We may never see a bigger moment in the history of sports than Tiger Woods’ improbable victory at The Masters in 2019.
However, Clive Tyldesley, who was lead broadcaster in the UK for ITV at many a World Cup, appeared on The Bunkered Podcast this week, believes that Jim Nantz did a disservice to the iconic moment by not providing analysis in the two-and-a-half minutes after his initial call of “a return to glory”.
The general sentiment in the sports world is that Nantz did a good job by allowing the moment to speak for itself, but Tyldesley thought Nantz needed to provide more context.
“It’s been talked about in our community as to whether it was great commentary or slightly self-indulgent,” said Tyldesley. “Tiger shook hands with about 25 people – and hugged several of them – between leaving the green and arriving at the scorers’ hut. Nantz didn’t identify any of them.
“I don’t think that’s very good journalism. I want to know who the family are and who the people are. This was a huge moment.”
Tyldesley then thought back to advice he’d received from his mentor Reg Gutteridge.
“Reg used to say to me, with a great goal, you’ve got to do better than ‘oh amazing, incredible, fantastic’. You’ve got to give it some context. It’s got to be tomorrow morning’s headline. That’s what I want to hear five seconds, ten seconds after the goal. Why is this goal so important?”
“Nantz certainly had a lot of thinking time to try to analyse in his mind and fathom exactly what we were seeing, something that we probably never thought we would see – Tiger winning another major championship. The most important golfer of the modern era in one of the two greatest events in our world and he won it, and won it in the way that he did.
“So he had plenty of time to pick some words. I think to give it no words was a little bit of a waste of a moment. We needed some facts. We needed to know who the heck these people were that he was getting excited with.
“But that’s my opinion. There are some people who’ve written that it was the greatest piece of sports commentary of all time.”
Here is the full clip of Nantz’ 2019 call.
Roaring back.#themasters pic.twitter.com/nlTwxWJW8X
— The Masters (@TheMasters) April 14, 2019
Was more context necessary? Or was letting the moment breathe the correct approach?
