Arnold Palmer at Masters 2016, his last.
Getty Images
I was driving the border to the south in I-95, Swamppland in North Carolina running next to it when Jim Nantz turned my call. I was surprised. It was Monday afternoon, and his loved one Houston Cougars would play Gators Florida for the Mena Basketball Championship. I realized that he would be at a prayer rally for three or something else. He’s again a fan.
Nantz, 65, no longer calls the last game of the college basketball season for CBS Sports. He bowed to that concert two years ago. With his extra time, he could appear in Augusta a little earlier, and a little more rested. It was always one thing, Jim Nantz reaching masters until Tuesday morning after Monday’s Monday match, with different stories outside Trains, planes and automobiles.
John Feinstein, a legend of sports writing, once did the same thing, went from the NCAA final to the masters. Nantz was surprised and sad by John’s sudden deathFor natural reasons, last month at the age of 69. John had a big heart and a cute, and he did not do much to help him. He stopped flying after the 9/11 attacks, so his travel story movie has a shorter title: Cars John’s own car was always a mess. Nantz has the regular gene.
“Where are you?” I asked Nantz.
“In a hotel room in San Antonio,” Nantz said. He sounds on the phone as he does on TV – silk from a scroll. The last match of this season the 2024-’25 college was being played in San Antonio, Alamodome.
You can camp a Ryder Cup team with the people Nantz was writing with Monday afternoon. Bill Rogers, who played Golf in the early 1970s in Houston and won the British Open 1981. Fred’s coupleswho played Golf in Houston in the late 1970s and won the 1992 masters. There was no way Nantz would not be in this basketball game, even if it was not working.
The two things Nantz is best known in his work life is calling the NCAA basketball final a Monday night in early April and, six days later, the fourth round of Masters. You can rely on both, like room service in Marriott in O’Hare. There have been dozens of other events that have played the life of Nantz’s work, but Final Four and the latest round in Augusta are the sun on the mountain.
In his private life, Nantz has had relationships with two elderly men who shaped his life immensely. You know both names. You may not know that they are both members of the world golf hall: Arnold Palmer and George Hw Bush. Whenever we speak, some names come. His father, first of all. Chuck Will and Frank Chirkinian, legendary directors at CBS. Old bush, as Charles Barkley HW calls it (to distinguish it from W., Aka New Bush.) And Arnold.
Nantz and I are both arnold-o-othiles. We were separated from Feinstein in Palmer, and from basketball in Golf. I asked Nantz for the last time without Palmer, in the masters of 2016.
Early on Thursday morning of the ’16 masters, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer gathered in the first Tee. The music on foot was Let’s start this party. The player and the Big Jack strip their shots. Arnie observed and offered his trademark. One right finger climbed, to the height of the shoulder. He was 86 years old and weak but alert. He came out of the folding chair in which he sat down without help to greet both shootings, his friends had just hit.
“Then Arnie and Alastair Johnston and Kit entered the club for breakfast,” Jim told me. Johnston was Palmer’s long business adviser, an IMG Lifer. Kit was Palmer’s second wife. “I asked Alastair if we could go to Arnold Hut For an interview after breakfast. He said he would ask, but if he did it, it would probably be short. “That would say yes.
Arnold got a carriage to Butler, a short car from the club, and Johnston and Nantz put it inside. “The moment I started asking, he was lit,” Nantz said. Arnold had so many performers in it. He always did. He was afraid to leave someone down he had never seen before.
I saw the interview for the first time last year. Is powerful. Near the end, Palmer says, “That’s it.” I said to Jimmy then, “As usual, he was saying so many few words. That’s it. I’ve said my farewell. “
Jim said then, “I believe Arnold knew he would never return there. That was his way of saying it, I believe. Just seeing him sitting there, knowing that the end was near, brought tears in your eyes.”
After the interview, Nantz walked Arnoldin in a pending car, a white Mercedes run by Johnston. The set was in the rear seat. Arnold was wearing the jacket of his green member. He rode the shotgun. They were going to the airport. Yes, Arnold left the property by wearing his club coat. You think someone would call him?
“I saw the car’s rest and thought, ‘The man arrived here with his wife in a Winnebago in 1955,” Nantz said. Arnold was then in his first year in tours, small tarval. There was a PGA rule of America’s PGA in those days that for the first half of the year, you can’t get a check in front of. But the masters were a private club event, and Arnold could be paid – $ 696 for a T10 end. Then he won in ’58, 60, ’62 and ’64. He invented modern masters, a sports event, a spectacle and a television show. A spring rite, just like the basketball tournament.
Jim Nantz was too young to appreciate Arnold in his prime minister. He was a child. “He filled the gaps,” Nantz told me. Arnold’s life and time links us to Dwight Eisenhower, a national member of Augusta and friend of Palmer; to Ben Hogan, Golf and Arnold’s personality in front of and a central figure in the masters; For Bobby Jones, who started all things. If you love golf, it’s hard not to love Arnold Palmer. He played with such a life, and he directed his life as he played.
