The idea, on the difficult No. 2 and No. 11 greens at the famed St. Andrews site, will be for onscreen graphics to project ideal lines for upcoming putts — then match those side-by-side with graphic showing the lines of actual putts that follow.

ESPN won't rely on caddies to project how greens should be played. It did laser scans of greens' undulations, says Anthony Bailey, ESPN vice president for emerging technology, "kind of like road crews do for surveying."

That data, he says, was then put into "a physics model in software" to create onscreen visions of perfect putts from anywhere on the greens.

The graphics could be particularly useful this week: Tiger Woods, for the first time in 11 years, will use a new putter in trying a new Nike model.

ESPN's British Open will be the first only on cable TV, meaning it won't be accessible to more than 10 million TV households. But not to worry, suggests ESPN executive vice president John Wildhack: "The delineating between broadcast (TV) and cable is over. If you asked anyone under 40 the difference … you'd get a quizzical look." (Hey, go try that at home.)

ESPN this week expanded Thursday and Friday coverage to begin at 4 a.m. ET, starting an hour earlier than planned in order to try to catch all of Woods' play. And, in a long overdue move, ESPN will try to be less reliant on the Open's 55-camera world TV feed. This week, it will also use 35 cameras of its own — up from 18 on last year's Open on ABC, when the world TV feed coverage was spotty — and just 10 in 2005 when the Open was last held at St. Andrews. Says ESPN vice president Mike McQuade: "We'll be able to separate ourselves from the (world television feed) for the first time."

And ESPN will try to mitigate the Old Course Hotel along the 17th fairway, which blocks golfers' views of their tee shots. After cameras behind golfers show tee shots, says ESPN's Bailey, a camera atop that hotel will pick up shots in flight to, effectively, create continuous shots — "optically, it looks like we removed the hotel."