The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (19 page)

“Even though I had been in the business a long time, I certainly arrived as I would at Notre Dame Cathedral,” says Scully. “I was in awe of the history of the place as well as those who were going to play in the tournament. It has quite an effect on you no matter how many baseball games and how many football games and even how many other golf tournaments you had done.”

Scully walked into Roberts’s office aware of his strictness. He had heard of Jack Whitaker, an esteemed sportscaster who had sat atop the 18th hole perch in the mid-1960s but was taken off the Masters broadcast because he was deemed insufficient in that role. Of Ben Wright, who had to pass a thirty-second test of Roberts’s ability to understand his British accent before being approved. “All he wanted to do was just meet me,” says Scully, as the two chatted about the weather and Scully’s feelings about announcing the Masters. “It was very charming, very, very sweet,” he remembers fondly. Scully was relieved to make his flight back to Cincinnati in plenty of time for the game, but he was still wary of what lay ahead on the weekend.

“It was frightening for me,” says Scully, whose Masters viewing had been limited over the years. Afternoons on the second Sunday in April had always been taken up by baseball games. “I was afraid that I would make some gigantic mistake during the tournament.” So Scully worked extra hard to prepare for the Masters, immersing
himself in the lore of Augusta National, researching its history, and compiling notes on present day players, in particular the trio of Nicklaus, Miller, and Weiskopf. Facts on those players became entrenched in Scully’s mind.

Scully realized how important the Masters broadcast was. More than anything, television had taken the reins of the Masters and pulled it into the psyche of the nation by way of living rooms and clubhouses. It was first broadcast on CBS in 1956 and capitalized on being one of the few golf events on television. “Back then, it seemed like it was the only golf on TV,” says Gary Koch, who remembers watching his first Masters at age ten.

What Koch and others saw was determined by Chirkinian, the network’s brilliant, yet autocratic, producer who would be at the controls for CBS’s live weekend broadcasts for the 18th consecutive year. For the indomitable forty-eight-year-old, the Masters wasn’t sports as much as unscripted theatre.

In no sport does a producer have more impact on what the viewer sees at home than golf. At Augusta National, the playing field is the size of approximately 200 football fields and nearly four miles in length. Dozens of shots are played, or about to be played, at the same time, scattered about on tees, fairways, greens, and from trees and bunkers. Timing and sequence of all those shots are tough to balance, as is a team of announcers throwing back and forth to one another under the direction of a lone voice in their ears.

It’s debatable as to what Chirkinian invented and what he just perfected, but there’s no question what he innovated. He was present the first time videotape was used and was the person to bring it to golf. He invented the program interrupt system, where the producer/director could talk directly to each announcer in the field. He built scaffolding behind greens to put cameras on. He had the inside of the cups painted white. He placed microphones on the tees and beside the greens. He used boom mikes to capture on-course conversations between players and caddies. He utilized split screen images to perfection at Augusta.
And either he or Roberts or both conceived the idea of over-par/under-par scoring, which simplified how players stood in relation to one another. It revolutionized golf on television.

“He was always looking for something,” says Wright. “He was a genius, an absolute genius.” Scully adds, “Frank was a marvelous producer-director. He understood the game from the grass up.”

On Friday, April 11, 1975, there would be no Masters coverage on television. The local CBS affiliate Channel 12 (WRDW) had a late afternoon line-up of
Match Game, Tattle Tales, Gomer Pyle
, and
Bonanza
. There weren’t even any local highlight shows or specials. It would be another four years before a start-up called ESPN hit the air, and viewers at home would have to wait seven years until the CBS team produced the first live golf on Thursday and Friday at the Masters for USA Network in 1982. The thirty-ninth Masters would be nearly five-eighths finished before anyone at home saw live golf.

The crew wasn’t on the air until 4:30 p.m. eastern daylight time Saturday, but their full-ensemble dress rehearsal took place Friday afternoon. They would cover Nicklaus’s second nine. Chirkinian had 215 personnel and twenty-two cameras at his disposal and command. All announcers had to be in their towers and on-headset fifteen minutes before rehearsal. This was his annual masterpiece. And no one would muck it up.

“By jove, it was long,” says Wright. “It was longer than the broadcast quite often. He would have you there until you got it right in his opinion. God bless him, that is exactly what was required. That was why the product was pretty superior in its time. He left no stone unturned. It didn’t matter whether it was cameramen at fault or whether it was announcers.”

In Chirkinian’s mind, the commentators were responsible for voicing the soundtrack. Certain rules applied. “He would excoriate any announcer who stated the obvious,” says Wright. Saying a putt had missed would get a “how many million people have seen that
miss you dumbass.” Chirkinian wanted all his announcers to have both an ego and the ability to suppress it for the good of the team and the broadcast.

One of Chirkinian’s innovations was to station an announcer in a tower at each of the final seven holes. Some were golfers, others not. Scully would handle play at the 18th, as well as any action caught at the 9th, 10th, and 11th (even though there were no camera towers on those holes). At the 17th hole sat Frank Glieber, a Dallas-based sportscaster in his eighth Masters who worked a myriad of sports for the network. The legendary British golf writer Henry Longhurst, now sixty-six, took the perch behind the 16th green. Longhurst actually called golf for ABC in the United States, but broadcast this one event a year for CBS. At the 15th hole resided Wright, a veteran English sportswriter whom CBS Sports President Bill McPhail hired over Chirkinian’s head for the 1973 season. Beside the 14th was Whitaker, who had returned in 1972 as an emergency fill-in for an ailing Longhurst only to continue on the team. Stationed at the 13th hole was Pat Summerall, the former football player turned sports announcer, who had been at the Masters since 1968. He would also host the green jacket presentation for television. A camera position hadn’t been added at the 12th hole until 1973, and calling the play on the par three was Jim Thacker, a local sportscaster in Charlotte who, in addition to the occasional golf tournament, also worked regional ACC basketball games.

Those seven had already sat through the annual television meeting on Thursday up the hill from their compound in Butler Cabin. The meeting was conducted by Bill Kerr, co-chairman of the Television and Radio Committee and retired head of the San Francisco Stock Exchange. The guidelines were the same each year. For example, there should be no mention of prize money. There should be no mention of other tournament names that included sponsors (the Monsanto Open was to be referred to as Pensacola). Many in the room were irked that a man with no working knowledge of sports broadcasting was telling greats like Vin Scully and Henry Longhurst
how to do their jobs. “It did surprise me a little that he was lecturing a room full of announcers who had who knows how many years of experience, but it was the Masters so I happily sat there and tried to drink it all in,” says Scully. Longhurst, who tended to nod off during the meetings, insisted that he would never have walked on the floor of the exchange and told Kerr how to do his job.

But in reality, this was the club’s broadcast as much as anyone’s. The event was more-or-less a time buy, which allowed the club to have increased control over the product. There were just two sponsors: the Travelers Insurance Companies and the Cadillac Motor Car Division of General Motors Corporation. As Gene Sarazen would say in the broadcast’s taped opening: “You the viewing audience receive top consideration. It is planned to eliminate any interruptions of important tournament action through the limitation of commercial announcements.”

For many on the CBS crew, the annual highlight of the week was Wednesday night’s annual Calcutta, a pre-tournament party that featured an auction of each player in the field. The winner took home the entire pot, which was always five figures. Wright claims to have won seven Calcuttas. In 1979, he was taken to task for picking a first timer named Fuzzy Zoeller for $50. When Zoeller won, Wright pocketed $26,000. Who had Nicklaus in 1975? “It could have been Summerall, because he tried to buy up everybody,” says Wright.

It was about time to get to work.

THE STAGE OF AUGUSTA
National was set, but television was nothing unless there was a star to watch. Chirkinian was lucky. During his first year in 1958, a new player didn’t just enter stage door left, he kicked it in and commanded the theater. He knocked them dead, picked up the roses thrown at him, and embraced it all. If the Masters was unscripted theatre televised, then its first star was Arnold Palmer.

Palmer loved the camera, and the camera loved him back. Take a poll of members at Augusta National Golf Club of their favorite
golfer, and he would have won in a landslide. The viewers at home loved Palmer, too, especially impressionable children who were getting their first look at the game.

“He sort of made the Masters,” says Johnny Miller. By 1960, nearly nine out of every ten households owned a television. Kids such as Curtis Strange (his father knew Palmer and played his clubs), Gary Koch, Roger Maltbie, Ed Sneed, and many other Baby Boomers spent their early years watching Palmer swing away on the black-and-white tube and developed an affinity not only for him, but for the course he seemed to own from 1958 to 1964.

“It was always so special to me because Arnold Palmer was my hero as a kid,” says Maltbie, who watched it on television in the early-1960s. “It was a place I always wanted to go to.”

In the late-1940s, Palmer had desperately wanted to go to the Masters as well. One year, the Wake Forest College golf team he played on was competing in a match in Georgia around the same time as the tournament, and they contacted the club to offer their volunteer services. To Palmer’s great disappointment, the boys were turned down. Once Palmer received his own invitation in 1955, getting past the gates would never be an issue the rest of his life.

In 1958, soldiers from nearby Fort Gordon manned the scoreboards, and some made signs that read “Arnie’s Army.” The moniker stuck, and Augusta National became home base. That year, he won his first professional major at the Masters. He followed with a succession of victories in even-numbered years—1960, 1962, 1964—to become the tournament’s first four-time champion.

“Today, I could tell you every shot Arnold hit in 1962,” says Sneed, a high school senior at the time.

“There wasn’t much not to like about him,” says Koch, who became a Palmer fan watching those Masters. “It was the style, the swashbuckler, the whole bit.”

Unlike Weiskopf, Miller, or Nicklaus, Palmer didn’t so much swing at the ball as attack it, like a machete wielding adventurer off
to rescue a damsel in distress. No hands looked better on a golf club than Palmer’s. On a plane ride to the Spanish Open in 1975, Jerry Heard asked Palmer, with all his success, what was it he thought about when hitting the ball. Palmer said, “I just grab it real firm with the right hand and hit it as hard as I can.” Heard said, “That’s it?” Palmer replied, “That’s it.”

An adventure is what Palmer gave fans. His aggressive style didn’t necessarily suit a place like Augusta National and occasionally was his Kryptonite. In 1959, he led by two with seven to play before hitting it in the water on the 12th, bogeying the 17th, and missing a four-foot putt on the 18th. In 1961, he walked off the 18th tee with a one-shot lead, before seeing his friend George Low along the ropes. Palmer strolled closer to say hello, and Low congratulated him on the victory. Suddenly, Palmer was taken out of the moment. He lost his concentration and hit his approach shot into the right bunker. Then, he began playing quickly. His bunker shot ran over green, his chip shot came up well short, and his bogey putt missed. He’d lost by one, and it was down to a mental error.

It spoke to Palmer’s mass appeal and charisma that he was so revered. Throughout the blown leads and winless droughts, he remained the fan favorite, even if he hadn’t won a major since that 1964 Masters.

Times had been tough on the golf course for Palmer. He had not won on the PGA Tour since the Bob Hope Classic in early 1973. Putting problems dogged him, and he constantly switched putters. With his eye sight deteriorating, he began wearing eye glasses in 1972 and spent the next few years switching between glasses and contact lenses. This year, with the glasses, he had been in position to win at Hawaii, Inverrary, and Jacksonville, only to come undone in the final round each time. The prior week in Greensboro, though, Palmer had his best round of the year on Sunday, a 66.

Still, there was a lack of confidence fans never saw in his heyday. Some felt Palmer had lost his nerve. The day before the 1975 Masters,
Palmer said of his next win: “If it doesn’t come this year, it may never come.”

Palmer had finished well with a final-round 67 in 1974 to place in a tie for 11th, and the momentum had carried over to this year. His opening round of 69 was his best start to the tournament since 1964—his last win. The start was encouraging to Palmer. “The tournament is not going to end just because I broke 70,” he said. Palmer birdied holes 2, 6, 13, and 17. He had an opportunity to tie for the lead on the 18th with a birdie before leaving a 3-iron approach wide right and failing to get up and down after missing a fifteen footer. Palmer’s round could have been better if not for leaving a few putts short after failing to adjust to slower green speeds. Like Nicklaus, Palmer had been pointing to the Masters since the start of the year. “I’ve been trying to build my game to a peak,” he said. “If it doesn’t peak now it may not peak.”