Ryder Cup fever is alive and well, despite being weeks away. All the chatter has some folks a bit disgruntled.
“I love answering questions about the Ryder Cup, but this is ridiculous,” Scottie Scheffler said two weeks ago in a press conference. “We’re at the BMW Championship. The Ryder Cup is over a month away. If you want to talk about this week, let's talk about this week. If not, I’ve got practice to do. I'm getting ready for a golf tournament.”
NBC apparently shares that sentiment.
During the Tour Championship’s telecast, U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley was making a charge for the lead as the question looms whether he’ll pick himself for the team and become the first U.S. playing captain since 1963.
NBC, however, apparently told its broadcasters to tone down the Ryder Cup rhetoric and focus on the Tour Championship, the PGA Tour’s season finale.
“So this has been something that we’ve talked about on and off for a while,” NBC analyst and eight-time PGA Tour winner Brad Faxon told Toronto 1050 Radio on Monday (at the 8:20 mark here). “We were so obsessed with it that the PGA Tour actually called NBC on Saturday and said, ‘Listen, you’re talking way too much about the Ryder Cup. We’ve got to talk about the Tour Championship and the FedEx [Cup],’ and we’re like, ‘Oh my gosh. This is one of the reasons why people are watching.’”
Ironically, NBC airs all three days of the Ryder Cup in late September, so its broadcast team likely won’t be getting a similar demand that week.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Brad Faxon Says NBC Made Surprising Request During Tour Championship Broadcast .