During his career he has co-hosted the Olympics as well as covered the NBA, the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, baseball, NCAA track and field, swimming and diving, skiing, speed skating, and gymnastics. Nantz was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002 as the youngest recipient of the Curt Gowdy Media Award.
In January, Nantz and The Methodist Hospital in Houston announced the creation of the Nantz National Alzheimer Center, a neurological unit dedicated to the research and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and the care of Alzheimer’s patients and their families. Nantz’s father, Jim Nantz Jr., died in 2008 after being diagnosed with the disease. He was treated at The Methodist Hospital.
Nantz spoke recently about his broadcasting career, his book (“Always By My Side”), his father, and his commitment to the Nantz National Alzheimer Center.
Q. About journalism, Tom Brokaw said, "It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about." In “Always By My Side,” you wrote that it was your “lifelong aspiration to narrate the great stories of American sports.” Is it a challenge to find fresh stories?
Nantz: It is when you’re covering the same subjects over and over again. Tiger Woods, for example, in his dominant stretch won so many golf tournaments. Telling the story of an individual on his way to victory as the game is winding down or as a golfer is walking up the 72nd fairway…that is really the premium time to put in perspective for that individual just what that moment means. In Tiger’s case, he’s won over and over again on CBS. And through the years, it became a little bit of a difficult test to keep it fresh. But it’s a good problem to have. It’s a good thing to be challenged and a good way to test your creative ability.
Q. A lot of preparation goes into what ultimately comes out, though.
Nantz: It all gets back to that because if you’re lazy in your preparation and you just lean on, say, a media guide to provide you with the information, that can’t hold up for much more than a week. You’ve got to have trust with the people you are covering. You’ve got to have time with them. You’ve got to have the ability to get them to present to you fresh stories, fresh information, and fresh ideas about what’s going on with their abilities, their game, what’s inside their head. That all takes time to be able to develop—not only the story but the relationship.
Q. Your work has brought you into contact with athletes, presidents, performers, writers and other talented artists. That’s enviable access to a lot of original and creative personalities
Nantz: Sometimes it’s a little bit hard to believe when you’re playing golf with, say, President Bush and President Clinton that you’re actually in their company. There still is a real sense of awe for the people that I’ve been lucky enough to get to meet and know, whether it’s presidents or whether it’s Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus. People who have made a difference in the world and who I grew up watching on television and respecting when I was a young person—and still do in my adult life. To get to know them and all the many wonderful places and people that would come along with it…. It’s all made it very special. It’s a wonderful life, and I count my blessings.
Q. Speaking of stories, what sports stories are you following closely these days?
Nantz: It changes in my world all the time. I came off a 20-week NFL stretch. It was not our year to call the Super Bowl, as it was just 12 months ago. We let go of football and for a month, I focus on the PGA Tour. It’s kind of fun at this particular time because it’s early in the season and you’ve got all the questions that are out there circling in people’s minds.
Q. Such as?
Nantz: Where’s Tiger Woods going to be with his game? These young players who surfaced in 2010 and seized the moment a year ago—that whole brigade of talented, fearless young golfers—are they going to back up that breakout season of a year ago and perform at a high level again in 2011?
Q. It must be nice to cover golf in January and February and get a head start on spring.
Nantz: It’s kind of nice to be in early at some gorgeous sights in the dead of winter, like San Diego, Phoenix, Pebble Beach, and L.A. This is my four-week stretch. Before then, I transition again. I change hats and I go right into the most riveting, exciting month that you can ever imagine, being on the road to the Final Four on my way to calling another national championship game.
Q. There was no Super Bowl for you and CBS this year, but will there be an NFL season next year?
Nantz: I see people speculating on this who have a lot more knowledge about it than I do. My guess is that we’ll definitely have a season—an uninterrupted season—at some point. There’s just too much money for people to suddenly lose the momentum that they have with the NFL right now. There’s such a trust with the fan base that to suddenly turn your back on the fans when no one can understand, with all these billions being split up, how it can be so problematic. It’s lost on people. Middle America doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand how it’s so mixed up right now.
Q. The talk is of an 18-game season.
Nantz: I find it interesting that in the last week stories are starting to come out now that the fan out there is repelling this whole 18-game-schedule idea. That had been discussed as if it were a foregone conclusion, which is what the owners wanted. They wanted that to get through without there really being any resistance, but there’s some kickback now. And I think that that’s going to start to get even a little more attention—negative attention, that is—in the weeks ahead. It’s a big part of these negotiations. It’s a big revenue source, another two weeks’ worth of games, but I’m seeing now that there’s a lot of opposition, from the players, and now it’s even coming from the fans. And this thing may not be the big slam dunk that everybody thought it was going to be.
Q. The players are concerned about the debilitating effects of such a violent sport being made even longer.
Nantz: They are. Sure, they’re going to take away two preseason games, but the two that you have remaining, you’re really going to have to get your star players in shape, in game mode, earlier than in the past. Before, teams could gradually work them in across the four preseason games, play them a couple of series one week, a quarter the next week. Now, they’re going to have to play in those two preseason games. Now, you’ve got two additional real games. Of course that’s going to mean more injuries there as well. If you look back on this season, the game’s getting so more physical and faster… my goodness, the Indianapolis Colts, if they went two more weeks, they might not have been able to field a football team.
Q. Would you keep the schedule the way it is?
Nantz: The 16-game season, the way it’s set up, it works. I understand the four preseason games get tiring for all of us. They’re not important. But, you know, they fall in the middle of summer vacation. It’s the time of the year when you don’t care that you’re not that focused on the NFL. It’s O.K. to have four preseason games. So what if they’re sparsely attended. Once you get to Labor Day and schools are in session and people are back in that mindset of “It’s back to work now, summer’s over,” the interest is there, the ratings are there. But if you ever went back and looked at when the NFL would start a season before Labor Day weekend, the ratings weren’t there. Because, again, people’s interests were somewhere else. So don’t put so much stock in the fact that they’re trying to lose two preseason games. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s not a national crisis.
Q. Let’s talk basketball. The new partnership with Turner for the NCAA basketball tournament could be fun. There will be new voices covering the games. Steve Kerr said that he’s excited about being part of the broadcast team…
Nantz: I’m excited about Steve joining us; Clark [Kellogg] is, too.
Q. How do you assess the field? Admittedly it’s a little early. Any sleeper teams that can make a deep run?
Nantz: I’m on many talk-radio shows where I get asked questions I don’t know the answer to. I decided a long time ago, after listening to a lot of talk-radio, and hearing people in my industry who I thought were bluffing their way through answers… I don’t bluff. If I don’t know the answer to something, I’m not going to tell you. I’m not going to try to manufacture an answer. I have not done one college basketball game in person this year. I’ve watched it on TV, but for me to handicap the field? I can’t do that. Oh, sure, I could probably come up with a very convincing 30-second argument about Duke defending, and the way Ohio State is playing with Jared Sullinger and its decorated freshmen. But I haven’t seen any of them play in person. So, I think it’s more appropriate for me just to be honest and say, “I don’t know.”
Q. You wrote of your “unprecedented broadcasting ‘triple’—the Super Bowl, Final Four, and the Masters.” In 2011 you will call your 26th Masters, so you’re now more than halfway to your goal of calling 50 Masters.
Nantz: I will start in golf terminology by saying that I will begin the back nine come April. I would love to work 50 Masters, God willing, CBS willing, and Augusta willing. If things break my way, I would love to be able to go all the way to the year 2035. That would be my 50th. And, who knows, when we get there, maybe I’ll want to play a couple of extra holes.
Q. There is a song in “The Mikado” in which Ko-Ko lists things that would not be missed. For example, nuisances who write for autographs and people with irritating laughs. What in sports would you not miss if it were eliminated?
Nantz: That’s a great question. I would not miss—and I’m probably looking at this from a media perspective—all the talk and discussion now about television ratings. When I first started in the business, no one at home knew anything about the Nielsen ratings. Those were really in-house numbers that our sales crew would take over to Madison Avenue and try to sell the next golf tournament or football or basketball game off those numbers. But now, everybody thinks that he is some sort of closet expert on interpreting television ratings and crunching numbers. It’s so much out there in the public consciousness now.
Q. It’s true. Everyone seems to be discussing television numbers.
Nantz: Ratings! I get asked about them all the time. I work in the industry, and I’m here to tell you that like anything that involves numbers, they can be misleading. There can be all kinds of factors that are a part of [ratings] that people never take into consideration. Too often it just becomes something that tirelessly you have to answer questions about…. It’s a very easy, amateur view of the success or the failures of an individual or a sport right now because everybody always gets back to what the ratings were. But did they factor in weather? Some people maybe had outdoor activities. There are so many things, I don’t even want to rattle off the list. I get burned out on that. I wouldn’t miss [those discussions] if they went away.
Q. Anything else?
Nantz: I wouldn’t miss athletes who are ungrateful, athletes who don’t give back. Now, most of them are very generous. But there are some still who have a sense of entitlement, who think that the spoils of the life that comes with the million dollar contracts is something that is a birthright. It’s not! The chance to strike it big in your life, to be able to be lucky enough to play the PGA Tour or to play in the NFL…the odds of anyone ever making it to that level are so astronomical that once you get there, I really want you to be there with a grateful and open heart doing something more to give back to those who aren’t able to experience that. Sometimes, you see very generous attitudes. But I have the best seat in the house, and I see the athlete who won’t give an autograph or the athlete who spends his money excessively on some of the craziest things and doesn’t realize how hard it is to make that money for most people. I wouldn’t miss that.
Q. Jim, you wrote, “I realized that the key to an effective delivery is to be conversational.” One characteristic that strikes me about your style is the respect you have for your work, for history or tradition, and for your colleagues and the athletes you are covering. That seems lacking now to some extent in the media.
Nantz: I appreciate all those words, but I think it’s really a reflection of my father. That was his comportment. That’s the way he treated people, the way that I look at the world, the map that I saw as a young person. I think in the media—and there is so much media out there—everybody feels like they have to have an opinion or an answer about things, even when they don’t. Look at these anniversary shows or top 10 shows that everybody runs. Take, say, Tiger’s 1997 Masters win. In that documentary are sound bytes from people in the media that I didn’t even know were at the Masters that year. But they got in an interview setting and a producer rattled off a series of questions.
Q. It gets back to what you were saying about bluffing an answer.
Nantz: The worst thing in the world you can do in the media, in some people’s minds, is to say, “I just don’t know,” or “I wasn’t there,” or “I’m not the right guy to ask about that.” We don’t all have the answers, but everybody today looks like they have to be the ultimate expert on all things. It’s just not possible. I get asked to do some of these shows—the 50 greatest athletes or whatever—but that has spawned a whole new genre of these kind of documentary sound byte one-hour specials. I don’t do them anymore.
Q. Why?
Nantz: First, I just don’t feel like I have the breadth to be an expert on all things. And, second, if I am an expert on one of those subjects, I don’t want to be in the middle of a documentary that has a bunch of people who aren’t really experts on it and are bluffing their answers. You can’t have an answer to everything. Take sports-talk radio. People have got conditioned to where they have to have an opinion. You’re not going to be an interesting enough guest if you don’t come in and at least fake an answer. I’m not going to do that.
Q. You said that “Always By My Side” was “tantamount to writing my father’s eulogy in advance.” You wrote, “[Dad] loved his work—and he loved coming home to his family even more.” That sums up a happy and fulfilling life, doesn’t it?
Nantz: It really does. It’s something I really long for in my life because my life is on the road, by and large. In those halcyon days of your youth, you think back to the days when your dad walks into the house and you run to the door. Dinner is served at the table. It’s quiet. No distraction. You don’t know it at the time, but that’s a pretty sweet part of life right there, you know. There were just traditional, old-fashioned values that my father really represented. Did you read the hardcover or the paperback?
Q. The hardcover.
Nantz: Well, I wish you saw the paperback. My dad died seven weeks after the [hardcover] book came out. So I added a chapter for the paperback, about going through that. And that was the hardest part to write—how my father’s life ended. So, when I wrote that it was like writing my father’s eulogy while he was still alive, my father was oblivious to the fact that his boy was writing a book. And with Eli Spielman, my co-author, that whole Alzheimer’s angle hit really close to his family, too. We worked on this every day, including holidays, even if it was just for an hour. We wanted every story, every segue, to be spot on. We wanted a story that brought laughter and poignancy.
Q. Did you sense your father’s presence while you were writing the book?
Nantz: He was totally with me. We would write these chapters and then revise them. I wanted the book to flow naturally and not be just a collection of anecdotal stories. I wanted to be able to go naturally from one place right into the next. When we would finally knock off a chapter and it felt like it was whole and it was good enough, I would email it to my sister down in Houston. She would print it out and take it over to my dad’s bedside – he didn’t recognize anyone—and she would read those chapters over and over again. It was a very sweet thing to do. It was almost like she was just hoping somehow, some way, that this was resonating somewhere in my father’s mind.
Q. “Hello, friends” is your signature line. That is a tribute to him, isn’t it?
Nantz: It is. I openly thought there was a way that I needed to encode in my broadcast a way to say hello to my father or say something that was a tribute to him. At a golf tournament years ago, it just came out of the opening montage tease…. The last thing my dad could ever remember was his name. I’d say to him, “Hey, dad, What’s going on? What’s your name?” He’d say, “I’m Jim Nantz.” He’d always be able to say his name. Of course, eventually that went away. But shortly before that time, when I first said, “Hello, friends,” I said, “Hey, dad. I’m going to mention you this weekend. When I say ‘Jim Nantz’ on the air, I’m speaking to you. My name is your name.” I always felt that that was a way of reaching my father at the time. His nurses always had the updated on-air schedule, so I had the comfort of knowing that my broadcast at the very least was always playing in his room.
Q. In your book you wrote about a TV special you produced in 2007, “Jim Nantz Remembers Augusta: The 1960 Masters,” which was a colorization of Arnold Palmer’s Masters’ victory. The show also helped bring about a reconciliation between Palmer and Ken Venturi…
Nantz: Thank you for bringing that up. I don’t often get asked about that, but it was a really important thing for me.
Q. About that, you wrote, “Good people with good stories—my dad would have loved it. To him, that was what sports, and sportsmanship, were all about. My dad would not have hesitated to trade them all in for this one night in Los Angeles…. In his eyes, this would have been his son’s greatest accomplishment in a year unlike any other.” Was that your “One Shining Moment?”
Nantz: In that year, I think, my father would have loved the fact that I was part of a process that brought these two distinguished gentlemen together after so many years where maybe there had been conflict, particularly for Kenny, who had a hard time letting go of the 1958 Masters. And my point was, my father would have been very proud that I got to call all those events in that year. But he would have been particularly proud of the fact that I played the role of peacemaker. That was my father. He really had no enemies that I could ever imagine or knew of. My father was taken advantage of by people, I believe, as I look back on his life because he was easy prey. He trusted people, and that cost him what little money he had to invest. Still, you never heard him complain about it. When he would see that there was an argument or a disagreement with others, he would try to intercede and try to help bring people together. He was a uniter, a believer.
Q. Nothing wrong with that.
Nantz: You know, that’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. One time I asked John Wooden how he managed to win all those championships when there was so much turmoil on college campuses at the time. “How did you lead?” is basically what I asked him.
Q. What did he say?
Nantz: He told me that it’s better to trust and be disappointed some of the time than to never trust and therefore be disappointed all the time. In other words, if you’re going to live your life looking through a prism of doubt or cynicism or negativity, you’re never going to be happy. You’re not going to allow the best to come out. You’re not going to be able to absorb the best of an individual. But when you do trust, you’re going to get the best of everything. Sure, there will be a letdown from time to time, but at least you’re approaching it from an angle of openness. I think of that line many times from coach Wooden. I’ve attached it to the way my father lived his life. That’s the perfect summation of the way my father looked at the world.
Q. It’s a positive outlook,
Nantz: Yes. I’ve been around some negative people. We all have. And it’s never pleasant. It’s not rewarding. It’s not fulfilling. But the people who are the real achievers are those who have that positive spirit. Those who trust and know they’re going to be disappointed some of the time, they allow you to reach greater heights. They don’t restrict it.
Q. Let’s talk about the Nantz National Alzheimer Center. What is your role with it, and what do you hope to accomplish?
Nantz: What I’m trying to do is raise money and awareness for Alzheimer’s and all dementing illnesses and, really, the field of neurology that brings so many people into the equation. And let them know that down in the neurological institute at Methodist Hospital in Houston, where we have now the Nantz National Alzheimer Center, we’re aggressively and ambitiously trying to take on all of these diseases and illnesses and find a way to treat, prevent, and ultimately cure all of the above. I want to do all that I can both from my individual giving, which I’m making a lifetime commitment to do, and also in an ambassadorial role as someone who’s out front and is able to use the platform that I have.
Q. And with people living longer, Alzheimer’s disease is an illness that is affecting more and more families.
Nantz: The numbers that are being projected just a few years down the road are staggering. The other thing is, it’s been a hot-button item this year with the helmet-to-helmet collisions in the NFL, head traumas and how they may lead to later-life dementing illness. The early research is showing that there is definitely a tie between head traumas in young people and later-life dementing illness.
Q. Your father had a severe head injury as a young man.
Nantz: My dad played football at Guilford College. He was kicked in the side of the head—this was in the leather helmet era—while trying to block a punt and busted his eardrum. That injury was something he talked about incessantly. He had no hearing in that ear from that injury. He had ringing in his head for 40-plus years. He had drainage issues and several surgeries that were never able to quite fix the problem that he always attributed to that football injury. He lived a good part of his life with strong effects from that one head trauma.
Q. What happened?
Nantz: Here was this strong, physically fit, strapping, life-of-the-part 66-year-old man who looked like he was 50. And one day, all of a sudden, he was attending a golf tournament. Out of the blue, he has a mini stroke, which leads to another and another shortly after that, all in the span of maybe three or four months. And life as he knew it was never the same again. What happened? Where did that come from? Could it possibly have been because of a concussion that was not diagnosed when he was a college student? You can’t tell me it wasn’t related, that it didn’t cause the onset of his Alzheimer’s. It’s not just for people in their 80s and 90s.
Q. It affects people younger than that.
Nantz: This is a lot more prevalent than people think. I think the illness has been underchampioned—if that’s such a word. It’s definitely underfunded by the government. And if it means that someday I’ve got to figure out a way to climb the steps to the U.S. Capitol to beg for more government research dollars, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do whatever it takes. I’m ready to take on this challenge.
Q. The Nantz Center is not named for you, is it?
Nantz: That is named after my dad and is a tribute to my mother and sister. They represent the millions of people who have suddenly had to step into the thankless role as caregivers that does not ever get the attention or appreciation of how lives are affected by one individual with Alzheimer’s. There’s not one victim here. There’s never just one, because there’s always the caregiver part of it, too. It’s very sad. I am heartened by the fact that we have a great team in place in Houston.
