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The star coming out of the US Women’s Open has golf fans in awe

Mel Reid bogeys the 12th hole from the Lancaster Country Club live stream during the US Women’s Open.

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Thursday was a busy day for me last week, but not the golfing kind. That morning, as I moved from the end of one rental to the beginning of another, I was buried in boxes as my parents walked the busy streets of Chicago, looking for a place to park a truck. All of which is to say, I caught a bit in the first round of the US Women’s Open.

I glanced at my phone for Nelly Korda’s goal update. No math was too important, right? But with the clutter piling up and the many bogey trips, I missed the digital earthquake that was Korda’s septuple-bogey 10 on the 12th, just the third hole of his tournament.

Between the 5th floor (the old apartment) and the 34th (the new pad), I scrolled through Twitter and got one reaction more than any other: complete shock. Jokes quickly follow about Nelly seeing the scene in eight shots. Then came the sad realization that no one was going to see Korda win for the seventh time in eight games.

I was more upset than I thought. We should have got Nelly Golf weekend, and at least Friday Primetime Nelly Golf. But most of all I was just grasping the essence. How does this happen? The shot track on the USGA’s online leaderboard showed a Ping-Pong path of red dots from where Korda had played (and dropped) strokes. It doesn’t help. I will have to wait for more color.

The problem is, the highlights don’t do justice to the lead ups, downs, and conversations that are happening right now. They can’t capture what’s happening—the fastest of the cycle. They are meant to show you good things and things that make sense, but they are faster than revealing. I found myself in the middle of the most common event of a game that plays more than 18 holes with four rounds and eight hour broadcast windows. You miss things. Life takes over. Movement is happening. Writers wrote a lot of words at the time, and Korda himself even gave a brief description of what he faced – a long delay on the tee, stuck between the 6 and 7 iron, interrupted by the group in front of him hitting. the river.

Enter our troubleshooter: Mel Reid.

Reid will tell you what he would like to be to play at the US Women’s Open rather than broadcasting it, but lucky for us as golf fans she’s willing to do the latter if the former doesn’t work out. Because this is the time to provide golf TV context. Or at least dare to try harder than before in that life.

This is the time for “Full Swing” players and mic’d-up players and Jim Nantz criticizing – a little bit – Robert MacIntyre’s attitude about the noise made by the CBS drone. Sorry, friend. But your golf needs to be on TV, and aerial views bring context to it.

Reid, as we saw last week, is the LPGA core machine. (If you’re new to the Mel Reid Experience, that’s okay. You have a lot of listening to do. He’s an amazing speaker.) Sitting next to Brandel Chamblee on Golf Channel’s “Live From” last night at Lancaster Country Club, Reid. remind us how important information from top players is. He gave stories about the newly famous Charley Hull and set the record straight on the fairness of the course setup. His presence on the air was an example of why sports TV is full of talking heads. They know these games much better than we will ever know.

But it wasn’t Reid’s time that really caught viewers off guard last week. Instead that’s what he did on the 12th hole about 15 hours after the Korda fire, after I finished moving. As the maintenance crew at LCC prepared the course for Friday’s second round, Reid put on his Johnson Wagner hat, caught a few balls and explained exactly what Korda was dealing with after he accidentally missed his second shot.

You are studying everything you need to know about that hole of that dump one core, three minutes. You get real green ball action. You get a sense of what Korda’s vision looked like. You get a feeling of green speed as the ball rolls through the water. You get statistics and historical context, and even a view that fans on site couldn’t: standing on the edge of the green, looking down on a “golf ball graveyard,” to use Mel’s words. There was a lot of information at this point, Korda was still licking his wounds, but the intel also stuck with you. When Minjee Lee reached 12 with a tee shot to the short right side of the green on Sunday, anyone who had seen Reid’s fairway knew what was coming – his ball rolled back into the graveyard.

Any number of experts can step into Reid’s shoes and tell you the obvious. But can they do it without harm? And on live television? With Chamblee and holding Kira Dixon in his ear with a list of questions? And totally unapologetic about it? The herd of would-be commentators is quickly whittled down to a few.

We can thank Johnson Wagner and the producers of the Golf Channel for this new type of after-hours explainer content. It lights up and makes for a great social media platform. But more than anything important in this game – ours sports — where there aren’t a lot of X’s and O’s and secondary or higher angles. A little movement helps you to understand start of action golf but rarely the result, as in other games. Strategy in golf isn’t nearly as obvious as running down slow screens to get a big jump shot. And the details of the minutiae – especially the odd times like the 10th on the par-3 – can often be left waiting for interpretation as the stream changes for any one of the 70 players on the course.

Producing golf for TV is hard. I don’t envy people who have to do it. But if sport as a pastime is to match the trend of sport in general – that is, grow up – then golf on TV needs to be fed regularly to those of us watching at home. Or in the elevator while we’re on the move. Or while helping our parents find a parking space. Sometimes we hope to catch a glimpse of what happened, and that’s okay. This time, we got more than that.


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