J Schil's Blog

…is the best. Period, end of story.

I mentioned earlier in the week the announcers, from Marlboro’s own to Faldo to the on-course reporters, to everyone in between who use those CBS microphones to give us the best analysis anywhere. Coordinating Producer of Golf Lance Barrow and Director Steve Milton use creative graphics to propel stats onto the screen that are relevant. In addition they use the blimps at the RIGHT time, to not only show shots as they’re in the air, but to describe holes and show other neat things about the golf courses.

But they’re lucky, because they’ve now been blessed with two of the best tools of any of the networks that cover golf.

1) SwingVision - As described on the CBS Sports website, SwingVision “uses various high-speed cameras that shoot at 40,000 frames per second, capturing unique pictures such as the compression of a golf ball upon impact or the subtle nuances of a player’s swing.”

It has been nothing short of amazing to watch on a weekly basis. An Emmy-Award winner, the ability to dissect a player’s swing in slow-motion, the only true way to fix swing flaws in golf, has been amazing to watch. You can see, in clear and living color, what a certain player does, from Tiger Woods to Phil Mickelson to Vijay Singh to even former President Bush, to make their swing their own. And probably the coolest thing to see using the SwingVision camera is the compression of the ball — actually getting pushed smaller by the swing speed of a driver — something that had never been previously been seen in the history of golf on television.

During the PGA Championship last year CBS debuted a “mobile” version of SwingVision, enabling them to “super-slomo” chips, pitches, putts, and other shots from around the green. Just amazing.

2) Something they debuted just this week on CBS — Protracer — According to its website, “PROTRACER is a system for making the flight and trajectory of a golf ball visible in golf broadcasts and video recordings. Rather than merely calculating the path from the initial impact statistics, PROTRACER uses a patent pending combination of a CMOS sensor and advanced software analysis for detecting the true ball trajectory. While the ball is in air, superimposed graphics on the video stream shows the ball flight. This means that in the same picture the viewer can see the player, the golf course and the ball flight.”

What this has the ability to show, that nothing else has been able to, not even the blimp, is the effect that wind has on the flight and trajectory of the golf ball. I’ve played golf for 11 1/2 years now, so I know the effect, but I’m glad other viewers at home will now be able to see.

So this is all why CBS does the best golf coverage on TV, and oh by the way, it’s in High-Definition as well.