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By: John Maginnes
PGATOUR.com contributor

We have heard them all. "Why don't you guys cover anyone but Tiger? Why do you do so many leaderboards? Can't we have more Tiger? More leaderboards, please." Even, "When are you going to merge with Sirius?"

We smile and do our best to be polite. Mark Carnavale and I are used to it. After all, we had 14-handicappers try to tell us what was wrong with our games in pro-ams for years. The other guys are used to it because they are veteran broadcasters in a business where a thick skin is more important than a good vocabulary. There have been ups and downs in the nearly two years that XM Satellite Radio and the PGA TOUR have been putting golf on the radio. But the end result has been that people have found us and have become addicted.

From Sgt. Townsend in Iraq to Peter Jacobsen (no, not that one), the appetite for golf in this day and age seems to be endless. It is impossible for one of our "rovers," that's an on-course commentator (most of the real roving takes place at night), to walk the fairways with one of the top players in the world without being stopped by a fan and hear, "Hey, I listen to you guys all the time. Which one are you?"

XM Radio's Mark Carnevale talks with Vijay Singh during the season-opening Mercedes-Benz Championship. (Badz/WireImage)

The host of our broadcast is generally Jay Randolph Jr. He sets the tone most weeks from a mobile broadcast studio. The tone is golf-serious in a light-hearted and fun atmosphere. If we are having fun then the listener will, too. With his big voice and the knowledge of the game that only a self-proclaimed golf geek can possess, Jay is the quarterback of our broadcast.

Mark Carnavale, the 1992 PGA TOUR rookie of the year is, most often, the analyst. Mark has a style that combines current statistics with his vast experience to give an insider's view of competition. Mark has a healthy respect for the players and their abilities while maintaining an element of fairness that is crucial to effectively call the action. TOUR players are their own worst critics. They rarely sugarcoat their mistakes. You will almost never hear Mark, or any of the other commentators on our broadcast, say anything about a player that the player wouldn't say about himself.

When we say that you want to get to the buffet before one of the men of girth on the TOUR, we mean it with all possible respect. After all, we are the buffet boys of the PGA TOUR

If Jay has the ball, Jeremy Davis is calling the plays. Jeremy is the producer of PGA TOUR Live, the six-hour, four-day-a-week broadcast of all PGA TOUR events. His job is to process all the input from the five voices you hear, as well as the chief engineer, "Dynamite" Dave Theiland. With Justin "B" Ware, our technical director, who records interviews and call packages, Jeremy is in constant, yet fluid motion.

Occasionally what you are hearing is something that was recorded just moments before. If Tiger and Phil played together on Saturday afternoon and they come out of the scoring tent at the same time, it is possible that I will be interviewing one of them while funnyman Michael Collins or veteran broadcaster Fred Albers is interviewing the other. One of those interviews will be live while the other is being recorded for use in a couple of minutes.

The challenge for the interviewer is that he hears not only the interview he is conducting but both sides of the other interview and the producer. While we are doing the show it seems like total chaos. However, when we go back and listen there is much to be proud of in the finished product.

There are certainly many others who make the broadcast possible like Janis Self, our onsite producer, whose contribution ranges from set-up to recording audio and making sure that we all show up, then keeping us in line once we get there. There are certain words that are not allowed in the broadcast tent. Usually a sentence will go something like, "that *#@# shot, sorry Janis, was brilliant." Of course, that is always in commercial.

If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be doing golf on the radio at the age of 38, I would have laughed in your face. Now, I look forward to it every day. The thing that makes the broadcast special is that we all get it. From the guys who work a handful of weeks like Atlanta-based broadcaster Brian Katrek and Birmingham's Doug Bell to Jay Randolph Jr., Mark Carnavale and I, who seemingly work every week, the pieces come together every week.

Golf has the most knowledgeable fans in sports. When we make a mistake we hear about it. We stopped doing trivia questions because they were so hard to stump. If we ask a question on the air about what a certain TOUR player from a bygone era is doing now we get an answer via e-mail almost instantly.

We are not perfect, but we get better every week. The biggest compliment that I heard last week was from a caddy who told me that he nearly ran out of gas on his way to the next tournament a couple of weeks ago because he was so caught up in our broadcast that he wasn't paying attention to the gauge. Then he asked me when we were going to merge with Sirius.