Live From Florida, a PGA Tour Champions Event Played Somewhere Else

The PGA Tour’s state-of-the-art studio in Ponte Vedra Beach produces events with some commentators there and others not on site themselves.

Inside Studio 1A of the PGA Tour studios in Ponte Vedra Beach, where many remote broadcasts are now called from, including entire tournaments on the PGA Tour Champions. / Garry Smits/The Times-Union / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

It was an ordinary golf Sunday. As the Genesis Invitational was finishing on CBS, Mark Calcavecchia was in his Jupiter, Fla., motorhome watching Justin Leonard win the PGA Tour Champions Chubb Classic on Golf Channel. 

The 1989 British Open champion was unhappy with what he was consuming—and not because of the tournament’s results. So he put his thoughts into the atmosphere. 

“I think the fact that @PaulAzinger and @BobPapa_NFL are in a studio for all but 3 events all year is a total embarrassment to our game and @ChampionsTour we can’t be that cheap,” Calcavecchia tweeted on Feb. 15. “These guys can’t be great when they can’t talk to players and be there to see what’s going on.”

I think the fact that @PaulAzinger and @BobPapa_NFL are in a studio for all but 3 events all year is a total embarrassment to our game and @ChampionsTour we can’t be that cheap. These guys can’t be great when they can’t talk to players and be there to see what’s going on

— Mark Calcavecchia (@MarkCalc) February 15, 2025

Calcavecchia first learned that the PGA Tour Champions was moving to remote broadcasts in the PGA Tour Studios for all but three events in 2025 when he spoke to Paul Azinger, the 50-and-over tour’s television analyst, at NBC Sports’s broadcaster Gary Koch’s pro-am in December. At first, Calcavecchia didn’t think much of it. 

Then, a light bulb went off in his head during the Chubb Classic. 

“I started thinking about it listening to the coverage,” Calcavecchia told Sports Illustrated in an interview. “I’m like, ‘Well, how can you do a good job commentating on the golf when you’re not even there?’ You don’t know the conditions, you don’t know the wind, there’s so many things you don’t know, there’s so many variables to it.” 

He’s not the only one who feels this way. 

“Pretty much every single reply I got (to the tweet) agreed with me 100%,” says Calcavecchia, who retired from the senior tour in 2022 at age 61. 

However, the recent uproar surrounding the PGA Tour Champions’s broadcasting method has perplexed Greg Hopfe, the senior vice president and executive producer of PGA Tour Entertainment, which produces tour broadcasts for Golf Channel. 

“It's interesting that this has gotten so much attention because it’s nothing new in the sports production industry,” Hopfe says. “It’s been going on for a long time.

“We have produced PGA Tour Live for well over a decade this way. When the PGA Tour took over the production of the Korn Ferry Tour three years ago, we did it this way and never heard anything about it. I don’t understand why this is drawing attention.”

Beyond that, Golf Channel has utilized a hybrid production model for PGA Tour Fall and select opposite-field events out of NBC Sports’s Stamford, Conn., studios in recent years, with all talent on-site only in some instances, but on-course reporters always at the events. However, NBC/Golf Channel’s (non-autumn or alternate events) and CBS’s production of the PGA Tour remains a primarily on-site operation.

Other sports, especially since the pandemic, have dipped their toes in remote broadcasting, too. This week, Major League Baseball’s season-opening Tokyo Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs on Fox was called from the U.S., generating criticism.

At the start of this year, the PGA Tour opened a state-of-the-art, 165,000-square-foot production studio in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., which features eight production rooms, eight audio control rooms and seven LED studios with a 270-degree LED display in Studio 1A.

Launching a new era.
 
Welcome to PGA TOUR Studios 🎬🚁 pic.twitter.com/QT7GNuEeih

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) December 30, 2024

The Tour’s previous creative content hub was 15 miles away in St. Augustine, Fla., and only had one studio and one production control room.

“This is literally the last piece of the puzzle,” Hopfe says, “like this was the last move. (The PGA Tour Champions) was the only production we had that was on-site, and it’s simply because our facility in St. Augustine didn’t have enough room and bandwidth to handle it, or else we would have made the move three years ago.

“Now, we’re in a state-of-the-art facility with plenty of room, plenty of studios, and that’s why the timing is now.” 

And this mimics being on-site? 

A Complex Golf Production

Broadcasting golf is more complicated than other sports. 

“Before I came here, I did basketball, baseball and hockey,” Hopfe says, “and golf is one of the most unique sports productions and the hardest sport to produce because if you think about it, when I was doing hockey, I went into a brick-and-mortar place. It was already pre-cabled, the cameras were in the same spots every night. Golf, you literally have to go set up a traveling circus at a different venue outdoors, preexisting for one week.”

Hopfe compares doing the broadcast from the studios to walking into a house and flipping on a switch in the kitchen. Everything is ready to go, the same as it was the week before—and it’s more reliable. 

“You have the best technology infrastructure you could possibly ask for,” Hopfe says, “as opposed to going on-site where you’re in remote TV trucks that may not be consistent week in and week out, so you’re maybe not getting the best technology possible.”

Setting up and tearing down the production on-site is no cakewalk. For example, after the Cologuard Classic ends in Tucson, Ariz., all the equipment that was in the field is cabled and stored in the belly of a mobile unit for a 480-mile trip to the Hoag Classic in Newport Beach, Calif. Once the trailer reaches its destination, it’s all unpacked again. 

Then, audio personnel outfits the 10-by-10 foot TV truck, where the broadcasters do the call, with monitors, headsets and audio blankets. Plus, when equipment is being plugged and unplugged each week, it needs to be tested to ensure it’s functioning properly. But when the broadcast is done remotely, those worries dissolve. 

In addition to convenience and less manual labor, the PGA Tour studio has perks the trailer doesn’t. For example, the commentators have access to the world’s largest golf library. So if Azinger wants a specific shot of Calcavecchia from the 1995 BellSouth Classic, it can be found momentarily. And that would show up on the left graphics board, which can help with in-broadcast analysis. 

“Azinger has the ability to go on there and be creative,” says PGA Tour Champions president Miller Brady, “whether it’s critiquing swings, analyzing a swing now when a guy’s in his 50s versus a swing when he was in his 30s or in his 20s, and how that may correlate or how his swing has been altered or changed over time. I think it’s pretty cool because we really didn’t have the ability to do that in the past.

“We’ll also be able to utilize some of those graphic packages in a more unique way than we have in the past.”

The graphics help maximize sponsorship. When the broadcasters appear on camera, a backdrop displays the golf course setting watermarked with the tournament logo, with sponsorship labels pasted on the side. The average viewer might not care about that, but to those involved in putting on the tournament, it’s a big deal. 

“We’re gonna provide our sponsors more value because their logos will be up on the telecast where they were not before,” Brady says, “and I think that’s really important.”

Sponsorships are the straws that stir the drink for any professional golf circuit to stay afloat. Brady, however, claims the move to remote broadcasts in the new multimillion-dollar studio wasn’t a cost-cutting move, despite what many believe. (The PGA Tour declined to reveal the studio’s cost but noted it would boost the Tour’s economic impact in Northeast Florida by $112 million.)

“Ultimately the PGA Tour Studios was a huge investment,” Brady says, “and that investment is to actually enhance the overall quality of broadcasts, short term and long term.

“So, could it save some money? Potentially. But I wouldn’t say that that is the driving force behind doing this.”

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A post shared by Paul Azinger (@zinger.vision)

Aside from cameramen and audio personnel, the production crew, such as producers, technical directors and graphics operators, can now set up a home base in the Jacksonville area and sleep in their own beds during tournament weeks, rather than travel nearly 25 weeks a year. 

Not everyone is a car ride away during tournament weeks, though. Bob Papa has recently moved to the Jacksonville area, but Azinger lives in Bradenton, Fla., roughly four hours away. Azinger, the 1993 PGA champion, replaced World Golf Hall of Famer Lanny Wadkins for the PGA Tour Champions’s lead analyst role in January. Had Wadkins continued, he would have flown in from his Dallas home for the broadcast. 

And contrary to Brady and Hopfe, he’s not sure the new product will thrive for a similar price tag. 

“They want most of the people that are going to work there to move there otherwise, I mean, for me, for example, they would still be paying for a plane ticket in there, a hotel and per diem and, you know, they’re not saving money on me not living there if I was doing the telecast. So, that seems to be the bottom line in the thinking. I just hope the product doesn’t suffer, that’s my concern,” Wadkins told Golfweek last November.

“A lot of times, we’d be in the same hotel that most of the players were staying so we’d see them at the bar. And you know, I think that interaction is crucial to getting info that can improve the telecast. It doesn’t always come from me, but it may come from Papa or Cookie (analyst John Cook) or whoever, but only having, you know, a walker on-site, it sounds like a really lonely life just being the only person on site, nobody else there, you know, that’s gonna be kind of weird.”

On-site ... for the Majors

During Calcavecchia’s playing days, he remembers how diligently golf’s greatest voices brought a broadcast to life. 

“I go back to all the years that I was in the hunt on the PGA Tour,” he says. “(Peter) Kostis and [Gary] McCord and [David] Feherty, they’d be on the range two hours before the telecast even started, talking to guys and watching guys playing and hit it and drive around the course and watch some other players in the morning putt and certain things to help them with their knowledge of the course and whatnot. So without being able to do all that, it seems impossible to me to be able to do a good job commentating on golf when you’re sitting on the other side of the country watching it on a TV.” 

This week’s Hoag Classic in Newport Beach will be played nearly 2,500 miles from Ponte Vedra Beach, where Papa and Azinger will be on the call. Still, each event this year will have an on-course presence. 

“We have our walker on-site,” Brady says. “There’ll be sometimes when we have multiple walkers on-site. Still have the ability to get instant feedback or daily feedback from the players on how either they’re playing or how the course is playing—whatever it might be. That’s not gonna change.”

Not every tournament will be called remotely, though. A full crew will be at the Regions Tradition in Birmingham, Ala., and the Kaulig Companies Championship in Akron, Ohio (two of the five senior majors that are operated by the PGA Tour Champions), along with the season-ending Charles Schwab Cup Championship in Phoenix. 

If doing the broadcast from the studio boasts an abundance of benefits being on-site doesn’t, then why are the tour’s biggest events being telecasted the old way? 

“Those events are considered majors on our tour,” Brady says, “they’re four-day events (as opposed to three rounds) and we actually do want the overall talent being out there from time to time to make sure that they have a continued pulse on everything going on in our tour. 

“And by the way, there will be times when, even though we’re doing a remote broadcast that particular week, we send the talent out early in the week and they come back to PGA Tour Studios.”

That will only intensify if Tiger Woods, who turns 50 in December, decides to tee it up on the PGA Tour Champions next season. 

“Obviously, we don’t know what Tiger may or may not do at this point,” Brady says, “but assuming that he does play an event, or multiple events—when he decides to play a Champions Tour event, we may take the opportunity to put more cameras on-site than we have right now.

“So, we have the ability to always make changes and in certain instances, we’ll do that.”

Many, especially Calcavecchia and those who engaged with his tweet, hope PGA Tour leadership has heard all the noise and will return to its television heritage for PGA Tour Champions. The tour’s health may depend on it. 

“Golf, already we’ve lost TV viewers, we’ve lost some audience,” Calcavecchia says, “and if it continues to go in this direction, either people will watch it with no volume on, or not watch it at all. I think that’s what might happen if it keeps going in this direction, but I hope not.

“I hope this is a wake-up call and something gets done about it and we get the good commentary back on-site like it should be.”

Love it or hate it, that doesn’t seem likely​​—at least not in the immediate future. 

“When you take a step back and you look at the way the remote production has been headed over the past, I would even call it five years, whether it was the Olympics or other sports, and now more and more golf, it’s really the way of the world,” Brady says.