Play by Play

by Verne Lundquist

  I walked into his little cubicle.

  I said, “Frank, I’m Verne Lundquist.”

  He said, “I know who you are. Who do you think fucking hired you?”

  So that was the way our relationship started.

  He then sat me down and told me, “I have three rules. If you follow them, you’re going to get along fine with us.”

  I had actually met Frank once when I was living in Dallas–Fort Worth. CBS had the Colonial and we had briefly talked. So I at least knew of Frank, but I had never sat across from him. He was intimidating for a short man.

  Frank continued.

  “Rule number one,” he told me. “You never say your own name on television. Nobody gives a shit who you are.”

  Fine by me, I thought.

  “Here’s the way this works,” Frank continued. “You’re going to be at [hole] Sixteen. At the appropriate time, when we first come to you, Pat Summerall will say, ‘Here’s the newest member of our golf team, Verne Lundquist.’ I don’t want you to respond, okay?”

  Again, no problem here.

  “Rule number two: Don’t talk over a shot, ever.”

  I can do that, I thought.

  Of course Frank wasn’t done.

  “Whatever brilliant addition you have to make to the editorial content of this production, I want you to complete the sentence or the paragraph before the golfer ever takes his club back. Don’t fucking talk over the shot. And don’t predict where it’s going unless you’re absolutely sure. Just wait until the ball lands. Guys have been fucking wrong all the time!”

  Frank paused to take a breath.

  “Rule number three: Never state the fucking obvious. We have sixty-five technicians here. We have microphones and cameras all over the course. We’ve got videotape machines in the truck in case we have to use them. I don’t want you to state the obvious. If a guy makes a two-foot putt, don’t you dare ever say, ‘He made it.’ That’s pretty fucking obvious.”

  I made my CBS Sports golf debut on a Saturday at the 1983 Phoenix Open. I was assigned to No. 16 and Nancy was with me in the tower. I recall the director took a two-shot of us, with Pat Summerall rather warmly welcoming us both to the CBS golf family. It was very unusual that Frank would allow that. Somewhere in my house I have a five-by-seven photo of Nancy and me that was taken off the monitor the moment Pat introduced us.

  So as the newest member of our golf team, I said, “Here is Rex Crawford in the middle of the fairway, seven-iron, one hundred and fifty yards, the hole is cut back right.” Then I shut up. Crawford hit it. I didn’t say anything until the ball landed. It did, and wound up twenty feet away from the hole.

  “He’s going to have a swerving left-to-right putt for birdie,” I said.

  So far, so good. I thought.

  Summerall eventually brought it back to 16. Caldwell was twenty feet from the hole, currently three off the lead. If he makes this, he’s going to be two off the lead. I shut up. He putts and leaves it about three feet short. I say, “Well, he’s still got that chance for par,” and we go away.

  Pat brought it back to me again.

  “Here is Rex Caldwell—this is going to break a little left to right. If he makes it he’ll stay three off the lead.”

  Caldwell strokes the ball, never comes close to hitting the hole.

  “He missed it!” I scream.

  Oh, shit.

  Frank pushed what we call the “All Key” button so that every announcer could hear him. This was obviously not on the air—just in our headsets.

  “You stupid Scandinavian son of a bitch!” he screamed at me. “If I tell you not to tell me that he made it, can you not deduce on your own to never tell me that he missed it?”

  Well, the guys zinged me for the rest of the day. It was kind of an initiation rite. I never did it again. I’ve never done it again in all the years. So the lesson was learned. Don’t break Frank’s rules.

  When thinking about Frank, it’s impossible not to mention the Masters. I remember the first time I saw the course. I flew in on a Tuesday in April 1983. Nancy and I drove over to the complex. Nancy didn’t end up enjoying the Masters. It was really a boys’ club, and Frank reacted somewhat angrily when I told him I was bringing my wife. He said, “You are bringing your wife to Augusta?” It just happened to coincide with the date of our wedding anniversary, April 8. She returned the next year and decided she didn’t really enjoy it. More than a decade later, she came back at the invitation of then CBS Sports president Peter Lund and his wife, Teresa. We have celebrated our wedding anniversary together only three times since we were married.

  My first time there I was just floating on air. We got in from Dallas on Tuesday and on Wednesday I walked into the office to say hello to Frank. At the Masters we had a permanent office structure for CBS and two production trucks. Today you walk into the CBS compound and there are forty-three production trucks. But it’s the same old office. By now I had done Phoenix and Pebble. We had not yet done Memorial, Byron Nelson, or Colonial. So the 1983 Masters would have been the third telecast for me with the CBS crew.

  Our director was Bob Dailey. He was an older gentleman. In fact, before he got into sports, Bob had directed the old Edward R. Murrow show Person to Person. He had also taken occasional turns at directing The Ed Sullivan Show. I mean, he was an established director. Bob was tall, stately. I think he was in his sixties when I met him. He was Irish with a little bit of a brogue, American-born but I guess he had grown up in an Irish family, so he spoke with just a little bit of an accent. He looked at me and he said, “Laddy, I know you think you’ve seen the golf course because you’ve seen it on television, but let me show you the golf course. Climb in.”

  So I got into a golf cart with Bob and we went down this long dirt road. To a degree, I still do this same drive today. Bob and I entered the golf course midway down the fairway at the eleventh hole. Nobody was on the tee. Nobody was on the green. We traversed the eleventh, then took a left. That year I was assigned to the thirteenth hole, which is a pretty damn impressive way to start Augusta.

  In 1983, there had been no winter frost, no freeze, so the dogwood and azaleas were just incredible. My first view of Augusta was driving down the eleventh, and right in front of me was the beautiful and challenging par-three twelfth. You go up a hill and take a left and the golf cart road becomes a dirt road and you end up midway down the eleventh hole. Bob eventually took me to No. 13, which was my hole for the tournament. He and I parked the cart, walked across a little bridge, and went up into the thirteenth’s tower, which is fairly low compared to the height of all the other towers on the back nine. It’s just one of the great views in all of golf around the world. I’m sitting there in that tower, standing in the tower with Bob. He said, “Well, lad, this is your office for the next four days.”

  It was truly overwhelming.

  We got back in the cart, and he drove me around the entire back nine. I didn’t see the front nine until the next day. We went up to the main clubhouse. They don’t want carts up in that area at all, so we shimmied over to the side and got out of the sight lines of the members, then went back down the hill, up a hill, and back to the concourse.

  That was my first view of the course, that first Wednesday in April 1983. I did No. 13 for two years and moved to No. 14 in 1985. Then, on May 1, 1985, right after the Masters, Frank Glieber, my role model and dear, dear friend, died of a heart attack. Frank had done No. 17 from 1968 to 1985. He lived and worked in Dallas. I’d grown up listening to him. He was fifty-one when he died, only six years older than I was. When Frank died, Nancy and I were on vacation in Hawaii. I got a call that I had to go replace him on an NBA broadcast for CBS. We went straight from Honolulu to Portland, where the Lakers were playing the Trailblazers. My partner that day was James Brown, whom you can watch on The NFL Today. I can remember to this day sitting with Nancy and Pat Riley in the hotel lounge the night before the game. We all had a drink together. Riley was, of course, coaching the Lakers at
the time. We shared fond memories of Frank and hoisted a glass or two in his honor.

  Chirkinian called me when it was appropriate, long after Frank’s death but three months before the Masters. He said, “We’re going to reassign you, and you’re going to be at Seventeen.” So my first year doing No. 17 was 1986. It was very emotional. Frank was one of the first mentors I had. He taught me a lot about how to get along in this business. To lose him at that age, to have felt as connected to him as I did, and then to be chosen by Frank Chirkinian to move to 17, well, it was an emotional week for me. Perhaps that’s partially why it was so fitting that the 1986 tournament would go down as one of the greatest in Masters history.

  Jack Nicklaus was forty-six years old in 1986. He had not won a tournament in two years. Quite famously, a columnist named Tom McCollister, who has since passed away, had written a column for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the Tuesday of Masters week in 1986, ranking the ninety or so competitors. He didn’t put Jack dead last, but he was in the bottom quadrant. Most people did not think Jack had a shot.

  Jack Grout, one of Jack Nicklaus’s golf teachers, who was either staying with the family or was visiting the Nicklaus home that week, saw the column, cut it out, and put it on the refrigerator door. Jack saw it every day. He never took it down.

  So here he was, at forty-six, and he was not a factor in anybody’s coverage. I mean, we put him on the air because he was Jack Nicklaus. But he was not in any kind of a featured group. No one, to my recollection, was writing sidebars about him. It was just like, okay, the five-time winner of Augusta is in the field. Billy Kratzert had the lead after thirty-six holes of the tournament. With a big smile Billy will say today, “I don’t get it, nobody ever mentions me.” On that Sunday, no one had Jack in their sights. Nobody. He was four back at the start of Sunday’s round.

  When we got to that Sunday, there were a couple of famous exchanges in the truck and on the air. The third round ended with Greg Norman leading, Seve Ballesteros one back, with Bernard Langer and Jack four back of the lead. There were ten or so golfers ahead of Jack. Keep in mind, back then Augusta National did not allow us to cover the first nine live on CBS. We had to fight for that for years. My first year was 1983 and Ballesteros won it. He eagled both 2 and 8. At least I know he eagled 8. We had no coverage of it because we couldn’t get a minicam out there fast enough. It was early enough in the final round. Anyway, it’s lost to history.

  But on this day in 1986 for the final round, we had stationary cameras on No. 9. That meant we could cover everybody who came through on that hole. Lance Barrow, who is now the executive producer of golf, was the associate director of the Masters. He was in the truck with Frank Chirkinian. Again, you’re talking about the most profane man I’ve ever worked with in my life (I say that with affection, of course). So Jack was having a mundane round. In the meantime, Ballesteros had taken the lead. Then Jack birdied No. 9, and Seve would have been on No. 6 at the time.

  Lance in the truck looked at Frank and said, “Frank, we’ve got Jack Nicklaus with a birdie on No. 9.”

  “Buddha,” Frank replied—he called Lance “Buddha” because Lance is a man of large girth—“you need to learn how to tell a story. Jack Nicklaus is no part of this story. Now don’t bother me with him again.”

  Okay.

  Well, Jack then birdied 10. So Lance said to Frank, “Frank, I don’t mean to be persistent here, but Nicklaus just had his second birdie in a row.”

  Frank looked at him, glared at him, and said, “All right, we’ll play it back on tape.”

  From that moment on, after he birdied 10, we showed 9 and 10 on videotape and stayed with Jack after that. Here is Jack Nicklaus within hailing distance of the lead of the Masters. We covered him on 11, 12, and 13, where he went birdie, bogey, birdie. Then he made a par on 14, with Seve kind of plugging along. So Jack went birdie, birdie, birdie, bogey, birdie, par starting with the ninth hole. Then at 15, that’s when the drama really started to build. He was standing in the fairway with Jackie (Jack Nicklaus, Jr.), his son. He looked at Jackie and pulled out whatever club he had, a four-iron, I think.

  Jack looked at his son and said, “Let’s see how far a three [iron] would go here.”

  Jackie responded, “Dad, it’s too much club.”

  Jack said, “No, I’m talking about an eagle.”

  Jack put it fifteen feet away. Ben Wright was on the hole, and Ben still gets angry about this part. When Jack made the eagle—“made eagle” is the proper way to say it in golf parlance. But Ben just exclaimed, “Yes, sir.”

  For years I didn’t know that. Then one year David Feherty, Peter Kostis, and I were roommates at the Masters and Peter told me that Ben had actually said, “Yes, sir,” on air first. Well, when I got home that year, I went back and looked at the VHS tape, and Ben Wright certainly did say, “Yes, sir,” for the made eagle.

  Jim Nantz was on 16. Par three. Jack hit a five-iron. Never looked up. Jackie said, “Be good.” Without looking at the green, Jack said, “It is.” The ball rolled across the cup—he almost got an ace. So now he had an eagle and a birdie.

  They came to 17. He would have been two back at that time. Jack hit a very poor tee shot. He hooked it left over near the seventh green. So here is a little tidbit about our coverage: No one has ever seen that tee shot. We had a camera operator on a tower behind the green, but he lost it in the setting sun. You never see it. We go away. When we come back, Jack is standing 120 yards away to the left near the 7th green. We never saw the tee shot.

  As he was standing over his ball, Seve back at 15 had hooked it into the water, and wound up taking a double bogey. So Jack was over this tee shot 120 yards out. If he could birdie 17, he’d have a chance to take the lead.

  He hit his nine-iron shot, and I’ve never seen galleries respond like they did that day. From the time Jack got into the chase until he won the tournament I experienced the most electric feeling I’ve gotten from any group of fans anywhere. It was just magnificent. Jack hit it twelve feet from the hole. Seve had now double bogeyed. They were tied. If Jack made the putt, he’d have the lead.

  The platform then on 17 was directly behind the green. We had two levels on it. I was on the top one probably twenty feet up in the air. My thought process: Just get out of the way. We bounced around the course, and when we came back, Jack was about to line up for the putt and I thought: Don’t screw this up. So I said, “This is for sole possession of the lead.”

  He stood over it for quite a while. He finally stepped up. It had a very subtle double break. He hit the putt, and with the ball about a foot and a half away I said, “Maybe.” Then it dropped in and I hollered, “Yes, sir!” I’ve probably seen it five thousand times over the years.

  What I think made it work so well was the simplicity. If you watch the replay as I’m saying, “Yes, sir,” Jack is pumping his arms almost in synchronicity with my words. It’s like he’s punching the air to underline the emphasis on “Yes, sir.” It’s perfect. He was giving an orchestra a downbeat.

  A short aside: On Wednesday of that week before the tournament had started, we held a Calcutta with just the announcers, the production crew, the guys in the truck. I don’t tell the story of the Calcutta often because if you are not a golfer, you would not know what the hell a Calcutta is. Essentially it is a gambling game, a betting game. It was always held on a Wednesday night before the start of the Masters and a sportswriter named Bob Drum was the emcee of the evening. Bob, who has since passed on, was one of the guys given credit for popularizing Arnold Palmer back in the 1950s while working as a sportswriter for a Pittsburgh newspaper. Later he came to work for us. In the early 1980s he did a feature called “The Drummer’s Beat.” He ran as a regular feature on most of our golf telecasts.

  So Bob conducted the Calcuttas. We did it in the home that was shared by Pat Summerall and Ben Wright. This thing got real rowdy. With Pat and Ben, it was almost guaranteed to get rowdy, especially the later into the evening it got. There are seve
ral permutations of the Calcutta, but Bob would announce a golfer’s name in the tournament and the bidding for that golfer then started. There were usually thirty people involved. I’m not a gambler so I didn’t participate, but I enjoyed the entertainment. I went in just one year, with my CBS Sports colleague Jim Nantz, but I don’t remember who we bid on. The payoff was 85 percent of the pot to the winner, 10 percent to second place, and 5 percent to third. Everyone else was out of luck. I can tell you this no longer happens. Back then they were afraid word would get out that CBS guys were gambling. The brutal fact of the matter is that Augusta members also had their own Calcutta.

  The subplot to this whole story is that Summerall couldn’t stand Brent Musburger. Brent had pushed his way into hosting the Masters because he had the clout. He was down at the Butler Cabin while Pat was at 18. The two did not like each other at all. It went back twenty-five years. Brent was accused, and I think probably correctly, of listening in on the rehearsal that Pat and John Madden would do (or before that, Pat and Tom Brookshier would do). He would steal anything they had of relevance, and come on the air with it for The NFL Today. Something like, “Well, late news that Dexter Coakley is out with a knee injury that occurred in warm-ups this morning. Now let’s go out to Pat and John.” Of course, they were going to mention the injury.

  Anyway, that was the background between those two guys. Both men could afford to be in the Calcutta, but Pat knew golf and Brent didn’t. So Pat and three or four guys would artificially bid some golfers up knowing they had no chance but that Musburger would bite.

  During this particular Calcutta in 1986, Musburger bid $7,700 for Raymond Floyd, who famously shot 77 in the second round and missed the cut. Pat put the all key down after that round and said, “Mr. Musburger, I believe you spent one hundred dollars for every stroke Raymond took today.”

  Late in the evening during the Calcutta, Tom Brookshier came in as a guest of Charlie Brakefield, who was the owner of the CBS affiliate in Memphis at the time. Drum saw him walk in. Drum was infamous for his gravelly voice, and just then, Jack Nicklaus’s name came up. Booming, Drum announced Jack’s name, and nobody raised a finger. He said, “C’mon, you guys, this is Jack Fucking Nicklaus. Somebody has to bid something.”