http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2014/12/10/7353359/nerve-lundquist-interview
I took a semester out of college and interned for Golf Digest magazine for parts of two years in the mid-90s. While I was there, there was one Wednesday night in February when I saw Verne Lundquist commentate on a basketball game somewhere on the East Coast, and then the next afternoon he was out at Pebble Beach doing the Thursday afternoon broadcast at the AT&T National Pro-Am or whatever that golf tournament was called at the time. This seemed like quite a logistical contortion, so the next week I got one of my editors to hook with me up with a producer at CBS, and I wound up calling Lundquist at his house in Steamboat Springs and getting a delightful anecdote from him about how this particular trip was the closest he'd ever come to missing the start of a broadcast, how he raced from whichever airport it was out to the tower behind the 16th green and clambered up it with 10 minutes to go before airtime. I babbled on about how much I'd loved his call of Jack Nicklaus at the 71st hole at the 1986 Masters, and he was absolutely charming and wonderful...even though he's lost a few MPH off his fastball in recent years (as happens to pretty much every aging commentator), this interview reminded me just how much I enjoy Lundquist's work in every sense.
If you could swap places with any single commentator and go back in time to watch all of the events that person watched from the position in which he watched them, who would you pick? I don't quite think I'd pick Lundquist, but he might well crack my Top 5.
I took a semester out of college and interned for Golf Digest magazine for parts of two years in the mid-90s. While I was there, there was one Wednesday night in February when I saw Verne Lundquist commentate on a basketball game somewhere on the East Coast, and then the next afternoon he was out at Pebble Beach doing the Thursday afternoon broadcast at the AT&T National Pro-Am or whatever that golf tournament was called at the time. This seemed like quite a logistical contortion, so the next week I got one of my editors to hook with me up with a producer at CBS, and I wound up calling Lundquist at his house in Steamboat Springs and getting a delightful anecdote from him about how this particular trip was the closest he'd ever come to missing the start of a broadcast, how he raced from whichever airport it was out to the tower behind the 16th green and clambered up it with 10 minutes to go before airtime. I babbled on about how much I'd loved his call of Jack Nicklaus at the 71st hole at the 1986 Masters, and he was absolutely charming and wonderful...even though he's lost a few MPH off his fastball in recent years (as happens to pretty much every aging commentator), this interview reminded me just how much I enjoy Lundquist's work in every sense.
If you could swap places with any single commentator and go back in time to watch all of the events that person watched from the position in which he watched them, who would you pick? I don't quite think I'd pick Lundquist, but he might well crack my Top 5.