Tee time, any time, all the time.
As sweet a notion this is to legions of certified golf-a-holics craving a midnight fairway fix, in the pre-digital cable days of the mid-90s, just the idea of a 24/7 single-sport network (nevermind one solely dedicated to golf), was hard for people to get their heads around.
So when The Golf Channel first landed on the dial it was no hole in one. It was more like a shanked drive that careened into the unsuspecting windshield of a beemer in the parking lot.
GOLF was the first niche sports channel, the blueprint for SPEED, OLN, The NFL Network and all the others that would follow, so it didn’t have the benefit of a role model to emulate when it hit the air in 1995 and made a lofty rookie mistake in launching as a stand-alone pay service.
The fledgling network devoted to all things duffing, struggled to find an audience under a subscription model and lost $40 million in its first year. Clubhouse skeptics scoffed at the mere concept of a network dedicated to nothing but drives, putts, and chips especially since you could already watch 600 hours of tournament action year round on free existing channels.
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