Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame 2018: Jim Nantz, the Family Man Who Became Sports TV's Father By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - 10:28 am
Print This Story
Story Highlights
SVG is profiling this year's 11 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame inductees in the weeks leading up to the ceremony on Dec. 11 at the New York Hilton. For more information, CLICK HERE.
Hello, friends. That's far more than a calling card or a catch phrase. It's a daily reminder that, in the sports-broadcasting industry, we're family.
For 35 years, Jim Nantz has been family to millions of U.S. television viewers who have welcomed the legendary broadcaster into their homes for some of sports TV's biggest events, including countless NFL and March Madness games, as well as thrilling major golf tourneys.
It's a rare and special feat to achieve an entire career's worth of successes at one network, but that is what Nantz has done. After graduating from the University of Houston and serving brief stints at CBS affiliates in San Antonio and Salt Lake City, he got his big break with the network. It was obvious from the get-go that he was where he belonged.
He just blew everybody away with his audition, says Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer Ed Goren, who was an executive producer at CBS Sports at the time. The guy was 25, 26, and smooth as could be. It was a pretty easy decision to offer him the job.
In his 34 years (and counting) at CBS, Nantz has, so far, been honored with three Emmy Awards and named National Sportscaster of the Year five times.
He started at CBS as studio host of the network's college-football coverage in 1985. He moved to the booth to call play-by-play in 1989 before moving to the NFL scene in 1991. By '93, he was on the No. 2 NFL crew before becoming host of The NFL Today. In 2004, he went out on the road as the network's lead voice for The NFL on CBS, calling four Super Bowls (Super Bowl LIII in February will be his fifth).
Nantz's class and style are forever engrained in the minds of fans of the Masters and the NCAA Final Four. It was fellow Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame inductee Neal Pilson, then president of CBS Sports, who gave Nantz his shot at the tournament he loved, putting him up in the 16th Tower in Augusta to call the action in 1985. He has been an integral part of the iconic event's coverage ever since.
As for the Final Four, Nantz has leant his voice to the crowning of a college basketball champion every year since 1991, calling the action for many years with his counterpart Bill Packer. Over the past four years, he has been teamed with former NBA All-Star Grant Hill and Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer Bill Raftery, who once compared Nantz's style with that of Walter Cronkite.
[Nantz] was the voice of reason on TV for the public, Raftery said. There's a comfort people have.
Nantz's career has been marked by several extraordinary feats. Annually, he gets to take part in a week that any broadcaster would dream of: he goes straight from the Final Four to Augusta for the Masters. In 2007, in fact, he became the first broadcaster in history to complete what has been dubbed The Triple : calling the Super Bowl, the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship, and the Masters - all within about 60 days. He has done that three more times and will do it again in 2019.
His career has also given him the chance to call the shots at the US Open Tennis Championships for nearly a decade, broadcast from the booth of two college-football national-championship games (1996, 1997), and even host his network's coverage of the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan.
Nantz's story is a charmed one, but, to him, it's one highlighted not just by great accomplishments on the air but by love and friendships. There's Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer Jim McKay, one of his childhood heroes. In college, Nantz wrote him fan letters and then got to know him so well that he was asked to give the eulogy at his funeral. Jack Whitaker was such an idol that Nantz never imagined attending Whitaker's wedding, but, today, Nantz says, if he's within 50 miles of Whitaker, you can bet he'll make the effort to go see him. Even former President George H.W. Bush called Nantz one of the nicest and most generous people we know.
[These men are] one of the last links to my youth, reflects Nantz. [They] made such an indelible impression on me, and then to be able to have the gift of friendship from them, that's a pretty amazing thing. I've never taken it lightly.
And, of course, there was his father, Jim: the man who was Nantz's real hero and inspired his son's iconic phrase. Leaving a visit with his father to go call the 2002 PGA Championship, Nantz explained to his dad, who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, that, when he opened the broadcast of that event with Hello, friends, he was talking specifically to him.
For years and years, Nantz has extended that kind of hospitality to all of us, making us feel like his family and making us feel right at home, even on sports' biggest stages.
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame 2018: Jim Nantz, the Family Man Who Became Sports TV's Father By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital 
