Pebble Beach National Pro-Am shows its age as PGA Tour seeks younger fans

The PGA Tour last week debuted its digital Skratch TV network (Golf. But Louder.) to woo young sports fans turned off by the sluggishness of the game to the non-stop fun and excitement that Rickie Fowler brings to the new golf.

Two days later came the start of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, the slow-drip water torture that represents all that is wrong with golf played by captains of industry and Hollywood wannabes and has-beens -- a snail-like pace, elitism, smugness, and boredom.

Coincidence? Maybe, but the comparison between the two entities could not have been more stunning.

With the newest offering, there’s an effort to get the flat-billed set jazzed up about consuming golf in bite-sized snippets. The other -- especially after the sartorially splendid John Daly, and the circus atmosphere he engenders, faded into oblivion after a stellar first round -- was a tired act of who-dat “celebrities” mugging for the cameras wrapped around an actual golf tournament.

“We’ve had a healthy anxiety that we weren’t going to reach this generation with our traditional platforms,” Rick Anderson, the tour’s executive global media VP, told the New York Times after announcing its Skratch concept.

If there’s a pulse at Ponte Vedra HQ, that “healthy anxiety” became all-out alarm Sunday. The hours of Jim Cantore, er, Nantz, weather updates and skull-imploding analyses of sandbagging personalities’ swings from one of golf’s most perfectly carpeted layouts droned on until it was, mercifully, time to switch to the red carpet for SNL’s 40th anniversary bash.

Kudos, by the way, to Brandt Snedeker for cruising to his seventh tour win and second Pebble victory while enduring endless waits on Sunday’s tees as the Chris Bermans of the corporate, entertainment, and non-golf sporting worlds showcased their country club skills. Which, as veteran viewers of the former Bing Crosby Clambake are painfully aware, slows the always tedious pace of the Pebble proceedings down to an inevitable crawl.

Pebble and two sister tracks on the Monterey Peninsula have hosted the nearly 80-year-old event since 1947, and the contest’s showing its age.

“The Clambake has deteriorated into a glorified corporate outing with a few entertainers mixed in,” Golfweek’s Martin Kaufman wrote Sunday about what has become “a white-hot mess of utter unwatchableness.”

Even Bill Murray, a member of the old guard and one of the wrinkled faces of the tourney, seemed listless as he wandered the grounds, shanking shots and amusing spectators.

Maybe the 2011 pro-am champ was distracted by wondering how he would make it from Pebble to 30 Rock in time for SNL40. But he did (private jets are wonderful things) and his “Love Theme from Jaws” as Nick the Lounge Singer from his Saturday Night Live days was the highlight of a show that overstayed its welcome early into its 3.5-hour time slot.

As Kaufman pointed out, the myriad “entrenched interests” -- the tour, CBS, sponsors -- are too invested in the Pro-Am as it is to make any changes that might bring it up to date. Of course, even new faces, more actual golf, a moratorium on smirking about unprecedented spectacular conditions while those less fortunate suffer through an unprecedented nuclear winter, and less -- way less -- Chris Berman may not be enough to engage 20-somethings or retain older viewers.

But if the tour brainiacs believe that more Larry the Cable Guy (“scripted” in uncovered-old-man-arm-fat camo, unacceptable attire anywhere, anyplace) is to Pebble what More Cowbells was to SNL, they better go back to the drawing board and Skratch out something else.