Al Michaels’ 1-word text to Jim Nantz perfectly captured Rory McIlroy’s Masters

It’s possible no two men have witnessed more iconic sports moments than Al Michaels and Jim Nantz.

Up until several years ago, Michaels held the title of the voice of American sports, having called everything from the Super Bowl to the Miracle on Ice with his distinct blend of avuncular wit and genuine fascination. When Michaels stepped down from NBC to join Amazon’s Thursday Night Football coverage, he handed the baton to Nantz, whose more syrupy style of calling the NFL, NCAA and pro golf replaced Michaels’ “Fun Uncle” schtick with a “Voice of God” sensibility.

These differences are minor. Both broadcasters share a unique gift for narrating the greatest moments in American sports with perfect pitch. They also share another similarity: a love affair with the Masters.

Michaels never had the opportunity to call golf’s first major, which CBS has broadcast for the last seven decades. Nantz has been on the call for 40 years. But in an appearance on the Rich Eisen Show on Monday, Nantz admitted that Michaels is a keen viewer of the happenings at Augusta National.

“Our good friend Al Michaels is a huge Masters follower and fan,” Nantz told Eisen. “He writes me after these Masters telecasts when they’re really good [like this year’s was], and he says, ‘There’s no sporting event like it. There’s nothing in terms of television coverage that can compare.'”

Of course, this year’s Masters TV coverage proved particularly memorable. Not only did CBS’s cameras capture Rory McIlroy’s thrilling Grand Slam victory in real-time, they also did so with an artist’s touch, with director Steve Milton leading a telecast that produced some of the event’s most enduring images, like the entirety of McIlroy’s teary six-minute walk from the 18th green to the scoring room.

Michaels was watching with an expert eye. In his decades working on some of the sports world’s most prominent broadcast teams, he learned what it takes to turn a remarkable moment into an iconic image — and he knew McIlroy’s victory was much more than a moment.

“He called it ‘cinema’,” Nantz said. “It’s cinematic.”

In his interview with Eisen, Nantz admitted he was touched by Michaels’ sentiment.

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“I think that’s the way we all try to approach it,” he said. “We keep our words to a minimum, and we hope they have punch and power. We try to let this thing have the air and the space and the breath that it needs to play all the shots. We have that wonderful melody and undercurrent, the Augusta theme. It adds up almost like a dream sequence disguised as a sporting event.”

Indeed, McIlroy’s final round at Augusta National was every bit a dream sequence. Even Nantz’s final call — “The long journey is over … McIlroy has his masterpiece!” — spoke to the essential disbelief at the center of McIlroy’s Masters moment.

That, Nantz says, is the secret sauce that makes the Masters: cinema. Sports are much more than the sum of their parts, as Michaels and Nantz know well. At their best, our favorite games come to represent something much larger. And at the Masters, well, everything feels bigger.

“It’s my favorite event,” Nantz said. “I’ve been asked that question for years, and it’s always a tough thing to [give the perception of] slighting something else, but there’s nothing quite like that. And when you combine it with a story as big as Rory going for the career Grand Slam and the crazy odyssey/journey he took to close it all out? It was pure magic, man. I appreciate it a month later that we’re still talking about it. Everywhere I go I hear about it multiple times. Golf fans and non-golf fans were touched by what they saw that day.”

To hear the entirety of Nantz’s interview with Eisen, you can check out the link below — and to read more about Nantz’s Masters history, you can check out GOLF’s profile of the man here.