ST. LOUIS -- Imagine life as a zoo animal.
Folks buy tickets, line up at the glass and watch every scratch and itch, every unwitting movement, all the grunts and groans.
Life in a fishbowl pretty closely describes the working conditions for media this week at the BMW Championship, where the PGA Tour alarmingly signed off on a plan in which fans who bought tickets to the tournament can watch the press interview players from behind the anonymity of one-way mirrors.
Here's the sneakiest and most unethical part -- tour stars and media were not informed that fans were being directed to the area while the interview sessions were being conducted in advance of the tournament, which begins Thursday.
Consider this before making a snap decision: Would you want spectators lining up at your office to watch you toil through one-way mirrors, especially if you didn't know they were there, or if you hadn’t given advanced consent?
That's exactly the scenario at Bellerive Country Club, where the tour caved to the deep-pocketed title sponsor's wish to let fans get closer to the players by selling out the media on hand to cover the event.
Tour officials said the plan was the brainchild of BMW, which wanted to add a new wrinkle to the second-year tournament. It’s unclear how many fans trekked to the area during the interview sessions conducted Wednesday with players such as Padraig Harrington and Steve Stricker, but there's certainly plenty of room.
In fact, outrageously, it's being treated as a spectator event in itself. Behind 50 feet of one-way glass are three rows of tiered bleacher seats, totaling 57 ballpark-style chairs in all. The room is wired for sound. Thus, fans can see and hear the players and reporters in their exchanges, but not vice-versa.
"We did not expect everyone to embrace the concept right away, nor do we expect this to be a regular feature at upcoming events, but we concluded it was a good idea to move ahead and try it," tour vice-president Ty Votaw wrote in an email to CBSSports.com.
A good idea, huh? In fact, it's indefensible.
Visually, it looks like the death-row gallery where members of the public watch executions, with the exception that in the case of jailhouses, the condemned knows the people are there. And there's no curtain to pull back.
Had reporters not noticed signs around the clubhouse reading, "Fan access to interview room," none of the working press would have known they were being watched by spectators.
As though the invasion of privacy wasn't bad enough, it's merely the latest media intrusion on behalf of the tour, which keeps annoying what's left of its beat reporters in an era when golf has become an increasingly irrelevant sport for papers to cover. Earlier this year, the tour website began posting verbatim transcripts of interviews with players, turning a service provided for reporters into another revenue stream.
The tour takes the transcripts, which feature the questions and answers from writers and top players, and surrounds them with advertising, turning someone else's work into profit and beating the writers to the punch on the news value before newspapers ever go to bed.
A female transcriptionist worked while seated and facing the one-way glass in the interview room all afternoon while wearing a short skirt, never aware that members of the public were potentially watching her every move.
Unless your name is Sharon Stone, that's hardly an ideal work scenario.