Sports media personalities’ eating preferences often draw some discussion, whether it’s Dan Orlovsky’s avoidance of seasonings or Al Michaels’s anti-vegetable stance. And CBS’ Jim Nantz is no stranger to that discussion, revealing in a first-person Golf Digest piece in 2016 that he carries a wallet photo of how burnt he likes his toast to convince wait staff to bring it the way he wants.
Ahead of his call of Super Bowl LVIII Sunday, Nantz had another interesting food discussion. It’s perhaps not quite as shocking as his toast take, or as most things from Orlovsky, or as Michaels’ diet, or Michael Kay only recently trying an egg, but it is notable. As part of a larger profile from Sam Farmer of The Los Angeles Times, Nantz talked about eating stadium popcorn during breaks in the action, and how NFL games are the only time he eats hot dogs.
“I’m going against every rule in live television,” he said. “I’m a popcorn fanatic. Crispy stadium popcorn. I’m snacking on foods that can actually get caught in your throat and put you in the blue tent for a couple of calls.”
He ranks popcorn as his second-favorite food to stone crab, which would be even tougher to eat while on air. He has a reservation for a stone-crab dinner in Las Vegas the night before the Super Bowl.
Nantz eats a hot dog at halftime, too, but only devours those during the NFL season. He doesn’t have time to fiddle around with those little packets of ketchup so he travels with his own bottle. He bends at the waist when he’s eating as not to drip ketchup on his clothing.
By his count, he eats 22 hot dogs per year — matching the number of games he calls — but it’s actually fewer than that because he always tosses the last bite.
“Makes me feel like I didn’t eat the whole thing,” he said.
That’s a bit of an odd ritual, but hey, it’s sports, and odd rituals are plentiful here. But it is interesting that hot dogs are so specifically tied to the NFL for Nantz. That maybe fits with the piece’s larger focus on his memories, though, from watching the first game in New Orleans Saints history in 1967 with his dad (and remembering the smell of “a mixture of cigar smoke and hot dogs on the grill” as he walked through tailgaters in the parking lot, a smell that still brings up memories for him entering stadiums) to him visiting his old house and obtaining his old pool table from the man who lives there now to his discussion of the phone he has from Giants Stadium, where he got the call in 1985 that CBS wanted to hire him:
Look what Jim Nantz has on his wall. pic.twitter.com/PRUzfNPMwi
— Sam Farmer (@LATimesfarmer) February 6, 2024
And the whole piece is a notable look back at what’s been a remarkable career for Nantz, who is set to call his seventh Super Bowl (he also served as host for two before that) Sunday. And the hot dog and popcorn broadcasting fuel certainly seems to be working for him.
