![]() "I'm preparing for this game tomorrow as hard as I did in '91," Nantz says as he settles into a chair, donning a salmon-colored quarter-zip from his personalized Vineyard Vines clothing line.Įvery basketball assignment Nantz has called for CBS (the number is somewhere in the vicinity of 575 broadcasts) includes a "game board": a white, wide, sturdy paper that is his colorful prep sheet of information and statistics about the players and coaches. That was what the goal was: to work for CBS." But, really, went to Houston to study communications and try to figure out a way to get trained to hopefully one day be noticed by CBS. "Sure, I was a golfer and I went to Houston to be on the golf team. "I got to live out my dream because of college basketball," Nantz said. It's always felt like he should be there. It's an outrageous accomplishment, and yet it speaks to Nantz's preternatural capability as a broadcaster that he's never felt old, stale or worn out. Before his first Final Four assignment in 1991, no one had worked more than six Final Fours. Given the nature of some television contracts and network-hopping tendencies of broadcasters, this will never be done again. Monday night's title game will be the 32nd Final Four of Nantz's career. ![]() "The enormity of it now still blows me away," Nantz said. It's the sport where Nantz cut his teeth, honed his techniques and, most amazing of all, became the voice among a throng of animated narrators over the past 30-plus years in this absurdly incredible event that is the NCAA Tournament. Over the decades, he's also been the go-to voice on CBS for college football, the Winter Olympics and tennis.īut basketball - college basketball - bred him and nurtured his craft into becoming the broadcast legend he is. The 63-year-old is most affectionately tied to calling golf, the Masters being his most treasured event of them all, and he'll continue to be the lead play-by-play voice of the NFL on CBS. "My school and the basketball program gave me the entryway into the business," he said. This is the city where he went to college, the place that put him on the path to microphone royalty.Īt the University of Houston, a 19-year-old Nantz began his road to this night by talking into the mic as the public address announcer for Cougars basketball games. He's leaving behind the basketball portion of his broadcast duties after tonight, and appropriately so, this joyride is concluding in Houston. Nantz has a distinctly singular career in broadcasting due to his lifelong ties to CBS and his nearly 40-year connection to this blessed, maddening tournament. You don't get stories without the storyteller.īehind every great sports moment, there’s a storyteller.įor decades, Jim Nantz has been the storyteller of the Men's Final Four. Humble as Nantz is, there is no escaping this night will also, in part, be about him. Take off the headset, go give the trophy away. In sync with (producer) Wolfie (Mark Wolff) and (director) Mark Grant, Grant and Raft and Tracy, just want it to be clean. ![]() "I just want to have a nice, clean, high-camaraderie broadcast. "I want this to feel as normal as possible," Nantz said. 5 San Diego State - a national title game almost nobody saw coming as recently as two weeks ago. On Monday night, Nantz will toss on the headset for one final basketball call next to Raftery, working CBS' broadcast with Grant Hill and Tracy Wolfson. "You walk out of one dinner with Raft and you feel like you've known him for 37 years, which is the actual case now," Nantz told CBS Sports in his final sit-down interview before his final basketball call after 37 years and 354 NCAA Tournament broadcasts. An eager-to-please Nantz got taken out to an extravagant Miami Beach dinner, and as is Raftery's wont, young Jim got more than he bargained for that night. As fate would have it, he was partnered with the one and only Bill Raftery. Nantz catty-cornered to Coral Gables, Florida, to call Arizona at Miami. One week later: a proper introduction to a lifelong friendship. Jim Nantz's first play-by-play assignment for CBS was a USC-Washington affair on January 11 of that year, working the game alongside former Kentucky standout Larry Conley. It wound up being the formal initiation of a legendary broadcasting career. HOUSTON - In early January 1986, a 26-year-old with joyful ambition and bottomless optimism took a flight out to Seattle to call a men's basketball game.
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