By Leonard Shapiro
Washington Post Columnist
Thursday, May 27, 1999; Page H8

When Grant Boone was 15, he secured a wonderful job at a local pizza parlor in his home town of Nashville. Instead of flipping dough or piling on the pepperoni, Boone was given a video camera and told to go out to the softball fields and bowling alleys around the city and tape games and frames while also doing a play-by-play of the action.

It was a brilliant marketing ploy. All the weekend warriors then made it a habit to gather at the restaurant afterward to eat and drink and watch themselves perform via the VCR plugged into a big screen TV, with Grant Boone behind the microphone. It wasn't exactly like his uncle Pat crooning "April Love," but using his vocal cords certainly beat toiling in front of a hot pizza stove.

"It was a great way to start for me," Boone, 29, said the other day. "And I ate well, too."

These days, Boone is The Voice behind a far more sophisticated operation as the announcer for the fledgling PGA Tour Radio network, soon to be heard on WTEM-980 in Washington Saturday and Sunday for the final two rounds of the Kemper Open. Boone will offer a live play-by-play from 4 to 6 p.m. both days, even though he'll be hundreds of miles away from the TPC at Avenel while he's describing the action.

Instead, just as he is on 30 weekends of the year, Boone and co-host DeWitt Long will be in a television studio in suburban Atlanta, looking at a bank of TV monitors providing the live feed from CBS Sports, which is covering the tournament on television. They'll be looking at the same pictures CBS golf producer Lance Barrow will see in the truck parked on a back lot at Avenel, and will offer their own commentary to the pictures for the radio audience.

"No, we're not there, but I don't think anyone who listens is able to tell the difference," Boone said. "We pride ourselves on covering everything that's out there, the entire atmosphere. And you'll hear the galleries, you're even able to hear them hitting the ball off the tee, because we get the sound feed from CBS, too."

So far, PGA Tour Radio has not felt it necessary to tell the audience listening at home while they're gardening or driving around the Beltway with the radio tuned up that the announcers are far, far away from the action on the course. They should offer a disclaimer, if only to be totally on the up-and-up about a broadcast that really does have the feel and the sound of being broadcast from the grounds.

Back in 1997, when PGA Tour Radio first went on the air, the announcers actually did do the tournaments on site, including walking roving reporters wearing battery-charged backpack transmitters as they trudged around the course for color commentary with the leaders.

That was a very costly way to produce live golf on the radio, about $50,000 to $75,000 per tournament. It also was a logistical nightmare, particularly when batteries ran down or equipment suddenly decided not to transmit.

The operation moved back to the studio last March, a huge cost-cutter for events that now essentially run about $7,500 per weekend to produce, according to David Wynn, vice president of affiliate relations. His network also offers a variety of other programming for the 218 stations in the United States and Canada that take all or parts of the service.

Boone hosts a one-hour magazine format show focusing on the PGA Tour, heard on WTEM Saturday mornings from 7 to 8. Stations also can purchase a package of 21 different tour vignettes that run about 90 seconds each, regular 90-second leader-board updates once a tournament has started play on Thursday and 90-second instructional tips from Butch Harmon, Tiger Woods's teacher.

PGA Tour Radio is actually owned by Santa Rosa Radio, which pays the tour about $1 million in rights fees to broadcast events on the regular and Senior PGA Tour. There are 16 minutes of advertising in each hour of the tournament broadcast, with Santa Rosa selling half the spots and the local station the other half.

"Play-by-play on the radio is important to the tour," Wynn said. "They realize that people are doing other things when their events are on TV. They might be out cutting the grass, or listening at the beach. People are mobile on the weekend, and if you can provide good golf, they'll listen to it as a viable alternative."

Golf fans coming out to the course to watch the pros on the weekend will often bring their own portable radios-with earphones mandatory so as not to upset the noise-sensitive players-a phenomenon likely to occur at the Kemper as well.

Wynn said the latest numbers from Arbitron indicate the broadcasts are reaching just over one million listeners in the all-important adult 18-54 range.

Even better, men 35 and older account for about 817,000 of those same listeners, an excellent demographic for the same sort of high end sponsors, including golf equipment and apparel companies, that advertise on TV at far higher prices.

WTEM does not carry the full play-by-play schedule on the weekend, preferring instead to stick with the popular ESPN Radio news and talk format throughout the day. "We're trying to convince them to do more tournaments," Wynn said. "Right now, we're just talking."

Though the network did not do play-by-play at The Masters, it did have three-hour live shows on the weekend from Augusta, with two credentialed reporters to provide interviews and features. They'll do the same at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst next month, and Wynn would like to think that eventually the company will be able to pay a rights fee to do play-by-play from the three majors played in the United States.

"It is a little more difficult to do it this way as opposed to being at the course," Grant Boone said. "At every tournament, if you're there, you pick up certain vibes, you can get more information. I do try to go to a tournament site for a couple of days early in the week, just to get a feel for things, and that definitely helps the play-by-play."

It's a far different routine than the old play-by-play days at the pizza parlor. "And much better for the waistline," he said.