Photo: Mary Kouw/CBS/Getty Images
Even among legendary sports announcers, few become synonymous with the sport they cover. But after more than 40 years in the business, Jim Nantz is the undisputed voice of golf, and particularly the Masters — its premier event. For tens of millions of Americans, he’s also woven into the audio fabric of NFL and college basketball broadcasts. Nantz’s buttery-smooth tone and easy delivery bring to mind Steve Jobs’s line about how it takes a lot of work to make something simple: His style is the product of a childhood spent studying broadcast legends, and throughout his career he has read hundreds of pages of research every day.
Calling sports was his childhood dream, and he reached the profession’s summit at a preposterously young age. At 26, Nantz was hosting college football, and before long, he was covering nearly every other sport as well. He went on to host The NFL Today, the Winter Olympics, 40 Masters Tournaments, seven Super Bowls, and 32 NCAA national championship basketball games.
Nantz was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and moved around often, but he came of age in New Jersey before settling in Houston. He is unabashedly sincere and sentimental, characteristics that could come across as anachronistic. Focusing on those qualities, though, overlooks his full range of skills: Witness (or relive) these two NFL calls of his from last season that are pitch perfect yet captivatingly raw.
Nantz is not one for lassitude. He spoke last week from his home in Nashville and a few days later during a drive to New York, amid a full schedule of meetings, projects, and production planning for the PGA Championship, a tournament he’ll be hosting this week.
In conversation, Nantz talks much the way viewers have come to expect; not in brief comments or even in paragraphs but in thematic monologues, often with a nod to history and a thoughtfully placed flourish.
You’ve been at this for decades. Your job is obviously demanding: There’s a lot of preparation, a lot of travel, and the adrenaline of live television, but you’ve said that you feel young. How does that work?
I just think all the adrenaline that’s running through me somehow has sparked some sort of age-resistant reaction inside my body, and most everyone that’s full time in my world says the same thing. People ask, “When are you going to slow down? How do you have so much energy?” I don’t know any other way. I just pack and go on to the next one, whatever that might be. And in the afternoons, I get in the car and drive down to my kids’ school and sit in the car line waiting for the real sweet spot of my day. You’ve got to understand, I have two small children. That’s another thing that really delivers the fountain of youth.
My mind is always working. It’s always thinking of ideas for stories and ways to capture a moment, whatever the season might be. In football, for example, I’m a voracious reader. I go through at least a 200-page clip file every day that’s sent to me by CBS research, so I know what’s being written in every market for the 32 NFL teams. And that’s just a daily ritual: Brush my teeth, read my books, look ahead, file it away in my brain. I never know when I’m going to be able to use it at some point. It might be the following weekend, it might be five years from now, but these stories on virtually any athlete stay compartmentalized in my head, and I can dial them up when the time is right.
My memory has been such a blessing in my life. Particularly in golf, I don’t really work with notes. I call it from my heart and my head; I feel. People like to say that I have a photographic memory. I don’t think I do. The sad paradox is that my dad was a victim of Alzheimer’s disease. His 13-year journey through that dark world in many ways changed the way I looked at my world and at life. I wanted to dedicate myself to be part of a team that would one day bring positivity to that otherwise dreary world of Alzheimer’s research. I created and opened with the Houston Methodist Hospital the Nantz National Alzheimer Center, named in honor of my dad, and it truly has been life-changing for me.
As a boy, you’d record the audio of football broadcasts on Sundays and listen to them throughout the following week. Was that just a matter of practicing and learning, or was there something deeper that you got out of hearing these voices and the narratives of the game?
I think it was the latter. I was enraptured by the voices and the storytelling, not thinking that this might be a career pursuit, but I just loved living in that bubble where I could hear the sounds of an event taking place. By the way, I also recorded all the golf tournaments.
I listened to these broadcasters and their voices, their timbres and their inflections, and I could close my eyes and feel like I was in that arena. We also didn’t have seven-day-a-week sports coverage. There was no ESPN. There weren’t even DVRs, much less VCRs, so I had to be enterprising about it. I would fill up tiny cassette tapes and play them over and over again because I had nothing else to listen to. It was the way I fell asleep every night, with an earplug plugged into the side of my little tape deck, listening to an NFL game, a college football game, a golf tournament, whatever the season might be. I felt like I was inside the stadium and I was being educated.
Little did I know it was actually serving me quite well. People listen to meditation, et cetera, but I was actually listening to people that, as time went on, I wanted to be like. I had all these years of hearing their deliveries and understanding the importance of a voice and the way the voice is used. I had no intent on that being a training ground for me, but it proved to be.
How does sports fit into the life of a sportscaster when you’re not technically working?
I love watching as a fan. Late last night, the Warriors were playing the T-Wolves in the Western Conference semifinal series. Now, I don’t cover the NBA. I did early in my career. But it was good entertainment. I recorded the game. And this morning before school, when I had a few extra minutes, I fast-forwarded the game to the end and watched it with my son.
I do watch the sports that I’m aligned with very closely. It’s just golf and the NFL now, but these are required viewing for me. I need to watch them. The word work — I can’t really understand that. I don’t feel like I’m working. I feel like I’m doing something I’m passionate about, something that’s been my passion since I was a little boy.
One job you mentioned in your book is something you did starting out at the University of Houston. You would cover Astros games for the radio by resetting the game after every single pitch, to get the perfect audio snippet from the decisive play of the game, so it could run in a CBS Sports highlights package. It’s exhausting to think about.
That was a bit of a hustle, too, because I never wanted my parents to feel the strain of having to put me through college. So I was not only on the golf team for the first part of my college experience but I worked all sorts of odd jobs. I would sit at an Astros game. You never knew when the winning pitch was going to be thrown or the winning hit would take place. So I would reset a situation: “Reds lead it, 4-3. Bases are loaded. Two outs, bottom of the ninth, Enos Cabell at the plate. Oh, it’s a base hit up the middle! Around comes Terry Puhl! Puhl is going to score! Here comes Cedeño! And Cedeño slides … He’s safe! Astros win it!” [Imitates other voice] “That’s Jim Nantz on our affiliate, KTRH radio, down in Houston.”
I might have had 100 setup calls. But that clip right there was worth $37 and 50 cents. That was big money. The interesting thing about the way it was put in the books and itemized at CBS when they would have to pay for those cuts is that Win Elliott — a broadcast legend that, I think, never got enough credit — could take that call and bust up that tape into different parts. So it might be, this is my play of Win here, “Well, there was a great game going on last night down in Houston, and it came down to the very last at-bat, and Jim Nantz was there.” [Nantz voice] “Bases are loaded. Two outs. Bottom of the ninth. Enos Cabell at the plate. [Back to Win Elliott voice] “Uh-huh. Okay, Jim. And then what happened?” “It’s a base hit up the middle! Around comes Terry Puhl!” “All right, so the game is tied. What else?” “Here comes Cedeño! And Cedeño slides.” “And is he safe or out?” “He’s safe! Astros win it!” That one cut that you would normally get $37.50 for, he cut it into four parts, so I’d make 150 bucks for that call.
It was appreciated by a young enterprising broadcaster who was aggressive and trying to learn the ropes. And I have to say it was a kick being on national radio when I was 20 years old.
You’re doing the PGA Championship this week. What I find interesting about the presentation of golf on TV is that the aesthetics haven’t changed much from generation to generation, even as, say, the Barstool Sports crowd and nontraditional golf fans have increasingly come into the game. What is it about golf’s aesthetics that you think resonate so much?
I think what you’re saying here is that the presentation of golf has always remained kind of traditional.
Yeah. It just hasn’t bent to the times the way the presentation of other sports has.
I think there’s been a lot of innovation in technology. If you look at broadcasts from early in my career — and this is my 40th year — they look vastly different. You think of shot tracers, you think of drone coverage. These high-speed cameras that can walk with Rory McIlroy after he wins in a playoff and follow him for seven minutes, and it’s almost like an action-movie shot.
In a lot of ways, golf has introduced these technologies. So I think it has changed. Now, some of the basic tenets of the sport — the quietness of it, the silence over the stroke — that’s always been there. I don’t think people want to watch golf with wall-to-wall commentary. Tennis is like that too; it has never really changed. Tennis is actually more spare than golf. I did it for nine years. A point is played, your analyst jumps in as they’re looking back at the point or about how important this next moment is. And my role is basically, “40-30.”
So you don’t talk over a point in tennis, and you don’t talk over a swing in golf. This was explained to me early on by a true golf visionary, Frank Chirkinian, who basically invented golf on TV. He was CBS’s golf producer and director for 40 years. He told every one of his announcers on their first day, “Don’t ever talk over one of my golf shots, ever — or I’ll come out and throw you out out of the tower!”
I was wondering if you subscribe to George Plimpton’s small-ball theory of sports coverage.
The smaller the ball, the more creative. I feel the same way. I had 37 years of being around college basketball and the NCAA tournament and 32 years calling the NCAA Final Four and championship games. But those are fast-moving sports. There’s a shot, there’s a rebound, and then they’re running down the floor and the only place you can insert a story is during a dead ball. There’s not a lot of space to be lyrical and poetic.
With golf, when you get to the end, you have sometimes ten- or 15-minute stretches walking a player up the 72nd hole to express yourself. I think it’s a reflection on your skill set more than the other sports are. And I’m not trying to minimize what broadcasters do with basketball or football. I’m right in the thick of it with our lead team with the NFL — I treasure that — but it’s a different challenge. The challenge in football is that every play is potentially a play of the game. Each play is a chapter, and there are probably 130 chapters in that book. And you never know which one is going to be the defining chapter. In golf, it’s more of a fireside chat, more of a storytelling demand than the other sports are, in my estimation.
Something that the sports figures of the internet generation like Bill Simmons and others make light of are your calls that utilize wordplay, or puns, or a bon mot. Do you pay attention to that criticism?
I heard a lot of that early in my career, and I think I dialed it back a lot. I don’t think I’m really in that space anymore of puns and plays on words. I have no problem with it, by the way. I find it kind of amusing that there’s criticism for it. If you look at almost every article — and I know it’s not the writer that’s putting together the headline — but the headline often features wordplay.
So help me, I don’t have a Twitter account, an Instagram account, a Facebook account, or TikTok. That probably sounds pretty dumb. I should be in that space, but I just don’t have the time to manage it. I don’t know how people do it. Between a ton of texts and emails and then my daily reading, I feel like I’ve got enough information. But am I wise and aware of what’s being said out there? Yes, and I don’t think that’s really something people are saying. I don’t really do it anymore. I feel like I’m older — a bit more … I don’t know what it is. But in my world, the more years you have in some respects, the more valuable you become because you have context.
I was there in ‘86 when Jack Nicklaus won that historic sixth green jacket. And I never could have imagined back then that I would be to 40 Masters, hoping to make it to 50 and then go beyond that. But that serves me well when I see an event and I can tie things together. History is important to me. History is important in everything. I hold and reserve a lot of facts, dates, names, events that I call on quite often. And I think, I hope, the viewers appreciate that. They probably think someone is always just slipping you that information and you run up with it. But I have a pretty deep library of memories and historical facts. Otherwise, I would leave it alone.
All the social media that you’re not a part of is rich with negativity, satire, cynicism and irony — almost like a whole new language of sports. What do you think is the value of sincerity in this day and age among all of that?
My father never understood cynicism or sarcasm as a way of communicating. So that’s kind of the way I look at the world. I’ll hear a funny joke and there’s a victim — most humor has a victim in it — and I’m not offended by it at all. But I’m a very positive person, and I hope that comes out in my broadcast. I’ll use an example I’ve mentioned before: When I was in college, I was the last man on a prominent college golf team. I probably did not belong. But when I showed up to be a part of Dave Williams’s golf dynasty, he had asked me what I wanted to do with my life. He was big on motivating his kids through positivity. None of us ever saw him swing a golf club. He never gave a golf lesson, yet he won 16 national championships.
I told him that I wanted to be a broadcaster and I hoped one day I could work for CBS. That was my dream. Well, for Coach Williams, that became a constant way he communicated with me, making me believe it was going to happen. Lo and behold, I get into a dorm room as the worst incoming freshmen and worst player on the team, who really contributed nothing to the cause in terms of winning championships, and I live with the three highest recruited freshmen of our class.
Those rooms were assigned by Coach Williams. Now, why did he put the worst player with the three best players? Psychology. As a goal-minded and positive individual, I think he believed that I would build people up and be a — this was a big phrase for Coach Williams — “positive influence.” So I lived with three guys who all dreamed of playing on the PGA Tour, and all three of them realized that dream. They were positive individuals, too, and we would build each other up. Not falsely, not pandering, but seeing the best in somebody and reinforcing your belief in them that somehow fed that goal, that dream that was burning inside of them. They did the same thing to me in return. I know it’s different these days. I get it. This was a long time ago. But we never leaned on humor that was based on cynicism or sarcasm. We just didn’t know it.
Every team these days has fan media; some pundits nowadays make no secret of who they root for, and the local announcers are often blatant homers. As with news media, it feels like people have been conditioned to hearing only what they want to hear. But your job is to be impartial. Do you worry that impartiality is less valued or misunderstood these days in some way?
I am concerned about it, and I’m very mindful of it, and I see what you see: Pundits and broadcasters who are very open about their allegiance. You’ve got to put the local announcers in a different category; they’re paid by the teams. But when it comes to being a network broadcaster, you owe it to the fan to play it right down the middle.
I can give you specific examples of where that’s been a challenge for me: The closest thing that would ever stir me would be calling a game involving my alma mater, the University of Houston. I have had occasion to do that several times in recent years, and I was highly sensitive to the idea that I would go into this game and give the other team the exact same amount of space, airtime, and storytelling that I would give the school that is housed very deep in my heart. In my last year calling the NCAA tournament, Houston was a No. 1 seed. Houston was also the site of the Final Four.
There was a lot of speculation swirling that Coach Kelvin Sampson and the Cougars would be making it back home for the Final Four — and what a scene that would be. For me, I was internalizing the thought: Can you imagine the last game that I ever get to call in the NCAA tournament could possibly be Houston’s first-ever national championship in men’s college basketball? We were one of the favorites — I’m using the word we in this interview; I did not use the word we once on the air, I assure you. There was so much coverage about this being my last tournament, and wouldn’t it be storybook if in Nantz’s last game he walked off the court with Houston winning the national championship, especially given that my entire career began through the Houston basketball program: I was the student public-address announcer. The basketball coach in my day, Guy Lewis, a Hall of Famer, asked me to be the host of his television show, which aired on the NBC affiliate. Along with my roommates, we endowed the first basketball scholarship in school history. The press room at the home basketball games is named after me. It’s personal! I live and die with that basketball team on every possession.
But getting back to 2023. In their Sweet 16 matchup, the University of Miami upset Houston. And all I heard after the game was, “It was amazing how you did that, how fair you were to the Cinderella story of Miami.” It truly was one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done in my career, oddly enough. Inside, of course, I had this team that I love and I’m passionate about, but it is my role on the air not to be displaying any of that.
I guess I’m thinking of it this way: News media has worsened as it’s become more partial, and I’m wondering if you think sports has suffered in a similar way.
I do. I don’t know if “suffering” is the right word. I think it has succumbed to that, and everybody thinks it’s okay. I’m not cool with it on any level. Everything is so slanted these days. Where is Walter Cronkite?
One way sports has improved, though, is that, nowadays, when I’m at a sports event, I find myself actually missing the TV presentation version with the camera angles, the access, and the announcers. The TV product feels like a heightened experience in some ways, like what postmodernists refer to as “hyperrealism.” You have the unique role of both being there and shaping the TV experience. Do you worry about the future of live sports in any way?
I hear this all the time, that people find themselves missing all of the angles, the storytelling, the ability to stay in their home or wherever they are watching on their phone. Yet the NFL games are all sold out. When I was a kid growing up, the NFL had a blackout rule where if a home game wasn’t sold out 72 hours in advance of kickoff, it wasn’t shown in the local market — and that used to happen a lot!
I think there are more sports fans now, and I think people have been hooked on sports being a big part of their life. With more fans, the seats are being filled. And for others, the television experience for people is the way they’re used to experiencing the game. I don’t see attendance down out there. College football stadiums are packed, college basketball stadiums are packed. The NFL stadiums are sold out. Everything is healthy in my book.
Immediately following Rory McIlroy’s Masters win last month, there was a now-famous several-minute shot without commentary — just him in his emotions. I wanted to ask you about the significance of silence. It seems deceptively complicated for an announcer because your job is to talk, to describe, to contextualize — and of course it’s human nature to fill silence with talking. Does it take a lot of confidence or nerve to be quiet for long periods at a time?
I’ve never been asked to analyze that like I have in the last month. It really, truly, comes down to instincts. It’s just — you feel it. I wouldn’t even think for a second of inserting myself over those visuals. The crowd is chanting. We’ve got a camera right there walking with him. You’re given the gift of hearing conversations that Rory is having on the way to the scoring tent, being able to share this moment with the important people in his life. I’m going to talk through that? Not a chance.
I think a product of social media is that people boil down our jobs to that one call at the end. But you might be on the air for 20 hours at a golf event. I’m not there for just that last call. Otherwise, I would have flown in on Sunday morning. “All right, is he going to knock it in? Ready? ‘The long journey is over … McIlroy has his masterpiece!’ Okay, guys, get me to the airport, I’m ready to go.” There’s so much more to it than that.
What goes into leading a broadcast as an anchor is the stories that you insert along the way. That’s the sweet spot — when you’re able, with an economy of words, to humanize the subjects that you’re covering or educate the people about the location you’re broadcasting from. That’s really high-level commentary. Those to me are every bit if not more rewarding than the three-second call when the last putt is dropped, when the winning kick is made in a football game.
I worked with Nick Faldo for 15 years. He said when he played in the Masters, he felt like every single shot he struck was a reflection of a lifetime of preparation. And I feel like when I’m broadcasting the Masters Tournament or the PGA Championship, that every scene set, every tease I’ll write and voice-over, every moment coming in and out of commercial, every little anecdote that no one has heard before about a given subject — that’s on my record. There’s a permanence to it. There’s hours and hours and thousands of little moments where you have to make a decision.
What worries you the most about the future of sports?
There’s always one thing that concerns me most: money. I don’t want it to go away, but — particularly when it comes to the college paradigm that we’ve grown up watching — is there going to be a point where it just doesn’t feel anything like what it used to and it doesn’t feel as authentic? It doesn’t feel as passionate? It doesn’t feel as if we’re all in this together? Silly me and a lot of other people: I grew up thinking that the players that we watch in college athletics want to win for the good old alma mater!
But there’s so much jumping around now with the portal and NIL, and everybody’s a free agent. We’ve seen a mass exodus of some great coaches who still had a lot of runway. It’s just not what they signed up for anymore. It’s been sad to see a lot of them go, the most recent one being Tony Bennett at Virginia tearfully walking away from it. He just couldn’t relate to the game anymore. He thought he was in the business of molding, building, developing kids and having a student athlete eventually shouldering the role of leader.
It’s all different now. Money can corrupt a lot of the pureness. Now, do I make money? Yeah, I make money. Do I take offense that there are quarterbacks in the NFL that make $50 million or $60 million a year? Not at all. In the NBA, we’re going to have a $100 million-a-year player here before we know it. That’s all fine. I just don’t want it ever to get away from where the fan feels that the players aren’t driven to win, that they’re after a pursuit that’s self-rewarding instead of team-rewarding.
I know you were considered for some of the top jobs in network news but turned them down to stay with sports. Why continue with sports rather than have the opportunity to inform, to be influential and shape opinions?
My beloved dad always told me when I was a kid with the broadcasting dream that I ought to go into news. He said, “Jimmy, people trust you. You can be Walter Cronkite.” It was really a nice thing to say. But the short of it is it wasn’t a childhood dream. The childhood dream is not for sale. I ultimately did the dance on two different occasions, once at CBS, once at another network, and I probably went down the road more than I should have and led people to believe that I was actually going to take that new direction. By the way, it was going to be financially much more rewarding.
Very few people are probably as qualified as you to answer this question: In your opinion, what’s the greatest sports event on earth?
For me, it’s the Masters Tournament.
It really is?
It truly is.
In a world of Olympics, World Cups, Super Bowls, World Series, and a thousand other things?
It was the event that inspired me as a young boy to want to pursue this since I was 11 years old. When I sat down with Dave Williams at the University of Houston in 1977, he said, “What do you want to do with your life?” He was big on this. I mentioned the NFL, CBS, and the Masters Tournament. In its purest form, it’s the greatest storytelling venue I see in sport. You know what it is? It’s cinematic. Not my part, necessarily. I’m talking about the way it’s presented with our production team, the way it’s so vastly different than a basketball game or a football game or a baseball game inside one stadium, one arena. This is spread over hundreds of acres, and I know that all golf events are, but we have the equipment there. We have this soundtrack, this undercurrent that plays along with it. This Augusta melody.
Al Michaels is a very dear friend of mine. Al is the biggest fan in the world of watching the Masters Tournament. He loves it. He says to us, “You’re making movies. It’s different than anything on television.”
People who go to Augusta and see it for the first time — I have never in my life had anybody come back and say, “It was great, but it wasn’t quite as good as everybody said it was going to be.” Never, ever, ever, once. Everybody comes back and extols this place as heaven on earth. For me, who had this crazy dream, with those voices lulling me to sleep, it was always going to be the greatest thing I could ever be a part of. And just like that first-time visitor who walks through the gates and down Magnolia Lane, it always has exceeded expectations of a young kid in Colts Neck, New Jersey, by way of Charlotte, North Carolina.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
