When one of the legends of the game questions your multi-million golf investment, should it give you some pause? Grant Boone offers his insight in his third installment of Radio Daze, the start of the PGA TOUR Radio Network.

By Grant Boone, Special to PGA.com

This is the third part of a series called "PGA Tour Radio Daze." To read part one, click here. To read part two, click here.

The fact that approximately no one was listening to those early tournament broadcasts did nothing to dampen my spirits. Tom Kite did that all by himself.

The entire crew was excited (and a little nervous) when we arrived in May 1997 at the TPC at The Woodlands for our first play-by-play broadcasts, which would take place on that Saturday and Sunday. To curb the enthusiasm, we rehearsed. I don't recall ever hearsing, but I vividly remember re-hearsing. We had a full run through for four hours Thursday, then another three-hour practice session Friday. We even had dress rehearsals where we rehearsed getting dressed.

The same keen strategy that had lined up all of one radio station to carry that first tournament ordered full television regalia for the host and analyst, namely yours truly and Denis Watson. (The on-course announcers were mercifully permitted to wear PGA Tour Radio Network golf shirts in Houston's late spring swelter.) Denis and I, on the other hand, got to the course Thursday in our coats and ties, stepped into the mobile studio located on the 17th hole, and promptly disappeared from everyone's sight. We could've broadcast nude and no one would've noticed, though I'm pretty sure it would've violated our contract with the little Christian radio station carrying our feed.

Our sartorial sentence was commuted at the 11th hour by Jim Griffel, an operative in the Tour's broadcasting department, who late Friday broke the news to our CEO Warren Elliott that of the few random souls who would be listening over the weekend, none would be able to actually see us. Finally convinced that radio is only an aural medium, Elliott doled out a couple of XLs so Denis and I could do the shows short-sleeved.

The chest inside my golf shirt preceded me as I strolled the grounds in Houston that week, proud as I was of our incipient adventure. Then I bumped into Kite as we were both walking into the media center at the TPC at The Woodlands. I used the occasion to introduce myself and tell him I was with PGA Tour Radio Network, assuming he'd not only heard of it but had arranged for his family to gather around the living room Hi-Fi to listen.

Instead, he wrinkled up his nose and asked, "Who?" I told him it was the Tour's new radio network and that we'd be doing play-by-play of tournaments all year long.

"Golf on radio," he said. "How's that gonna work?"

It was a rhetorical jab. He wasn't actually curious about how we'd execute our play-by-play broadcasts. It was more like Ron Burgundy telling producers at his fictional ESPN audition that their all-sports channel would be a financial and cultural disaster (click here). Of course, Kite was right, at least in terms of that incarnation of PGA Tour Radio Network.

It's also possible he was a bit on edge after having coming face to face with the mortality of his career on the PGA Tour just a couple of weeks before when he finished second at The Masters, a mere 12 strokes behind Tiger Woods. It wasn't just that Woods won. It was also the margin of victory and that his win in Augusta was his fourth in his first 15 starts as a professional.

Kite had himself been flying high to that point. From 1989 through part of 1995, he'd been the Tour's career money leader and was still 2nd at the time of our chance encounter. Then again, that was mostly B.T. - Before Tiger, when you could still use an abacus to calculate players' paychecks. Consider that at the end of the 1994 season, the last in which Kite led the career earnings category, he'd made a total of $9.1 million. Woods would eclipse that number in the 2000 season alone, thanks not only to his 9 wins (3 of which were majors) but also the power of his personality which single-handedly produced the Tour's windfall television contract that yielded an exponential increase in Tour purses.

In terms of providing inspiration for our first weekend of shows, Kite went over about as well as Matt Foley (click here). But we had bigger issues to worry about. Like making sure our announce team got to the course safely. On the way down to the lobby of our hotel to meet up with the rest of the crew, one of our announcers, Ed "Filet" Bignon, found himself stuck in an elevator. He picked up the phone, and it immediately connected.

"Hello?" came the voice on the other end.

"Hello," Bignon began, "there's a problem with the elevator."

"Ed?" asked the voice.

"Yes, this is Ed. Who's this?" Bignon said.

"It's Jimmy Day," another of our announcers.

"Jimmy! Can you call the front desk and tell them I'm stuck in the elevator?"

To which Jimmy answered, "I thought this was the front desk. We were calling 'cause we're stuck in the other one!"

Unfortunately, our sales staff - an amorphous assortment of ephemeral employees with the CEO Elliott the one constant - stayed stuck in the elevator pretty much the whole year. As the on-air team spent the summer following the Tour week to week, we kept hearing of many and imminent blockbuster advertising contracts that only needed the Is dotted and Ts crossed. If you guessed none of them ever happened, you've obviously been paying attention. Not only couldn't we handle the Is and Ts, turns out we weren't very good with the rest of the alphabet either, with the possible exception of NSF, as in Not Sufficient Funds.

To say we were having a problem with cashflow only tells half the story: our cash was flowing out quite steadily; the company, in fact, was said to be spending upwards of $70,000 per week to take our live tournament broadcasts on the road. It was the in-flow that never happened. You don't exactly need Alan Greenspan to crunch those numbers. Any number of weeks times $70,000 probably isn't going to look too good in the books when you keep putting up goose eggs on the income side of the ledger.

Seventy large doesn't buy what it used to. We traveled as a pack of 15 or so. There were usually 6 of us announcers, a producer, a director, the ubiquitous Elliott, a handful of tech guys from Atlanta-based Crawford Communications (which didn't have much luck communicating when it came to actually getting paid for its services), and our Director of Tournament Operations, the guy we called The Mayor, Kevin Holloway, whose primary job was to make sure the necessary skids were sufficiently greased (like seeing to it that a parking lot attendant or two were handsomely tipped) at each venue. The Mayor's was no small task for a radio network few had yet heard or even heard of.

On the air, we were beginning to catch our stride. That'll happen when you broadcast 6 - count 'em, 6! - hours of live golf every Saturday and Sunday. I even managed to ratchet down my energy level down a couple of notches to "Monster Truck/Tractor Pull PA Announcer." There were occasional hiccups, like when lightning struck our truck at Westchester or the time I tossed it to on-course reporter Randy Brown, who had understandably little to say from his position inside a port-o-john. But we were fortunate to do Tiger's wins at the Nelson and the Western Open, Greg Norman's at Firestone (the last of his 20 Tour titles), and the first 3 victories of David Duval's career, which would see him rise to #1 in the world.

We were beginning to feel good about the product and get some positive feedback from the Tour and listeners as we headed into the 1998 season. We'd even managed to build a small but feisty group of stations which were finally catching on to what golf on radio could be.

And then, just 5 weeks into the new year, the bottom fell out. And suddenly, Brown wasn't the only one in the crapper.

Grant Boone is a husband, father, golf broadcaster, and sports journalist based in Abilene, Texas. His column appears on PGA.com each Wednesday and every day during major championships and other big events. He can be contacted at pgagrant@hotmail.com.

The views and opinions expressed here do not reflect those of PGA.com or The PGA of America.