If you spend any time at all around golf\u2019s crop of TV analysts, you realize something unusual: By the letter of the law, almost none of them are qualified.<\/p>\n
The reason for this is not broadcast training or golf skill, but something much simpler. In the history of golf television, there have been only a handful of so-called \u201cLead Analysts\u201d \u2014 the talking heads atop each network\u2019s broadcast \u2014 and all but one of them have been major championship winners.<\/p>\n
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On Wednesday morning, that group added a surprise new voice to the mix: Jim Furyk, who will call two PGA Tour events on the Florida swing \u2014 the Arnold Palmer Invitational and Players Championship \u2014 in the lead analyst chair for Golf Channel.<\/p>\n
The 55-year-old U.S. Open winner and former Ryder Cup captain is no stranger to life inside the ropes. Over the past several years, he\u2019s been a fixture on the PGA Tour Champions, winning the Tour\u2019s rookie of the year award in 2021 and hosting an annual Champions Tour event through his charity, Furyk and Friends. His TV and radio history is less thorough, though he has been no stranger to media scrums in his three decades and 17 victories on the PGA Tour \u2014 and has served as a frequent guest on SiriusXM throughout the years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s probably on a trial basis, see how much I like it, get a feel for it,\u201d Furyk told the Associated Press\u2019 Doug Ferguson<\/a>. \u201cWith any new endeavor, it\u2019s a learning process. There\u2019s a feel and flow for how the show is done. I\u2019m focused on doing the best job for two weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n The 17-time PGA Tour winner may not have a preponderance of TV experience, but he does have a deep well of professional experience to lean on. He has competed as a pro for more than three decades, and enters the Players Championship with five top-5 finishes in the event, including two runner-up finishes, most recently as an out-of-nowhere 48-year-old in 2019<\/a>. Furyk never won the Arnold Palmer Invitational<\/a>, but he was just the third pro ever (following Palmer and Bruce Fleisher) to win his first two starts on the Champions Tour.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n It\u2019s early to forecast exactly what the tryout period means for Furyk\u2019s TV future (in large part because he does not currently have a TV past to speak of), but he enters the job with something every fellow golf analyst craves: his 2003 victory at the U.S. Open at Olympia Fields. While Furyk might ultimately choose not to pursue a pathway to a lead analyst role with any of golf\u2019s major networks, the major championship pedigree provides him with a potential pathway to a lead analyst chair that, until NBC\u2019s Kevin Kisner,<\/a> had only ever been occupied by major championship winners.<\/p>\n Ironically, Kisner\u2019s path to the lead chair<\/a> at NBC could provide clues for Furyk as he tries to navigate the journey forward. Kisner was a full-time PGA Tour player when he first stepped into NBC\u2019s \u201ctryout\u201d to replace Paul Azinger in the lead analyst chair, then spent a year flirting with the job on a part-time basis before being named Azinger\u2019s permanent replacement at the end of 2024.<\/p>\n Kisner was a cool customer from the beginning at NBC, but he proved it was possible to grow on the job en route to something bigger. For now, that\u2019s not on Furyk\u2019s radar \u2014 but by the end of March, he could be singing a very different tune.<\/p>\n The post Golf Channel hires surprise new lead analyst for PGA Tour coverage<\/a> appeared first on Golf<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you spend any time at all around golf\u2019s crop of TV analysts, you realize something unusual: By…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[14761,226030,46707,226031,427,50741,74427,3332,99],"class_list":["post-493463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-analyst","tag-arnold-palmer-invitational","tag-champions-tour","tag-championship-winners","tag-golf","tag-golf-channel","tag-jim-furyk","tag-pga-tour","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/493464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}