AUGUSTA, Ga. – When moment of consequence arrived for Rory McIlroy on Saturday afternoon at the Masters, I had the best seat in the house.
Not from the side of the 11th fairway, where you can see everything on the opening hole of Amen Corner, or from the stands on the 12th tee, where a great vantage point looks down on the action on the 11th green. Not even on the CBS broadcast, where the team was heard between shots from a frantic afternoon in Augusta Nationalincluding forward in the closing stretch, where Cameron Young was on his way to briefly grab the club’s lead.
No, I was watching on Prime Video, where a new Masters resource brought golf’s greatest story to life like nowhere else.
Before McIlroy’s approach on the 11th landed in the water, launching a Amen corner spiral that defined Saturday’s Masters and reopened the tournament as we knew it, the team at Amazon’s Inside Amen Corner stream noticed something interesting. McIlroy had the stroke of a lifetime on his putt, which bounced off a tree and back into the center of the fairway. But the contact meant his ball had fallen more than 60 yards back where he would have finished on the previous two days.
“McIlroy had better be careful in this look,” John Wood, the stream analyst, forebodingly said. “Right is good. Green is good. Everywhere else is not.”
As McIlroy talked about his 213-yard approach with his caddy, Harry Diamond, the Premier team showed a graphic on the air that told the story, showing the difference in detail between the approaches on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and contextualizing how that difference affected McIlroy. other shot, which could come to decide the tournament.
“This is a very different shot than what he’s had the last couple of days,” said Justin Kutcher, host of the broadcast, raising the tension even further.
For reasons that aren’t hard to fathom, you almost never spend as much time watching a player prepare for one of the most important shots in a tournament as the Amazon team spent lingering over McIlroy’s decision on the 11th. Traditional golf broadcasts have a duty and an obligation to show as much action as possible. They can zoom in when needed, but rarely to the depth they want, mostly because there’s always another view to show.
Augusta National debuted “Inside Amen Corner” on Amazon Prime this year to reverse that trend, giving the club’s new broadcast partner a broadcast that married the club’s incredibly deep well of tournament data with the property’s most drama-rich corner. This is the kind of stat-driven storytelling that has made Prime’s work with Thursday Night Football so compelling, with a special stat source called PrimeVision providing a deeper, more sinister insight than anywhere else in football.
As with every second of broadcast coverage from the Masters, CBS Sports is responsible for producing the Inside Amen Corner this week. And, as with every second of broadcast coverage from the Masters, the team is the beneficiary of a truly insane amount of data collected by the club on the use of the tournament’s enhancement.
This week at the Masters, Inside Amen Corner has been obsessing over moments, players and decisions on holes No. 11, 12 and 13 — working with dedicated statisticians and graphics teams (and with new cameras and equipment) to explain the hows and whys of Amen Corner in deeper detail and richer color than ever before. The crew reacts in real-time to tournament action and trends, collects individualized data and statistics for each player, and brings ideas from the club’s fertile research database to three-dimensional execution in the span of mere seconds – all in pursuit of the best possible story.
The result has been moments like McIlroy’s approach on 11, which eventually crashed into the water, picking up his first double of the tournament and dramatically changing the leaderboard. While the moment was dramatic enough on CBS — and no doubt emotional in Amen Corner — it was even more rewarding on the Prime broadcast, where producer Josh Weingardt had the time and bandwidth to zoom in on the gravity of McIlroy’s situation from all angles before the man in the arena finally arrived. By the time McIlroy finally pulled his club, the story was complete but for the score — and the score was amplified by the richness of the story.
You didn’t have to be a statistician to enjoy the fun at Inside Amen Corner – you just needed a thirst for the more interesting side of the story.
On Saturday, I found just that during McIlroy’s approach on 11, and it looked like nothing I had seen on golf television before.
