million, but only about 45 million homes actually have the service on their basic cable packages, meaning an automatic shrinkage in the overall audience.