Today is the final round of the Masters tournament. As I do each year, I’ll spend much of the afternoon watching. It’s the only time of the year I watch golf. I have nothing against the game, but it’s never been something I’ve done. Instead, it’s the tradition. The Masters takes place in Augusta, and I grew up about an hour from there. I can’t begin to count how many times over the span of my life I’ve rode past that tall fence and those forbidding gates along Washington Road, knowing full well that the world behind those gates was forever off-limits to some kid like me up from the country. Still, the fact it was in Augusta gave it a “local interest” angle that was fun: the one time a year something in our back yard got national attention. (It’s also funny since, as a local of sorts, I know that Augusta has much more in common with Scranton than with Eden. What you see on television is very carefully framed.)
But other things compel me. The Sunday telecast from Augusta often coincides with the world waking up from its long nap. The weather outside is getting nice again, and often the same weather in Augusta is what we have an hour or so away. And since so much of my life has been spent in the academy, it’s traditionally been a signpost that the academic year is almost over. The Hollywood-perfect color from Augusta National Golf Club rhymes nicely with that one time each year when our campus looks exactly as it does in the recruiting brochures, and it’s another reason to be happy.
And most of all, the broadcast itself is a throwback. Just as Augusta National is famous for its enforcement of etiquette on club grounds (even with the competitors!), it maintains a firm grip on what it will and won’t allow CBS to do on the telecast. For a long time, it was a very formal presentation with no more graphics or add-ons allowed than necessary, because that’s the way Augusta National Golf Club wanted it. Even the announcers got very careful warnings about what they could and couldn’t say, and woe betide you if you offended on the air.
Although there’s been some changes in recent years, you still don’t see as many gimmicks as you would in other golf broadcasts. It’s still kind of a throwback. In the opening montages, you don’t see these tough-guy hero shots of golfers backed by edgy music; you’re much more likely to see gauzy beauty shots of the tree-lined road to the clubhouse, of Amen Corner, of the stone bridge at 13 over the tributary of Rae’s Creek. Even the commercials are lower-voltage corporate image spots instead of attitude-driven, in-your-face hard sells. All in all, the final round is a soothing broadcast to have on in the background, and it’s also the last surviving example of a kind of broadcast I grew up with. It’s what sports broadcasting used to be, before we traded in our Vin Scullys and Jack Whitakers for sportscasters whose main selling points were attitude and volume. Yes, it could seem stodgy and stuffy, more than a whiff of “don’t upset Grandpa,” but there was a dignity to how they handled their duties, a dignity that’s missing in so much in modern media, let alone modern life.
This year, the tournament takes place against what’s been going on at CBS in general. As it’s been impossible to ignore, what’s left of CBS has been swallowed up by yet another conglomerate that’s making deep cuts. CBS Radio News will soon be no more. The Broadcast Center, I’ve heard from reliable sources, seems more and more like a ghost town. Television City and Black Rock were sold off a while back. As sad as it is to see play out, CBS has been little more than a brand in a portfolio for a long time. The network that Mr. Paley and Dr. Stanton brought to greatness really started to ebb in the mid-1980s, a victim of changing times and changing philosophies in the business and financial realms, and downhill has rolled the snowball since. It’s a longer story than I care to write here, and the story has been told many times over by now, anyway.
Yet there are times, like this weekend, when I think about what’s now a lost world. Really, not just for CBS, but for the broadcast industry in general, and the audience as well. The changes in television, the booming music and flashy graphics, the explosion of options, shorter attention spans, the constant need to monetize everything…it’s rare when a broadcast is allowed to be the pleasant company you enjoy on a lazy weekend afternoon.
All of this came back to mind, not only because of today’s broadcast, but because I recently watched again this clip I first stumbled across about 15 years ago. It uncorked a lot of memories (and if you read the comments on the original YouTube page, you’ll see I’m not alone):
That’s the end of the 1983 Talladega 500, which CBS aired on July 31, 1983. So many things come back from my memories: Don Robertson’s voice announcing the billboards, the lengthy credit roll over still-store images, the peerless voice of Ken Squier, and the way CBS would end these kinds of big broadcasts with wistful music. (In this case, it was “Rising Star,” the love theme from the movie The Electric Horseman. CBS used cuts from that soundtrack for several years on its NASCAR broadcasts, including the main theme under the starting grid. CBS Sports liked using soundtrack cuts, such as Chuck Mangione’s “Children of Sanchez” for some big events, or Lalo Schifrin’s theme to St. Ives for golf tournaments. But, I digress.)
Now even that seems like a thousand years ago, even though it’s only been four decades. And so many of the people in that credit roll from Talladega are no longer with us. So many folks in that recruiting video are also gone now. But, really, all of it’s a lost world. The voice of Don Robertson speaking for Pontiac and Sears? Pontiac’s gone now, and the once-mighty Sears is all but dead, victim of modern corporate techniques. Don Robertson died a few years ago. So did Ken Squier.
But there’s something else. That long closing credit roll gives what’s due to a lot of hard-working people who made possible that telecast you’d just watched. They were the people that made all that hard work and coordination happen, and made it look so effortless. Many of them had been at the network for decades, built lives and careers around CBS, and represented so much institutional and technical knowledge that would be impossible to replace. You can get an idea of what that world was like if you watch this video, which CBS produced in the 1980s while seeking the next generation of technicians and other broadcast specialists. (And happy coincidence: you can tell that much of the location footage was taken while CBS was setting up to cover a race at Talladega.)
For some people, that tape is an interesting artifact. For me, though, it has an emotional punch. Not just in what I remember from that era, and not just nostalgia for a time I missed. It’s because it makes me think of people I know. One of my friends is a CBS retiree; he worked there for more than 50 years. His wife also used to work at CBS. Last year I went up and spent the day with him. He told me stories, shared artifacts, showed me clips that he worked on and told me the stories behind them. Those stories told of teamwork, of craftsmanship, of a pride he still felt in the work he did. It was a privilege to hear those stories firsthand. And it made me a little sad that I missed it all. To this day I can hear the voices of CBS announcers that I remember, see little visual cues or characteristic qualities in a promo, and it takes me back, makes me smile…and makes me ache, even more so since some of the people who helped make that history are my friends. It makes me ache for an era that’s long gone, but it also makes me ache because the people who made all that happen are fewer with the years…and with them go so much history, so many memories, so many stories. And it makes me realize I need to get back and spend more time with my friend and his wife while I can, not just because I love the stories, but because they’re sweet people of whom I am very fond.
Progress is inevitable, I know. The strange new media landscape makes so much more possible. (Heck, I’m the beneficiary of that, since it means I’m now executive producer of a program we produce at work. And I assemble that program on a ridiculously small and ridiculously powerful laptop computer, running an editing package that cost me nothing to download, and yet can do in a second the kinds of effects my CBS retiree friend would spend untold hours doing in sessions at Broadway Video back in the day.) The networks that dominated television 50 years ago are now competing for eyeballs and clicks with hundreds of other outlets. It says everything when NBC’s centenary is coming up and it’s barely registering, let alone that its anniversary promo would make you think most of the network’s history took place after 1984 (blink and you’ll miss Dave Garroway). And I’ve found out the hard way that modern corporations really aren’t interested in legacy or tradition unless it can somehow be monetized.
And yet, this one Sunday a year when, by decree of the venue, a sports broadcast is allowed to breathe…it makes me think of what we once had, what we once took for granted, and what’s vanished.
