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The Publisher’s Page
An interview with David Manougian, the Golf Channel's CEO
By Mark Pazdur, Publisher |
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Dream to Reality: How The Golf Channel Did It
David Manougian presides over golf's 24/7 showcase medium-a bold concept that has only begun to exploit golf's TV potential.
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| Mark Pazdur |
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San Diego, California: We all remember moments when great ideas seemed to be overwhelmed by a deeper sense of reality. For example, years ago they talked about a so-called "information highway" where people would have access to just about everything and anything by way of a computer and phone line.
The "Internet," they were calling it. It sounded like a dream. It sounded unattainable.
Now, just about all of us wonder how we would get through a day without our e-mails and websites.
Another idea, hatched 15 years ago, likewise struck some folks as a bit over-the-top.
The Golf Channel.
Ah, there was a good one. A cable channel that would televise golf, only golf, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. True reality sports, events, and golf information, that can make you sit up and take notice that finally tears you away from those Keystone cops and robbers and boring sitcom re-runs.
Doubting Thomases-eat crow. The Golf Channel is a certified hit. It is received by 74 million households in the United States. It has expanded to Japan, to western Europe, to South America, and, soon, it will be a hot ticket with China's cable providers. It has a shimmering 15-year partnership with the PGA Tour to become its exclusive cable provider. There are 385 employees on the payroll of the Orlando, Florida-based enterprise that soon can boast that programming by the Golf Channel will have reached 95 percent of the world's golfers.
So much for those scratched heads from 15 years ago.
On this beautiful Southern California afternoon, the Golf Channel's chief executive officer is revealing to me the latest and greatest statistics and updates as he sits in the lounge of Loews Coronado Resort outside San Diego.
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David Manougian |
David Manougian is 45 years old and some days he feels as if he were 10. That's how exhilarating life can be for a golf network CEO when business is good, and it has been quite good at the Golf Channel.
Manougian has been with the network since August of 1994, five months before the Golf Channel first went on the air.
He would be the first to tell you he took a chance on something that was hardly a sure bet. His wife of 18 years, Lori, would smile (or, perhaps, wince) and tell you the same.
At the time they were a couple of native Oregonians who decided to leave the comforts of Portland and, more significantly, the security of Nike Golf, where David was entrenched in Nike's one-of-a-kind marketing culture.
He had heard that this bold venture called the Golf Channel had secured financing and was about to launch a cable station with programming that would include Nike Tour events. The concept of a television channel carrying all golf, all the time, struck Manougian as irresistible. This was a new frontier in golf's galaxy. He wanted to explore it.
His curiosity spurred a phone call to the Golf Channel's executive offices-or what passed for them in the spring of 1994-which led to a return call from a man named Gene Pizzolato, who liked the questions a marketing man from Oregon was asking.
"Why don't you come down and talk to us?" Pizzolato said.
Manougian should have guessed that things would click. He was 3,000 miles away and shared the same sense of excitement and potential as the minds that conceived programming as esoteric as the Golf Channel were planning.
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| David Manougian and Arnold Palmer at the Golf Channel desk. |
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"Knowing the golf culture and the nature of golfers-how it really permeates their entire lifestyle-I thought the Golf Channel made a ton of sense," Manougian remembers from an interview in which he and Pizzolato, predictably, hit it off. "It especially made sense in a cable area when they were getting ready to go from a normal channel lineup of, say, 40 basic channels, to 80 basic channels, to a universe of another hundred or 200 channels."
Manougian decided if he signed on with Pizzolato and the Golf Channel, it should be on the vice-presidential level. Marketing made sense, but he needed that VP title to justify leaving Portland.
Pizzolato called him back some days later. The rough news: the Golf Channel wanted him to take a marketing position-but not on a VP level. The better news: the Golf Channel's vice president of advertising sales had just resigned. Would Manougian be interested?
"Well," said Manougian, "I haven't sold media before."
Pizzolato shrugged.
"You're a sales person, right?" he asked. "You bought some media at Nike?
"You watch television commercials, don't you?"
Pizzolato concluded Manougian sounded like a terrific VP of ad sales.
There was one other person who needed to bless this spontaneous business marriage: Lori Manougian.
Magnificent woman and wife that she is, Lori realized her husband had become impassioned about an opportunity that, even to her, sounded worthwhile. In her sage fashion, Lori said to her husband:
"Look, the worst that can happen is we go down there, it doesn't work, we come back here [Oregon] and we figure things out."
He became the 14th employee at the Golf Channel and realized almost instantly that this was indeed a brand new venture. The clincher came at a meeting when the then-small group of executives sat around a table trying to decide what holidays the company would observe.
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Lori and David Manougian |
Startups And Lowdowns
Even to that embryonic point in the Golf Channel's life, it had not been the easiest of paths. Financing had been a serious challenge. Not until Arnold Palmer lent his name and credibility to the project did the Golf Channel finally nail down enough investors (six cable companies formed the backbone) to hit the air in January of 1995.
The business plan changed almost immediately. It was theorized that the Golf Channel could thrive on single subscriptions ranging from $4.95 to $6.95 per month. It seemed logical to the Golf Channel creators that any serious golfer with cable television would want to tie up a channel that could provide so much golf so inexpensively.
Manougian remembers how simple was the logic, and how complex became the audience's responses.
"The strategy, while it tested well with golfers on paper, goes to show how precise you must be in research questions," Manougian explains. "Because the way we posed the question to golfers was, 'Would you pay $4.95 or $6.95 per month-roughly the cost of a sleeve of golf balls-to get an entire channel devoted to golf?'
"And the overwhelming answer," Manougian recalls, "was, 'Yes.' But, really, the question needed to be: 'Would you be willing to pay your cable operator $6.95 more than you currently pay in order to get this?'
"It's a very different question."
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| David Manougian, left, with his older brother, Ron. |
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The decision was made in mid-1995 to scrap the elective charge and move to a base-subscriber network. The mechanism was going to be different, but not the ultimate vision. By the end of the Golf Channel's first year of operation there were 1 million subscribers.
A couple of years later the Golf Channel moved into Japan. And not quite five years into the station's existence, the Golf Channel was at a happy landmark for any start-up business: the Golf Channel was breaking even.
Manougian's personal background stood as something of a parallel to the demographics and history shared by a typical Golf Channel viewer. He grew up playing at a municipal layout, Eastmoreland Golf Course, in Portland. He had an older brother who worked for a time as a teaching professional and who helped turn a younger brother's interest in golf to a passion.
David Manougian today belongs to Bay Hill, where he gets a fairly regular shot at polishing his 7 handicap. It was also at Bay Hill where Manougian played the single most memorable round of golf in his life: 18 holes with Arnold Palmer, at Palmer's invitation, in the Bay Hill Men's Shootout.
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High school best friends, David Manougian and Jim Brown. |
Manougian doesn't recall that his score was anything extraordinary one way or the other. What he remembers is a five-hour slice of golfing bliss, understood by anyone who loves golf enough to make the Golf Channel part of his or her TV routine.
The Golf Channel's Growth Spurts
He became the Golf Channel's president in 2002, not long after Comcast bought out the other original investors to become the Golf Channel's sole owner. Growth along the way has been steady, as well as obvious to viewers familiar with the channel's programming benchmarks:
Picking up Champions Tour telecasts from CNBC carried credibility and prestige. Adding all-rounds coverage from the Solheim Cup was a significant step, as was bringing to the Golf Channel all four rounds of the McDonald's LPGA Championship.
"Those things don't happen unless the external world has seen you come of age," Manougian says of the Golf Channel's steady rise in profile since 1995. "It leads to [Tour executives] saying, 'OK, we trust you with this block of programming, whether it's the Solheim Cup, or a major championship, or 26 tour events. Those moments were important to us from a programming standpoint, but, just as important, I think, they were a validation that we were doing a good job and acting as good caretakers of the product we were overseeing."
This steady ascent paved the way for Manougian to nail down the Golf Channel's grand alliance: exclusive cable-TV carrier of PGA Tour events.
In the summer of 2004, Manougian had begun talking with PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem. Manougian had an idea that was based, he believed, on a reality he wanted to impress upon a man he had known since his days at Nike.
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There are 385 employees on the payroll of the enterprise based in Orlando, Florida, that soon can boast that programming by the Golf Channel will have reached 95 percent of the world’s golfers.
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| (Top left) David Manougian poses with NBA superstar and avid golfer, Charles Barkley; and (top right) with Donald Trump. (Above left) TaylorMade’s president, Mark King, pays a recent visit to Manougian. (Above right) PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem. |
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He thought that the Golf Channel and the PGA Tour should have a long-term programming alliance. The reasoning for Manougian was a matter of simple business logic: Other networks had other business to address. The Golf Channel, like the PGA Tour, was about one thing and one thing only: golf, pure and distilled.
Why not go for a relationship that would exceed the typical contract between a network and a particular sport's executives? Why not go for a 15-year deal that would make the Golf Channel the PGA Tour's exclusive cable carrier? For Manougian, it was imperative to persuade Finchem that the Golf Channel could not be viewed the same as any other network or cable niche.
"If you are ABC or CBS or NBC," Manougian says, repeating words he expressed then to Finchem, "the reason you do four- or five-year deals is because every four to five years a network's appetite for particular programming changes.
"You have changes in direction for your brand, changes in philosophy. Sports might be a big priority in one four-year block and then not a priority at all. If you're ESPN, one sport might be a serious priority, but then you get Monday Night Football."
Conversations and negotiations lasted for two years and sometimes were as informal as Manougian and Finchem agreeing to grab a quick cup of coffee at The British Open. Throughout their discussions and consistent with their ideas was a sense that each was interested in the same thing: betterment of the game of golf.
They meant it. Manougian calls the ultimate contract "more of a partnership than a transaction" because of each entity's ultimate objective that, yes, transcended dollars and cents.
Manougian asks today as he did then: "What better way to position golf in the best possible light, and to position the players and to let the audience get to know the players, than to do something that's really robust, and in a way the viewer can count on consistency-where he or she knows they can tune in each and every week to a quality telecast that, in the end, advances the game of golf?"
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This year the Golf Channel will televise 48 different Tour events. For those who believe a golf tournament is as worthy of coverage on Thursday and Friday as on the weekend, there will continue to be a banquet of PGA Tour golf spiced by the presence of the Golf Channel's on-air talent.
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Tabbing A Natural Talent:Nick Faldo
This year the Golf Channel will televise 48 different Tour events. For those who believe a golf tournament is as worthy of coverage on Thursday and Friday as on the weekend, there will continue to be a banquet of PGA Tour golf spiced by the presence of the Golf Channel's on-air talent.
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The Golf Channel's anchor, Kelly Tilghman; David Manougian, and lead analyst, Nick Faldo. |
Manougian had always had one particular Tour star in mind as his lead analyst: Nick Faldo. A man of Faldo's background and personal makeup represented what Manougian-with no argument from Finchem-believed brought status and color to the analyst's chair.
"It's everything, from his look to his demeanor," Manougian says of Faldo. "He's that rare breed who has obvious credibility because of winning six majors, which also affords him the distinct ability to joke around at times.
"He has a fantastic sense of humor that is balanced by this extreme resume that he owns, somebody else might not be able to pull it off. Golf is the greatest game in the world, and its history is wonderful, but it must also be enjoyable to watch. Nick's one of the primary faces we wanted to put on our telecasts."
The next question was equally important: Who to pair Faldo with as the telecast's anchor. The nod went to Kelly Tilghman, who possesses all the polish and professionalism and camera charisma that would meld neatly with Faldo's pluses.
Rich Lerner and Frank Nobilo offer additional luster to the on-air mosaic that will be enhanced in ongoing ways by creative, 21st-century graphics and an audience-bonding banquet of information and insight.
Note, for example, what the Golf Channel has in store for viewers with its new tournament-coverage baby, "Aim Point." It will display to viewers how much a particular putt faced by a golfer at a given position and distance will break on its way to the cup.
"Very cool technology," Manougian says.
Graphics and information snippets will become every bit as much of a Tour event on the Golf Channel as they are when a batter steps to the plate against a specific pitcher on a Major League Baseball broadcast. A golfer's percentage chance of making a birdie putt from a particular distance will be flashed in seconds on the screen.
It is going to be a telecast as vibrant and as information-filled as a camera, a computer, and a television screen can combine to communicate.
In the same way, the Golf Channel will unveil its Win Zone, where the prospects for a particular golfer in an upcoming event can be discerned. The Golf Channel should be able to present, days in advance, a fairly accurate projection on who will be jamming up Sunday's leader board.
A new and improved and glitzier Golf Central will also become part of an enhanced package of "shoulder programming" flanking the Golf Channel's pre- and post-event coverage. Included in the new menu will be a feature portraying "The Great Golf Inventor" as individuals conceive and construct the latest and greatest in golf-equipment enhancers.
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“Part of our mission is to make golf seem friendlier and more welcoming. We think it’s incumbent on us to make the game more enjoyable for people to watch, and to play.”
— David Manougian
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Golf: The Game That Must Grow
The idea is to make golf more personal, more captivating, more intertwined in the lives of those who love the game-and those who potentially will adopt it.
The latter point is important to Manougian, to Finchem, to all of the golf industry's captains and leaders who understand that any game's future is only as secure as it relates to the newest generation to embrace it. That was the inspiration behind the Golf Channel's Drive, Chip, and Putt competition that has seen 100,000 junior golfers compete in an event modeled after the NFL's Punt, Pass, and Kick event.
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| Enjoying a family vacation are David and Lori Manougian with daughter, Emma. |
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Golf can intimidate some of its potentially best ambassadors. Breaking down that sense of difficulty, the perception that it is too expensive, is a kind of ultimate value and gift Manougian believes the Golf Channel can deliver on behalf of a game that is waiting to embrace more fans and participants.
For evidence there Manougian looks no further than his wife, Lori.
"You know, my wife was convinced that she was going to be the worst golfer at Bay Hill when we moved down here," Manougian remembers, shaking his head. "And she thought it would be impossible for her to get on the course because of this conviction that she would be the worst golfer on the course. It was a perceived barrier.
"Finally, I said to her: 'Come and see the driving range. Just look up and down the driving range. You'll see that one particular person is better than you, and that you hit better than another person. Nobody's the worst golfer in the world, and nobody's the best golfer: Except for Tiger Woods, and who-knows who is on the other end of the spectrum, we're all somewhere in between.'
"So part of our mission is to make golf seem friendlier and more welcoming," Manougian says of the Golf Channel's job description. "We think it's incumbent on us to make the game more enjoyable for people to watch, and to play."
He concedes that making the Golf Channel a kind of idyllic haven for all golfers, present and future, is what motivates him as well as the Golf Channel's staff of bright people who happen to share his zeal for the game.
"What keeps me up at night is not whether we'll do a pretty good job," Manougian says. "It's wanting to do a fantastic job. It's wondering about the things we haven't yet thought of.
"I think that's a good place to be. For the majority of our employees, what they're obsessed with is not whether they're going to be able to achieve the core part of their job, but, rather, 'How do I go above and beyond the level where my department now operates?'
"What we are is a bunch of people who really work hard. We're fortunate to have a company of passionate employees, probably 90 percent of whom have relocated to work for the Golf Channel.
"And, you know, I think that's pretty special."
You may write David Manougian at the Golf Channel, 7580 Commerce Center Drive, Orlando, Florida 32819; or please visit thegolfchannel.com.
To contact Mark Pazdur, publisher, you may email him at: mark@executivegolfermagazine.com.
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