The only Masters story Jim Nantz won’t tell

The most famous voice in sports begins his breakfast order with a peculiar adjustment to the menu.

“You know the toast,” Jim Nantz tells our server, a smile forming at the corners of his mouth. “I’ll do the toast … Nantz-style.”

From the moment Nantz arrived at The Gallery at Pebble Beach one morning in January, it was clear he was not in a hurry. The day was cool and dense, and Nantz floated into the greasy-spoon breakfast joint dressed just as you might expect: sporting pleated slacks, a slim-fit quarter-zip and an air of unpracticed, warm conviviality.

It was his first journey to The Gallery in some time, and though the restaurant was jammed in the morning rush, something funny happened when he walked through the door: The celebrity was starstruck.  

Nantz paused living full-time in Pebble Beach several years back to accommodate his travel schedule, but part of him never left town. He says he feels a sense of clarity when he’s here, but at The Gallery, he might also feel a sense of community. His first three conversations in the restaurant were with the staff, whom he greeted with hugs, and who placed a brown to-go cup of hot black coffee in his hands without asking. After a few minutes of chitchat, he was interrupted by one of the restaurant’s patrons, and then another, and then another.

Just as it appeared as if Jim Nantz knew everyone in the restaurant, he turned to the table and ordered breakfast with Nantz-style toast, and the waitress, evidently a newbie, paused politely.

“And by Nantz-style, you mean…?”

“Oh, just put it through the toaster twice,” he said.

I promised I would not ask Jim Nantz about his affinity for burnt toast. The purpose of our meeting was to discuss his 40th year as the voice of the Masters, and under those auspices, there is a persuasive argument that Nantz’s bread preference is the single least interesting thing about him. And yet, 40 years later, toast is an irrefutable piece of his lore.

The legend dates back nearly a decade, to a story written by Golf Digest’s Guy Yocom. In the story, Nantz suggested he carried a photo of burnt toast in his wallet to help him streamline his breakfast order. (“The card was a magazine picture of two pieces of smoldering toast coming out of the toaster,” Nantz says. “You could see the smoke and everything.”)

The wallet photo was an aside in a much larger story, but it got picked up in the early days of social media and went nuclear. After maintaining his off-camera anonymity for years, people seemed to think the story revealed something sordid about Nantz — that America’s favorite sports guy clung to a strikingly two-dimensional palate, or worse, a gluten-filled sense of entitlement.

Nantz finds the whole ordeal deeply funny, if only because the actual origin of the legend was a prank. The wallet photo was a gag gift from Nantz’s longtime assistant, Melissa Miller. Yocom, a longtime friend and co-author, was the target. When the two met for breakfast to conduct an interview for a forthcoming Masters story, Nantz ordered his special brand of toast (he does like it “crispy”) with his laminated wallet card.

“I made sure [Yocom] saw the card, and when he asked about it, I said, ‘Well, that card has saved me a lot of hours,’” Nantz said. “I told Guy, ‘Do the math with me. I eat toast six days a week’  — which, by the way, I eat toast about once a month — ‘The toast comes out and it’s not done. Now the eggs come out, but the toast has got to be sent back because it’s not burned. So now I finished my eggs, but I’ve lost 10 minutes waiting.”

“Ten minutes, six days a week — that’s an hour a week. Now there’s 52 weeks in a year,” Nantz said. “I’m rounding down that I’m saving two days a year.”

Nantz laughed as he delivered the punchline, which was rendered funny by a deeper kernel of truth: That it would not be entirely unreasonable for Jim Nantz to think about his life in terms of the seconds, minutes or days lost in pursuit of the proper toast.

The secret ingredient in Nantz’s 40 years as the voice of American sports is time. Arguably no man in the history of sports on TV has had a better grasp of it. To become him, you must know not just how to speak, but when, and for how long. When he is on TV, Nantz is judged by his ability to manipulate time itself — to punctuate events quickly, navigate silences carefully, and linger when the moment asks.

“When do you need Jim Nantz?” Sellers Shy, Nantz’s longtime friend and CBS golf producer, asks the question and then answers it, rattling off a handful of the delicate dilemmas Nantz has tended to in just the last 12 months. “You need Jim Nantz when you need to fill a 4-hour show without showing a golf shot. You need Jim Nantz when Grayson Murray passes, and you need to go to air in 30 seconds. You need Jim Nantz when protestors storm the green on the 18th hole of the tournament.”

But time has also taken something from Nantz. Much of his life has been spent on airplanes, in hotel rooms, and orbiting the temporary aluminum towers built onto golf courses. He has three children, and two of them are still in school. His life does not allow for many consecutive days of class pickups.

In other words, when the camera turns off, Nantz is no less vulnerable to time’s frailties: Hours lost away from home, minutes bungled in transit, seconds waiting for toast.

Nantz gave up working the NCAA Tournament in March 2023 to spend more time with his family. It was a graceful exit, but a notable one: It was the first time his work schedule shrank in ages.

“He told me recently, ‘I miss March Madness, but I don’t miss it,’” said Fred Couples, Nantz’s longtime friend. “I can relate to what he’s saying. He’s got two young kids, and another one all grown up. He’s turning 66. He’s like everyone else.”

Forty Masters will teach a man something. One lesson is that time is not infinite. One day, Jim Nantz will not participate in golf’s April tradition, and he knows that. He is somewhere on the “second nine” of his Augusta National journey, to borrow the club’s parlance, and only the golf gods know which hole he’s on. For most people of his status, the mere suggestion of career mortality would be enough to set off a mad dash to the finish line — an effort to jam as much life into however little time remained.  

As we waited for breakfast, though, Jim Nantz appeared … peaceful. His movements were smooth and unhurried. My requests for an approximate timeline for our breakfast at The Gallery were given an opaque answer: As long as Jim wants. If Nantz is a man worried about The End, he sure isn’t acting like it.

“I like to live in the moment,” he says. “It’s not that I don’t know the end exists, it’s just that I don’t like to focus on it.”

We talked for more than an hour before our food arrived — so long that I wondered if I was eating into his day on one of the most precious weeks of his year. Before I could ask, the waitress placed his toast on the table.

It was charred beyond recognition, but Nantz did not send it back.

“You see this?” he asked, taking a bite out of the blackened wheat. “This is overdone.”

“I DON’T MEAN to steal your morning,” Nantz said as he fired up a golf cart outside of The Gallery a short while later. He grinned.

“But I think you’ll like this.”

We were off to his home, a Mission Revival-style mansion just up the hill from the first tee box at Pebble Beach. Oddly, the house is almost as famous as its owner, though most of its allure can be found in the backyard, where a scaled-down replica of Pebble Beach’s famed 7th hole rests against a nest of Cypress trees.

Nantz is shockingly tall — six feet two — and surprisingly thin. His eyes are coral blue, and his hair is a careful coiffe of brown with a flash of gray. Through some combination of his fame and disposition, he has been fashioned into a kind of model for the middle-aged, All-American man. His clothing skews professorial — a collection of trim quarter-zips, colorful ties and pastel shirts that would leave him equally qualified to work as the headmaster of a private school.

Anyone who has spent even a few minutes around Nantz knows the vision is an illusion. Nantz, now 65, has never grown up.

“He struggles to tie a tie,” said Ian Baker-Finch, Nantz’s longtime CBS Golf boothmate. “I’m serious. He has to wear one every day of his life, but he struggles still to get it tied straight.”  

When I asked Dottie Pepper to confirm this story, Nantz’s on-course reporter laughed.

“He has almost no hand-eye coordination,” Pepper said, recounting a commercial shoot in which Pepper and Nantz had to toss a set of car keys to a dog.

“He couldn’t do it. I think we got one good take in an hour,” Pepper said. “It was unbelievable.”

Nantz can be deadly serious, but moments of childhood innocence are no act. To be around Nantz is to know, almost immediately, that he is keenly aware of his good fortune. He is living his boyhood dream, and he’s in no rush to wake up. His backyard par-3 is the physical manifestation of his inner child — as is its mirror image at Nantz’s Nashville home of Augusta National’s 13th hole.

Nantz was once a Division I college golfer, but he has always been better at talking sports than playing them. He maintains he was recruited for the Houston golf team mostly for his people skills. When he was a student at Houston, his golf coach, the legendary Dave Williams, addressed the difference directly.

“Some of you are going to play on the PGA Tour,” Williams used to tell the team. “But Jim Nantz is going to be President.”

Nantz had other plans. Even as a child, he’d dreamt of a life on television. In a childhood split between Charlotte, New Orleans, Oakland and Colts Neck, N.J., sports were one of the lone constants. He obsessed over sports TV broadcasts, mesmerized by the authority and intellect of their narrators. At the 1979 Houston Open, while Nantz was in college, his friend (and future PGA Tour pro) Blaine McAllister dared him to go to NBC’s hospitality suite and request an audience with the legendary producer Don Ohlmeyer. To Nantz’s surprise, Ohlmeyer agreed to the meeting. He granted Nantz his first TV job on the spot, naming the teenager a “runner” for the rest of the weekend. Eight years later, Nantz was on the call for the Masters on CBS.

Today, Nantz talks about his career as if he was born under a lucky star, but his history suggests otherwise. A self-imposed deadline marked the first chapter of his professional life: Make it into a national sports TV job by 30, or leave the industry altogether to pitch in with his father’s furniture business. With that deadline looming, Nantz spent his early 20s in a sprint, crisscrossing the United States at various local news stations, working strange hours and picking up all manner of side-gigs. Within a few years, his tapes were circulating the major TV networks without his knowledge. CBS Sports called in August 1985, a few months after his 26th birthday.

“Jim literally has a photographic memory,” said Sean McManus, Nantz’s longtime boss at CBS. “I mean, he could tell you what happened on Thursday afternoon at the Masters in 2003, but his memory for meeting people and remembering their names and something about them? I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s extraordinary.”

Nantz’s tax returns simplified after he joined CBS, but his life did not. He began working four sports for the network and spending north of 200 days on the road. A frenetic life kicked into overdrive.

Nantz watched as his work altered his relationship with time. He made “seriously good friends” in at least 25 cities throughout the U.S., according to McManus, but overlapped with them only when work brought him in their orbit. The fellow members of CBS’s traveling circus became his family, and vice versa.

It helped that he was used to the movement. Nantz’s family relocated often throughout his childhood to support his father’s career. He has credited the frequent turnover for softening a regional accent from his dialect, but he was affected by the transience of his childhood in other ways.

“He is a tremendous sap,” Pepper says. “He’s very sensitive and emotional.”

In the absence of a place to call home, Nantz developed an attachment to physical pieces of the past. His home is littered with keepsakes: A limited-edition golf cart belonging to his longtime broadcast partner, Ken Venturi; a locker from Bel-Air Country Club he used to split with Venturi; a tremendous (and ancient) pool table, rescued from the basement of one of his childhood homes in southern New Jersey. Even our breakfast table at The Gallery has an emotional attachment: Arnold Palmer bequeathed it to Nantz after he died in 2016.

As we walked through his home, it struck me that Nantz’s nostalgia seemed to define his relationship with time. He was not clinging to the past, like so many successful people seemed to do. He was living within it, transacting with his memories in real-time — and keeping the people at the center of those memories alive in his thoughts.

Nantz’s father, Jim II, is the most striking example of this approach. For the first thirty years of Nantz’s life, Nantz and his father were inseparable. They shared a dream of traveling the country with CBS, living the ultimate sporting road trip from the Super Bowl to the Final Four to the Masters. Nantz’s father was 66 when doctors diagnosed him with Alzheimer’s in 1996, setting off a 13-year journey with the disease that robbed him of his mind and prematurely ended his life. Nantz remembers how young and vigorous his namesake seemed at the time of his diagnosis — and how quickly he deteriorated. Nantz will turn 66 in May.

“I think about my Dad, and how hard he worked,” Nantz said. “I’ve been luxuriating at Augusta National since my 20s, and sometimes I look around and say, what am I doing? My dad deserved this.”

It is fitting that Nantz’s most famous keepsake is a nod to his father — a gift from the boy who never grew up to the man who gave him so much.

It is, like the rest of Nantz’s mementos, a piece of his everyday life: A simple two-word welcome he has used to start his broadcasts since the ’90s.

Hello, friends.

“Even now, for that little moment, I feel like I’m connecting with my dad,” Nantz said. “I feel like I’m talking to him.”

YEARS AGO, Jim Nantz did something out of character.

He could not help himself. He looked ahead.

Nantz claims he was always captivated by the idea of retiring after 50 Masters in the booth. Fifty was a large, round number. It would also allow Nantz to call the tournament until he was 75 — a time when he might reasonably expect to step away from broadcasting. He told a few reporters that he planned to retire after the big 5-0, and the story made modest headlines. Then Nantz met the legendary broadcaster Jack Whitaker for a drink.

“He said, ‘Well, you have to do 51.’ I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well 2036, that will be the 100th playing of the Masters and you need to be there.”

Nantz initially accepted Whitaker’s plan, but as the years progressed, he grew weary of it. On one hand, it felt gaudy and presumptuous to assume he’d make it to 51 Masters; on the other, who was Nantz to say he’d be ready to give up the gig so soon?

“I always said the retirement date with a wink,” he said.

I asked Nantz how he thought about his relationship with time, and he paused slightly.

“Look, I get why this is a story, but I’m not counting down the days until the end of my childhood dream. I’m just not.”

Truth be told, Nantz has never been fond of deadlines. When he first told the Whitaker story publicly, word got back to Nantz’s buddies on the production team, including an 18th tower supervisor named Kevin McHale. As a gag, McHale purchased a tremendous countdown clock, plugged in the date of the 2036 Masters, and hung it in the 18th tower for Nantz to see.

“Of course I had a good laugh about it, but then we were on the road for weeks in a row, and the clock kept coming with us,” Nantz said. “So I’m facing the cameras, and all I can see is this clock counting down saying, you know, 20 years, 268 days, 22 hours, 15 minutes and 12 seconds.”

After a few weeks, Nantz pulled McHale aside.

“That clock is driving me crazy,” he told McHale. “Please, I get it. It was funny. It is funny. But looking at it, I’m feeling like I’m watching my life go by. I don’t like it.”

The clock story belies an interesting truth, and not just about the passage of time: for a man who lives in front of a camera, Nantz loathes the limelight. He occasionally baits the sports press with headlines, but he would much rather endure a lifetime of soggy bread than 10 minutes of haughty reflections about his “legacy.”  

“He’s beloved because it’s not about Jim,” Dottie Pepper said. “It’s about taking time to do things the right way, all the time.”

Given these traits, it is perhaps not surprising that Nantz has maintained a good relationship with Augusta National. The Masters is famously nostalgic and quality-obsessed, with little patience for self-aggrandization. Its broadcaster fits a similar billing.

“Sixty million people watched the AFC Championship Game,” Nantz’s current boss, CBS Sports chairman David Berson, said. “But golf is Jim’s love.”  

At 65, the Masters has become a Nantz keepsake unto itself. His life can be charted through the events of tournament history, from his first career-defining line (‘The Bear has come out of hibernation’) in ’86, to the high watermark of his father’s athletic life: Becoming the first person to try on Fred Couples’ green jacket after his ’92 victory.

“I don’t know why I handed it to him,” Couples says now. “But I’m happy I did.”

As he closed in on his 40th Masters, Nantz seemed undecided about his future at the event. Maybe he’ll do 51. Maybe he’ll do 55. Maybe he won’t even get to 50.

“I’m living in the moment,” he said.  

That answer sounds cagey, but Nantz’s recent history is instructive of his headspace. His son, Jameson, joined his father for the weekend at last year’s Masters — the first true father/son trip to Augusta National for Nantz since his father’s diagnosis.

Jameson celebrated a green jacket high on Sunday evening, when another Masters champ, Scottie Scheffler, stopped for an intercession with the Nantzes outside of Butler Cabin.

“There’s Jamo, looking up at the Masters champion,” Nantz said. “And there’s Scottie, leaning over and locking eyes with him.”

Nantz’s voice caught in his throat as he finished the story, and I wondered if any place in sports better exemplified Nantz’s relationship with time. For a man constantly balancing the past and the present, Augusta National was like Groundhog Day.

The best memories really could be lived twice.

DR. JOSEPH MASDEU is a tall, slender man with a side-part of shock-gray hair and dark brown eyes. His tendency to speak in self-assured, unyielding paragraphs suggests he is typically in a rush — a habit supported by his resume.

Dr. Masdeu is one of the foremost neurologists in the United States, the author of seven books on clinical neurology and more than 150 scientific papers. He is also the director of the Nantz National Alzheimer Center at Houston Methodist Hospital — one of the best Alzheimer’s treatment centers in the world.

Nantz does not often speak publicly about his investment in the center, but he orbited the topic regularly in conversation. I reached out to Dr. Masdeu on a hunch that Nantz might be understating his involvement. Had they ever crossed paths? He laughed.

“How would I summarize this?” Dr. Masdeu said. “Jim is totally and completely involved with all the events happening here in the center.”

The Nantzes visited Houston Methodist for the first time in 1996, shortly after Nantz’s father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Nantz’s father was admitted and spent the next 13 years at the hospital, where he remained until he died in 2008. Three years later, the broadcaster’s donation funded the creation of the Nantz Center, named for his father, to research the causes of Alzheimer’s.

Today, Dr. Masdeu guessed that Nantz’s financial investment in the center is “well into the millions,” and pointed to a handful of encouraging clinical trials the center has nurtured into the world. Alzheimer’s research is expensive, and it can be hard to get financial support for the so-called “pilot programs” needed to assess the viability of treatments. Not at the Nantz Center.

“Jim has been absolutely amazing in making sure that we have the support we need,” Dr. Masdeu said. “Really, really important work has gotten funded because of him.”

As I reported this story, tales of Nantz’s quiet charitable acts surfaced like vegetables in a stew. In January, he quietly bid $50,000 on Scottie Scheffler’s heavily used Yukon XL to support a children’s cancer foundation. On the day we toured his house, Nantz walked into the garage and laughed.

“Check out my new ride,” he said, pointing to the rusted-out vehicle.

“We did an event last year in Toledo, and he turned around and wrote a $25,000 check that night to the charity,” Dottie Pepper said.

“That Scottie Scheffler thing? Yeah, that’s not unique.”

Some of Nantz’s friends suggested that his generosity and his wistfulness were, in some way, related. In his possessions, Nantz could remember the goodness of those who came before him, but in his actions, he could multiply it.

“The Nantz Center is my proudest achievement outside of my family,” he said.

According to Dr. Masdeu, a “straight line” can be drawn from Nantz’s philanthropy to the development of treatments that are changing the scope of Alzheimer’s treatment.

“I can never thank him enough, on behalf of my patients, for what he’s doing,” Dr. Masdeu said. “He is literally changing lives.”

NANTZ’S OFFICE is a bright, cluttered space on the first floor of his home.

A solid steel telephone sits behind the desk — the line from the old Giants Stadium that Nantz picked up to learn he’d gotten the job at CBS Sports. The opposite wall is jammed with artifacts: photos of celebrities playing Nantz’s backyard par-3, a scoreboard from a winning member-guest at Cypress Point, and drawings from his daughters.

Even for an individual of tremendous sentimentality, Nantz’s office is a sacred space. The shelves of the room’s large, oak bookcase could be transplanted to any sports museum in the world, filled with personal relics from legendary moments, letters from hall-of-famers, and enough correspondence with former commanders-in-chief to fill a Presidential library. (Nantz has called the former President George H.W. Bush a “second father,” and maintains a close friendship with former President Clinton.)

But the room’s most valuable item is entirely immaterial. It is a fossilized leaf with a brownish hue, roughly the size and shape of a comb. The leaf came from Latrobe Golf Club in the fall of 2016, the site of Arnold Palmer’s final resting place. Nantz went there shortly after Palmer’s family spread his ashes and plucked the leaf from the earth. He brought it back to Pebble Beach carefully and has preserved it here, in his personal shrine, ever since.

Like most items in Nantz’s house, the leaf is a connection to the past — a reminder of the most terrifying assignment of Nantz’s career: The King’s eulogy.

Nantz rose at 3 a.m. on the morning of the funeral, unsure of what to say. He spent the next several hours typing out his thoughts for the speech. The behavior was highly unusual: Nantz speaks prodigiously — and almost exclusively — off-the-cuff, and several of his friends recounted lengthy speeches he’d given with no preparation. For the first time in his life, it seemed Jim Nantz was out of time, and speechless.

He arrived at the church with the papers tucked away in his suit jacket, and when the appointed time arrived, he walked slowly to the pulpit.

Over the 20 minutes that followed, Nantz gave what might be described as the most inspired narration of his career. The speech concluded with a story Nantz had shared only once before: From the morning of Palmer’s last Masters round in April 2004.

Palmer arrived at the practice green at Augusta National to find Nantz waiting for him. Weeks earlier, Nantz had turned down a tantalizing offer to anchor CBS This Morning. Palmer, another Nantz mentor and confidante, wanted to know the details.

It’d been a painstaking negotiation, and the job had promised to redefine Nantz’s career and schedule, but Nantz found he couldn’t accept.

“I couldn’t give up on the childhood dream,” Nantz said. “I just couldn’t.”

The decision was hard, but more than that, it was lonely. It was the first major life development that hadn’t included Nantz’s dad.

Palmer stopped him.

“You don’t understand,” Palmer told Nantz. “Your father helped you make that decision. You were listening to him.”

Arnie stuck a finger in Nantz’s chest.

“He was right there, in your heart, the whole time.”

In the church, Nantz fought back tears as he delivered the final line of the eulogy.

“It’s gonna hurt when he’s not there to pick up the phone. It’s gonna hurt when he’s not there on the first tee when that springtime tradition rolls around,” Nantz said.

He placed a palm over his heart.

“But I hope you’ll always remember: He’s right here.”

FOUR HOURS after he’d ordered his toast, Jim Nantz finally ran out of time.

It’d been a long morning, in the middle of a long week, at the beginning of a long year. His next obligation beckoned.

I wondered aloud how Nantz kept his sanity on the road. Living in the moment is great, but didn’t he ever wonder what it was like to look more than five minutes ahead? He laughed.

“Next week, I’m surprising my kids with a visit to Pebble Beach. It’s Jamo’s birthday, and they have no idea they’re coming here to celebrate,” Nantz said. “I’m allowing myself to look forward to that.”

He smiled, and it occurred to me that maybe this was Nantz’s true gift for time. Not the ability to bend it to his will, but the willingness to accept he couldn’t.

The next afternoon, I sat in front of a screen and watched Jim Nantz. I’d tracked down the video of his eulogy for Palmer, and I was eager to see the speech that Nantz had called one of the crowning achievements of his career. I played the video and watched as Nantz emerged, a decade younger, on the pulpit.

As he spoke, I saw Nantz address every corner of our conversation from the day before. I watched him struggle with the enormity of legacy, I saw him agonize over the end, and I heard him grapple with the pain of loss and the promise of memory. As he juggled each of these emotions from the pulpit, I watched him disappear into a moment of perfect peace.

“In that moment, I felt Arnie with me,” Nantz told me later. “It was one of the most surreal experiences of my life.”

As the speech concluded, I heard Nantz share the story of Palmer’s final round again. But as he delivered the final haymaker, Nantz delivered a line he’d skipped the day before.

“I knew it was time,” he said. “But I never wanted it to end.”

A raucous applause greeted Nantz as he stepped off the pulpit.

And then he disappeared, out of screen and into a memory.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.