Tough Like Patton

Filed in archive Golf News on December 14, 2007

Courtesy: Golf Digest

Frank Chirkinian has been inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame for his efforts in the game of golf.

Who is Frank Chirkinian? A touring pro no one has ever heard of?

Anything but. In fact, Chirkinian is as responsible for making golf a household sport in North America as Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus ever were.

Frank Chirkinian was a CBS sports producer and director who was given the task of figuring out how to televise the game of golf way back in 1958 when the network decided golf was worth a look.

His production techniques revolutionized sports coverage and influenced how broadcasters around the world covered tournaments on TV.

Chirkinian's parents were from Armenia. They fled to the United States in the early 1920s after Turkey had invaded the largely Christian country and killed roughly 2 million Armenians.

His father lost his first wife and four sons along with his own brothers and sisters.

Frank Chirkinian was born in the United States. But his family history must have contributed to his toughness.

When Chirkinian produced golf for CBS from 1958 until 1996, he was known as an iron-fisted ruler in the control room.

Now, I've been in a good number of control rooms in my time and they are hairy places during the live broadcast of something as seemingly straightforward as a news program, let alone a 14 or 15 camera golf telecast.

There has to be a degree of control to keep order from descending into chaos. Chirkinian brought that order to his control rooms and didn't win many friends doing it.

Those who found Chirkinian too hard to take were not confined just to the TV industry; he was not always popular with the players, either.

Scott Hoch, the Rory Sabbatini of the older generation on tour, can't stand the man.

Hoch has said some tough things about Chirkinian, all of which the retired producer refutes.

Regardless of all that, Frank Chirkinian was a pioneer in a medium that is ideally suited to golf.

I never realized that it was Chirkinian who suggested that golf scores stop being cumulative ("Ben Hogan is 144 while Byron Nelson is 139") and switch to a plus/minus scoring system ("Ben Hogan is 2 over par after two rounds and trailing Byron Nelson by 5 strokes").

Chirkinian said it created more drama for viewers and he was right. It was just one of his small adjustments that had a huge impact.

He brought out the perfect fit between television and golf.

And, in doing so, he helped to make golf exciting to watch, using the power and influence of television to spread the game among recreational players.

With four decades of golf production and direction under his belt, Chirkinian has a lot of stories to tell. And he reveals a few of them in this article from 2003.

Frank Chirkinian deserves his honor in the Sports Hall of Fame.

But he really belongs alongside the other innovators of golf in The Golf Hall of Fame.