PONTE VEDRA BEACH - The pine- and palm-tree-shaded headquarters of the PGA Tour, nestled on more than 400 acres that include two golf courses, has recently taken on the buzz of a NASA launch pad. Talk of putts, pars and tee shots has turned to gigabytes, gigahertz and light-emitting diodes.

Early next month, the PGA Tour will unveil its high-tech scoreboards, which are designed to be placed strategically on courses where Tour tournaments are played. The screens are high-resolution, LED panels, similar in many ways to the giant video screens that are popular fixtures in most modern sports arenas. These boards - 7 feet 7 inches high by 20 feet 2 inches long - are smaller than stadium scoreboards. But they are also mobile, receive information wirelessly and engineered so as not to produce glare.

Steve Evans, senior vice president for information systems for the PGA Tour, said the new, full-color scoreboards would replace the electromechanical scoreboards the Tour has been using for the past 20 years. They will also replace more primitive boards using information posted by hand.

All 22 of the new scoreboards are expected to be in use during The Players Championship. Eventually, Evans said, 11 scoreboards will be used at Tour events while the other 11 will either be on their way to or being installed at the next course where a Tour event is played.

The scoreboards are scheduled to be phased in, Evans said, a few at a time throughout the summer as transport crews are trained. The World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational in Akron, Ohio, which is scheduled for the week beginning July 30, is expected to be the first tournament in which the Tour uses what will be the typical setup of 11 scoreboards.

The new scoreboards are 75 percent larger. The electromechanical boards were capable of showing only limited information and rudimentary graphics in one color, a sort of bright yellow.

The capabilities of the new screens, which are custom made by Mitsubishi Electric, are much closer to television in terms of text, graphics and video, he said.

A demonstration of one of the screens showed 15-second introductory clips of players, flashed photographs of the players and spun their statistics across a screen that was bright and clear in spite of the bright Florida sunshine. The screens are positioned on a pedestal that can lift the scoreboards six feet. In another instance, the screen displayed a computer animation of giant puzzle pieces that encouraged viewers to guess the player as the pieces of a player's face began to assemble.

"The more we can engage the fan and make him comfortable that we're going to provide relevant information and also entertaining information, the better job we're doing for that fan," Evans said of the new scoreboards. "We're really focused on the best experience we can give the fan given the environment that we're in."

Golf fans have struggled with trade-offs. Attending a tournament is unmatched in its visceral appeal but offers no single vantage point from which to watch and appreciate the game unfolding. Watching tournaments on television offers fans a richer overview, with statistics and commentary.

"If you're sitting at a particular golf hole, you know everything that is happening at that hole, but you don't know very much about what's happening somewhere else," Evans said. "So the real opportunity here is to bring that information to you."

In a sport steeped in traditions, golf has long celebrated a sense of understatement in contrast to the splashy style of the National Football League and NASCAR, which have been famously quick to embrace new technologies. NFL telecasts use computer-generated first-down lines and NASCAR broadcasts include remote cameras in racecars.

But the PGA Tour has, for the past six or so years, been quietly introducing computer technologies to professional golf as part of a multimillion-dollar investment. The scoreboards, which cost more than $200,000 apiece, are among the most visible applications of new technologies, said Tom Wade, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for the PGA Tour.

"Technology is moving down the road and we're moving with it," he said. "If you don't move with it, you not going to be around. You've got to serve the fan."

Call it the Tiger Effect, the significant migration of a younger and more racially and ethnically diverse group to golf since Tiger Woods turned professional in 1996. Although much of the PGA Tour's fan base remains mature and affluent, Wade said, significant numbers in that group are "heavy technology adaptors."

The fact that the scoreboards, which weigh about a ton, had to be mobile presented a number of engineering challenges, said Mark Foster, general manager of Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision Systems.

The Diamond Vision LED scoreboards had to be engineered to be free-standing, requiring their own cooling systems and power source. Each scoreboard will run on electricity provided by a portable generator. Each has its own computer and hard drive, which allow it to display information while receiving updates by way of a sophisticated wireless network.

What the scoreboards display will largely be beamed to them by a high-tech system called ShotLink, a computerized data-gathering system, which was recently upgraded.

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