Featured Image Credit: Getty
Topics: Golf
Chris Nee
What does it take for a leading broadcaster to earn a rebuke and a ban from covering the Masters at Augusta? Not a lot, it turns out.
Officials at the Augusta National Golf Club, where the Masters has been hosted for 90 years, expect strict adherence to some very particular rules that include not sneaking into a bunker to scoop sand into a beer cup and not urinating off a bridge while playing a hole.
There are plenty of rules that are a little more picky and they're of great importance to the Masters broadcast partners who need to keep the infamously fussy club onside.
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Even bona-fide legends of broadcasting can fall foul of the Georgia club's expectations, as one CBS reporter discovered to his cost some years ago.
The great Jack Nicklaus won the Masters for the third time in 1966. Then, as now, CBS had the broadcast.
As fans crowded the green on the 18th hole at the end of an epic 18-hole play-off, reporter Jack Whitaker referred to the "mob scene" surrounding Nicklaus' final putt and upset Augusta club president Clifford Roberts.
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According to Sports Broadcast Journal columnist Rich Podolsky, Whitaker then neglected to mention the imminent Green Jacket ceremony in his need to conclude the late-running broadcast and hand over to CBS news colossus Walter Cronkite.
"As a result, Roberts told CBS that it had to remove Whitaker from the broadcast of the Masters," writes Podolsky, who quotes Roberts' assertion that "We don't have mobs at Augusta."
"The ban lasted six years before Jack was allowed to return to the telecast in 1972."
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Roberts was born in 1894 and co-founded the Augusta National. He serves as its president between 1931 and 1976, creating and running the Masters as chairman.
After suffering with ill health and stepping down in the previous year, he died by suicide in 1977.
Whitaker passed away at the age of 95 in 2019, regarded by Podolsky and others as a titan of his profession. But money talks, and the CBS needs the Masters.
"Sidelining Whitaker drew outrage from sportswriters all over the country," adds Podolsky.
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"But CBS felt that it had no choice. CBS’ Masters deal was always on a year-to-year renewal. No long-term deal ever. If it didn’t do as Roberts ordered, Roone Arledge and ABC were waiting in the wings."