Veteran CBS broadcaster retiring
CBS Sports broadcaster Verne Lundquist announced he’ll be retiring after calling the 2024 Mater in April – his 40th tournament like no other.
Lundquist, 83, will be ending a broadcast career that included calling Dallas Cowboys football, SEC football and basketball and NCAA March Madness.
He’ll be best remembered for making the call for perhaps the slowest-falling golf ball Nike ever produced.
It came during the final round of the 2005 Masters when Tiger Woods’s chip from behind Augusta National’s 16th green hung on for its national TV close-up before finding the bottom of the cup and a place in sports broadcasting history.
Verne Lundquist made a Masters call for the ages
From James Colgan of Golf.com, here’s how that shot went down in the booth for Lundquist and his broadcast partner, Lanny Wadkins:
“’There’s a good chance he doesn’t get this inside … this inside the mark of [Chris DiMarco’s] ball,’ Wadkins scoffed.”
“You know the rest. A perfect chip. A brief pause of the ball on the edge of the hole. And then … chaos.
“Woods exploded. The crowd exploded. Lundquist exploded.
“’Oh … my … goodness… OH WOW! … In your LIFE have you ever seen anything like that?’”
“Woods had made the shot of his Masters life, and Lundquist had made the call of his.”
Lundquist has been on every Masters broadcast but one since 1983,
“It is strange to imagine a world in which Lundquist will no longer visit America’s living room during the second week in April. It is even stranger to imagine a world in which, after four decades as CBS’s announcer du jour, Lundquist’s voice may no longer be present at any major sporting event on the calendar,” Golf.com continued.
He started work as a sports anchor for WFAA in Dallas and KTBC in Austin, then became the radio voice of the Dallas Cowboys in 1967, a job he did until 1984. He went network in 1974 when he joined ABC, then left for CBS in 1982, Yahoo Sports reported.
The Athletic reported: “For the last three years, he hinted that he may be nearing retirement, saying in 2022 that his goal was to get to 40 Masters. Much of that time, he has been set up in a tower above the famous 16th green.”
This year’s Masters will be held April 11-14 and broadcast on CBS.
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Featured image of B=Verne Lundquist calling NCAA basketball courtesy of Wikipedia
