How IT Supports the Big Business of Sports
On the road with the IT team that gathers, processes and disseminates the facts and figures for giant events such as the U.S. Open and PGA Championship.
CIO — Before 22,000 silent fans in Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, N.Y., the shrill sounds of two women grunting and screaming, their sneakers screeching on the green hard-court surface, fill the evening air. It's a warm September evening in 1999, and the two women rallying in the quarterfinal match for the U.S. Open championship, Monica Seles and Serena Williams, are two of the fiercest—and certainly the loudest&3151;warriors in the women's draw.
The little yellow ball speeds back and forth over the net; the crowd's heads move in rhythmic, side-to-side unison. Williams eventually passes Seles with a grunt and a powerful backhand winner. And almost before anyone in the stands can blink, every detail about the last 11 seconds—the speed of the serve, the length of the rally, the winning stroke, the new score—is captured by courtside USTA officials. From there, the data travels from the head referee's souped-up ThinkPad to points known—the huge scoreboard atop Arthur Ashe stadium, a server farm in Illinois, www.usopen.org—and unknown—whoever is logging in at home or the office.
The technology to do all this comes courtesy of IBM's e-Business Services group, a traveling band of techies and sports enthusiasts who broadcast numbers, pictures and other assorted sporting data to the web world from events such as the Open, the Olympics, the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup matches. This technology for aggregating, processing and disseminating scores and other real-time sports data is also available to the oil corporation looking to synchronize and share information from oil rigs around the globe, the law firm setting up a remote office in Mexico City or Timbuktu, and the government agency providing temporary onsite disaster relief in the floodplains of Arkansas. The content may change, but the difference between processing information at a major sporting event and your company's next remote IT initiative is simply a matter of scale.
These large athletic events serve as a laboratory for testing and refining the leading-edge products of the Information Age—and a great way for fans who can't afford the price of admission to get up close and personal with the likes of Anna Kournikova and Tiger Woods.
PGA at Medinah: Teeing Off
On the par 4, 415-yard third hole at tree-lined Medinah Country Club, just outside the melting asphalt streets of Chicago, Davis Love III taps his ball in the cup for a good par. Although it's just the first round of last August's PGA Championship, the '97 winner seems relieved with his score on what is a relatively easy hole for the pros. A serious-looking man holding a clipboard and trailing the group jots down Love's score, the number of putts, driving distance (and more stats) on a 3-by-5 index card, as well as the scores of his two playing partners. As the threesome leaves the green, he hands the card to a volunteer sitting on a folding chair behind the putting surface. The volunteer, an older woman—one of hundreds of suburban Chicago locals and Medinah club members who donate their time and energy to help the PGA Championship run smoothly—enters Love's par and other data (using his unique ID number) into a handheld device. Love's four flies through the air via a wireless LAN connection into a nondescript trailer in the media parking lot—the IDS (Information and Display Systems) scoring trailer. IDS is a Jacksonville, Fla.-based company that records the scoring data for the results system on www.pga.com. It is the conduit for every person, organization and network connection looking for up-to-the-second scores, including the site team and PGA.com. That par score gets confirmed for accuracy by IDS staffers and is simultaneously sent to the scoreboards on the course and the ThinkPad 770s running just a chip shot away in the IBM trailer. Then, things really start to happen.
