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Yahoo
6 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Former Golf Channel analyst Dave Marr provides voice of Sunnehanna Amateur livestream
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – Dave Marr III stood amid a large television monitor, multiple laptops and other high-tech gadgets in a makeshift digital production room at Sunnehanna Country Club in Westmont. The respected former Golf Channel analyst watched as a group of eight young men and women maneuvered tripods and cameras, prepped a drone and reviewed the game plan for a livestream during the third round of the 84th Sunnehanna Amateur Tournament for Champions. Advertisement Marr smiled as the group buzzed around the room at a sometimes hectic pace Friday afternoon. The activity took him back to 1983 during another big golf tournament in western Pennsylvania. 'It's interesting to me because 42 years ago, I was working with ABC Sports at Oakmont for the U.S. Open,' said Marr, who will provide Championship Golf Network livestream, insight and commentary at Sunnehanna. 'They had three different mobile units, millions of dollars of technical equipment, different crews to do producing of the front nine and back nine, different broadcast teams. My dad was on the broadcast team and I was on the production team.' CGN will livestream portions of the final two rounds, adding another layer to the Sunnehanna Amateur's digital imprint. Advertisement The CGN team spent the past few days assembling a control room. The crew covered the course through two rounds, collecting player interviews, behind-the-scenes content and producing leaderboard graphics and recaps. 'We've got a group of golf-loving guys and gals coming together and doing what we did 42 years ago,' Marr said of the similarities between 1983 and 2025. 'It looks like it's out of the back of a van with unbelievably high-tech equipment. 'That is going to allow this – one of the most important amateur events in the game anywhere, not just this country – to be broadcasted and enjoyed by people all over the world,' Marr said. Advertisement Marr spent 17 years at the Golf Channel, filling roles such as tower announcer, interviewer and play-by-play host for the network's PGA Tour Champions coverage from 2000-17. He also hosted PGA Tour Champions Learning Center, a weekly 30-minute series. A native New Yorker who now resides in Florida, Marr is the son of the late Dave Marr, who won the 1965 PGA Championship at Laurel Valley Golf Club in Ligonier. Dave Marr III's father also was a respected broadcaster. 'My perspective on Sunnehanna has changed since I got here,' Marr said. 'I went to school at Bucknell University right here in central Pa., so I always knew what Sunnehanna was all about. 'My dad was pals with Jay Sigel,' Marr said of the former three-time Sunnehanna champion who died in April. 'Jay was always nice to me and always talked highly about Sunnehanna.' Advertisement This year's Sunnehanna Amateur is dedicated to Sigel's memory. 'Many of my friends who played amateur golf highly competitively, this event, the U.S. Amateur, the North and South, the Western, those are the tournaments they all wanted to win, all the time,' Marr said. 'My dad played professional golf from an early age so he never got a chance to play, but he always missed coming here.' The rolling hills and the layout of the historic Sunnehanna course impressed Marr. 'I knew it was a Tillinghast design, so I knew it was going to be a beautiful place,' Marr said of golf course architect A.W. Tillinghast. 'But are you kidding me? Up here on this hilltop, this mountaintop. It's such a beautiful location to have such a fantastic course and a great event. It all dovetails together and makes sense.' Advertisement His role on the livestream will have Marr looking both to the future and the past. 'I'm more of a historian,' Marr said. 'A lot of times, people focus in amateur golf on who's going to be on the PGA Tour in the future. If you look back just a decade ago, all four major championship winners from last year were in the (Sunnehanna Amateur) field a decade prior (in 2014). 'There are some great up-and-comers. 'The overall amateur game is focusing a little bit more toward college golf, the PGA U program, all of those things that are gearing those rare few to the tour, but there is a lot to be celebrated about amateur golf in general.' Advertisement Marr pointed to an interview PGA Tour winner Collin Morikawa did earlier this week on the eve of this year's U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club in Pittsburgh. The 2016 Sunnehanna Amateur champion, Morikawa reflected on his time in the Westmont tournament. 'Collin Morikawa just this week called it pure golf,' Marr said. 'To celebrate pure golf for all of those others in the field that are not going to play the PGA Tour or win major championships, I think it's an important thing for the overall strength and soul of the game. Sunnehanna is right in the middle of all of that.' Mike Mastovich is a sports reporter and columnist for The Tribune-Democrat. He can be reached at 814-532-5083. Follow him on Twitter @Masty81.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Prime Video adds two underrated 2024 movies that I love and you need to watch right now
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. To me, the best part of streaming are that great movies and TV shows that may not have made a splash upon their initial release for whatever reason can get a second chance to find an audience. This week I'm hoping we get two examples of that as two of the better movies I saw at the tail end of last year but weren't able to crack through against the likes of Gladiator 2, Wicked and more, land on Prime Video — September 5 and The Fire Inside. Both movies arrived on the streaming service on May 27 and both should be added to your watchlist real quick. September 5 was one of the best movies of 2024 that I saw, while The Fire Inside is a winning crowd-pleaser sports movie that goes deeper than others in the genre. Let's start with September 5, a journalism thriller that follows the ABC Sports broadcast crew of the 1972 Olympics that find themselves in the middle of the story of their lives when the Munich hostage situation takes place. Tim Fehlbaum directed and co-wrote the movie, which takes place almost entirely in the broadcast room of ABC Sports, using archival footage of the actual event to chronicle the story. The movie also features an outstanding ensemble that consists of John Magaro, Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin and breakout star Leonie Benesch. My September 5 review gave the movie five stars, as not only is it a gripping thriller (I was hooked to see how everything unfolded despite the fact that the event happened more than 50 years ago), but it immediately put itself with the best journalism movies of all time, All the President's Men and Spotlight. Other critics were of a similar mind, as September 5 is 'Certified Fresh' at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet audiences and awards bodies mostly ignored it. While I never would have expected September 5 to be a $100 million movie, a shifting release date that ultimately had it open limited on December 13, 2024, before releasing everywhere in the US on January 17, 2025, yielded disappointing results (just $2.5 million in the US). Major awards bodies didn't recognize it either, with the Golden Globes only giving it one nomination (even though it was for Best Picture) and the Oscars following suit (nominating it for Best Original Screenplay). The German Film Awards gave the movie its proper due, handing it nine of the 10 awards it was nominated for, including Outstanding Feature Film. At just over 90 minutes and an almost non-stop, tense thriller, September 5 can hopefully find its audience at last on Prime Video. Moving on to The Fire Inside, directed by Rachel Morrison, this is another based-on-a-true-story movie, this time about Claressa Shields, a young boxer from Flint, Mich., who became the first American woman to win a gold medal at the Olympics for boxing. Her incredible athletic accomplishment is just one part of the movie though, as it also touches on the reality that Olympic glory does not always bring the benefits you might expect. That extra bit of depth to the story (courtesy of a script from Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins), along with the chemistry between stars Ryan Destiny and Bryan Tyree Henry, are the secret sauce to this movie, which I gave four stars in my The Fire Inside review. Unfortunately again, The Fire Inside failed to register at the box office (just over $8 million) and felt like it was quickly forgotten. We need to remedy that for both The Fire Inside and September 5. I highly recommend you give these movies a chance now that they are available to stream on Prime Video.
Fox News
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Ex-ESPN star shares stance on transgender athletes in girls' and women's sports
Former ESPN star Jeannine Edwards made her stance on transgender athletes competing in girls' and women's sports clear in an interview on Tuesday. Edwards appeared on OutKick's "Don't @ Me with Dan Dakich" and said she couldn't believe there was a debate about the issue in sports. "I cannot believe that we have even gotten to this point," Edwards said. "I mean 50 years of Title IX and all those decades of working up to that and getting to that point where women could have equal access, equal opportunity, equal benefits, but they need to be in their own niche. Because let's face it, men have 60% more muscle mass, they've got a heck of a lot more bone density and bone mass, larger lung capacity, larger oxygen consumption capacity. It doesn't matter whether you are taking hormones or not. "It doesn't matter whether you say you identify as a female, I'm sorry your physiology of your body as a man is much different than that of the body of a woman. So, to me, this a no-brainer and I don't understand why some people on the left think that is a cause that is going to be a winner for them just as I don't believe that this immigration issue and deporting these criminal aliens, I don't think that's a winning issue for them either." The New Jersey native was an ESPN and ABC Sports broadcaster from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s. A New York Times/Ipsos Survey released in January showed that the vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, don't think transgender athletes should be permitted to compete in women's sports. Of the 2,128 people polled, 79% said biological males who identify as women should not be allowed to participate in women's sports. Of the 1,025 people who identified as Democrats or leaning Democratic, 67% said transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete with women. Among 1,022 Republicans, that number was 94%. Follow Fox News Digital's sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
When Terrorism First Went Live: The Munich Olympics That Changed Broadcasting Forever
The boom of social media over the past two decades has democratized journalism to the point wherein a profession once lofted and lauded and dominated by individuals fearlessly committed to the dogged pursuit of truth has devolved into a faux subspecialty of online influencers who go from hocking lip gloss to declaring themselves experts on hot button subjects ranging from Middle East geopolitics to epidemiology. All within the span of a millisecond. Today, everything has become fair game for public consumption. But in 1972, Roone Arledge, then-president of ABC Sports, was left to contend with a conundrum never before experienced: should real-time footage of the 1972 Munich massacre, in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team, be made available to viewers global-wide?September 5, writer-director Tim Fehlbaum's Oscar-nominated historical drama, functions as a chronicle of this tragedy as seen through the perspective of the ABC Sports network broadcasting team, with Peter Sarsgaard as Arledge, John Magaro as Emmy Award-winning production executive Geoffrey Mason and Ben Chaplin as legendary sportscaster Marvin Bader. But the film is also a throwback to a bygone era in journalism in which career reporters contended with newsroom ethics while covering the latest breaking news.'It was the first time the Olympics were broadcast live globally,' says John Ira Palmer, who produced September 5 alongside partners Sean Penn and John Wildermuth, with whom Palmer formed Projected Picture Works in 2021. 'We had almost a billion people over the course of the Olympics watching these things unfold. What happened that day in Munich from that ABC Sports team forever changed the way that news is told.' Palmer, a film instructor at USC School of Cinematic Arts and AFI Conservatory and whose previous credits include Penn's 2021 film Flag Day and Asphalt City, has always been interested in society's consumption of media.'We're now in this new moment, with AI and social media — and I think our ethics haven't really caught up with our technology,' says Palmer. 'The larger existential quandaries remain when you walk out of the newsroom: we're doing our job, we're telling the truth and reporting on things that happened to the broad population as quickly and as accurately as possible. But is that the right thing to do? It's something journalists still have to grapple with every day.' Fehlbaum, the Switzerland-born director and co-writer of the horror-cum-sci-fi flicks Hell and The Colony, structured September 5 around the perspective of the ABC Sports news crew following a 'research conversation' with Mason.'As a 28-year-old at the time, [Mason] experienced firsthand in the TV control room how the team transitioned from sports reporting to crisis coverage,' says Fehlbaum. 'His vivid recollections of that intense 22-hour marathon of live reporting were so compelling that we decided to tell the story entirely from his perspective. The subject of media influence on global political events felt especially pertinent, particularly in today's context.'Sparse in violent imagery, September 5 — filmed over a 32-day period in Munich for less than $10 million — is a testament to how powerful cinema can be when it's about what's not on screen even more so than what is. The Paramount Pictures movie hits theaters widely Jan. 17.'Watching a film away from any social media discourse, I hope we can have good conversations,' says Palmer, 'and, hopefully, become better as a society — together.'
The Independent
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Oscar-nominated Munich Olympics drama September 5 is the wrong film for the moment
When it comes to art, the word 'apolitical' serves largely as a kind of grand delusion. You can't simply shake the meaning and implication out of words and images like they're a dusty, old carpet; and neither can people simply switch off morality and emotion, conscious or subconscious, like a button on a machine. Such concepts have a hollowing effect on September 5 (pronounced 'September Five'), Tim Fehlbaum's film about the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, during which eight gunmen from the Palestinian militia Black September killed two members of the Israeli team, taking a further nine members hostage. In a failed rescue attempt, all nine athletes were killed, alongside five of the eight Black September members and a West German police officer. It's a moment that's been channelled into worthwhile cinema before: its aftermath was famously covered by Steven Spielberg's Munich (2005), whose script, penned by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner, showed far more interest in engaging with the moral and emotional underpinnings of Israeli and Palestinian violence. September 5 takes a comparatively oblique approach, focusing on ABC Sports's live TV coverage of the event. It indulges the notion that all that really matters is the telling of stories, at any risk or any cost – and, in doing so, takes a stance of wilful ignorance when it comes to both historical context and journalistic ethics. Its final beat, and declaration of concrete achievement, occurs when ABC Sports president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) informs us that more people watched their coverage than the moment Neil Armstrong stepped out on the moon. Instead of politics, we're served borderline fetishistic images of chain-smoking men in shirts and ties – plus a woman, fictional German translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) – deeply engaged in the work of problem solving. It's almost entirely set within the studio, dimly and evocatively lit by cinematographer Markus Förderer to look like a mad scientist's laboratory of ideas. Every inch of the screen is packed with rotary dial phones, bulky cameras, thick cables, sweaty brows, and rolled-up sleeves. It's about journalism as hard, rugged work, captured in bracing close-ups. Actors deliver each line with a certain practised bravado, brows furrowed and hands on hips. Its Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay seems based largely on its ability to deliver neat, little quips ('These cops have no idea what they're doing'; 'No wonder they lost the war'). From the very moment the ABC crew first hear gunshots, Fehlbaum's film becomes a single, steady drip feed of adrenaline. Could one of those heavy-duty television cameras be wheeled outside and up into the view of the Israeli team's hotel room? Could one of the news crew (Daniel Adeosun) be dressed up as a US athlete, with a forged ID and film canisters taped to his body, in order to sneak past the cordon? If the German media announce a development, do they really need a second confirmation? At the forefront of these decisions is Geoffrey Mason, head of the Munich control room. He's played by First Cow 's John Magaro, an actor with a fierce, natural intelligence to him, who can express to the audience directly that his actions have a weight to them, and will breed their own consequences. Yet, Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David's script treats all context, about the history of Israel and Palestine or the political tension already hanging over the 1972 Games, as background noise. There's a line here or there about how West Germany's lack of security at the event was shaped by its desire to create distance between the present and the country's Nazi past. There's a moment when a French-Algerian member of the team (Zinedine Soualem) takes a stand against an anti-Arab comment. The team's only expert in the Middle East, Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), is ushered off screen with a single warning: 'We have to be very sensitive about what we say.' In any context, it betrays a lack of curiosity. But watched now, at the very same time as hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians return to their homes in Gaza, often to find them reduced to rubble, while so much of the media world turns away from them – well, it's jarring. The idea that it serves a film like September 5 to tell its story through an apolitical lens isn't just wrong: it's laughable.
