Jim Nantz insists 99% of his calls are not premeditated

Jim Nantz is often accused of scripting too many of his famous calls, but the iconic play-by-play voice insists that’s not the case.

Nantz joined this week’s episode of the Vanity Index Podcast. And during the show, Nantz reflected on some of his famous calls, including “a win for the ages!” when Tiger Woods won the 1997 Masters, the first major championship of his career. Nantz has long admitted he scripted that call because he had the time to plan it with Woods having a big lead when he teed off on Sunday. And Nantz believed it was his duty to craft a call that would make the broadcasters he looked up to proud. But according to Nantz, premeditating calls is the rarity, not the norm.

“I will tell you that 99% of the time, it just happens,” Nantz said. “And maybe, as he’s stepping into the putt – take Rory (McIlroy) from last year – you think, ‘Wow, what do you say here, how do you sum it up?’ And he knocked it in and I said, ‘the long journey is over, McIlroy has his masterpiece.’ I didn’t have it written down. I didn’t have that pre-planned.

“Now when Tiger won in 2019, no idea he was gonna win even though he was around the lead. Did any of us think he was actually gonna pull that off until he got down to 12 and things went haywire for the rest of the field?”

Nantz said he asked whether Tiger’s kids were in attendance earlier in the round, and was told they were not going to be there. But on the final hole, CBS cut to a shot of Tiger’s children standing with his mother.

“I felt overcome with the fact that the kids were gonna see this, just as a parent,” Nantz said. “As he’s getting ready to stand over that winning putt, I’m truly like, ‘What am I gonna say here?’ Just thinking of the kids, the glory of them seeing their father.”

And that’s when Nantz came up with, “‘the return to glory,’ and when I said it, I said, ‘what does that mean?’” Nantz said he has since grown to appreciate the call, particularly after hearing Tiger recite it back to him a couple of years ago.

Maybe Nantz gets accused of scripting calls because he is such a wordsmith and tends to meet the moment, which is a testament to how great he is at the job. But Nantz also gets accused of scripting calls because he has scripted calls.

Nantz gave the example of the 1997 Masters, which he felt a responsibility to think through before getting behind a microphone, but there are others. Nantz used “jackpot, Kansas City” for the Super Bowl LVIII game-winner, a reference to Las Vegas being the host city. It was also an ode to Brent Musburger, who frequently used “jackpot, baby” as his touchdown call after the Raiders moved to Vegas. Nantz has claimed he only started thinking about the call as Kansas City was in the midst of their final drive, but it still wasn’t quite impromptu.

And then there was the 2004 men’s college basketball national championship game, which UConn won, led by Emeka Okafor. Nantz’s final call was a play on Emeka Okafor’s name, referring to UConn as the “mecca of college basketball.”

Last summer on the Awful Announcing Podcast, Verne Lundquist chuckled at Nantz’s 2004 call, saying it still makes him cringe. “I’ve always trusted my instincts,” Lundquist said of his own desire to always avoid scripting calls throughout his illustrious sportscasting career.

Most of Nantz’s scripted calls have landed well, but some, such as his 2004 UConn call were a miss. But as one of the most-respected broadcasters in sports history, it’s hard to argue with anything Nantz has done in his career. And scripting one percent, or maybe more, of his calls seems to have worked out just fine for him.