“Jolly” probably isn’t a word that gets tossed around much on the grounds of the Augusta National Golf Club, although there’s a pretty solid chromatic argument for making use of the roughly 720-year-old adjective during the Masters Tournament. Just a few smidges lighter than Pantone 342, the verdant shade synonymous with the totemic Green Jacket, “Jolly Green” offers a fair approximation of the course’s ⅜-inch fairways after a light spring rain.
As with pretty much everything else you can think of, language is strictly policed at Augusta, so jolly’s probably best reserved for less genteel gatherings, like monster-truck rallies and the Phoenix Open. And while Jim Nantz rarely misses a chance to rhapsodize about the sublimity of the course—Augusta is basically a botanical garden with the world’s most exclusive country club plopped down in the middle of it—there’s one green thing that positively cannot be mentioned during CBS’ Masters broadcasts. (Hint: It rhymes with “funny,” and each unit features the portrait of a famous dead guy.)
“When you have the Masters tournament, there’s never a discussion about money, purse money, how much you win,” Nantz said last week in advance of his 40th Augusta broadcast. “It’s about a jacket. It’s about a coat that you win. Tell me something else that compares to that.”
While Nantz’s conspicuous disdain for talk of filthy lucre is admirable, he also doesn’t have much choice in the matter. As the late Pat Summerall revealed in his 2006 memoir Summerall: On and Off the Air, Augusta’s finicky and exacting in-house rules restrict the tourney’s media partners from alluding to pecuniary matters of any stripe. “You can’t broach the subject of money,” Summerall wrote in a 17-page chapter dedicated to his experiences while covering the action at Bobby Jones’ course. “For example, you can’t say, ‘That putt means X amount of dollars to him,’ or ‘A par will put him 25th on the money list.’”
As Summerall disclosed in his book, CBS maintains the rights to broadcast the Masters as part of a “year-to-year handshake agreement with the club.” As part of this unconventional arrangement, CBS agrees to forever do things the Augusta way, which means that the booth talent forever navigates a minefield of potential lexical gaffes.
Analysts who failed to abide by the Augusta code were effectively disappeared from any future Masters coverage; as Summerall recalled, Jack Whitaker got the hook after referring to patrons as a “mob,” while Gary McCord in 1994 made the fatal mistake of associating one of the course’s topographical features with a depilatory technique that had recently been imported to these shores from Brazil.
“Gary said the incredibly fast greens looked as though they’d been ‘bikini-waxed,’” Summerall recalled. The reliably irreverent McCord went on to make a crack about “body bags” that had been stashed behind the 17th green—your guess is as good as mine—which, uh, did not go over well. As Summerall put it: “McCord was removed from Masters coverage by the Augusta brass, and he never returned.” (As McCord would later report, Augusta officials likely would have overlooked his indiscretions if not for a written complaint that had been sent to the club by an outraged Tom Watson, who huffily referred to the analyst as “the Howard Stern of golf.”)
Summerall’s book is packed with these sorts of disclosures, and his decision to open the kimono—a phrase that undoubtedly is off-limits in and around Amen Corner—on Augusta’s restrictions gave fans an unexpurgated look behind the scenes of sports’ most unconventional broadcast arrangement.
On and Off the Air was the first publication to detail the ins and outs of Augusta’s broadcast absolutism—“To this day, announcers can’t mention what brands of shoes or clothes a player is wearing or what equipment he is using. That would be free advertising”—although its author kept mum on the financial particulars of CBS’s deal.
While CBS executives and on-air talent prefer to keep a lid on the details underpinning the enduring partnership with Augusta, the arrangement isn’t overly complicated. The club doesn’t charge CBS or ESPN a dime for the privilege of covering the four-day event, and while that leaves as much as $125 million in rights fees on the table, Augusta more than makes up for that by way of the gate, merch and concessions. At the same time, the networks forgo a bonanza in advertising revenue, limiting commercial breaks to just four minutes per hour—or roughly a quarter of the standard broadcast load.
Commercial messages are further limited to a trio of on-air sponsors (IBM, AT&T and Mercedes-Benz). In a sense, the brands serve as producers of the event, in the Hollywood studio sense of the word. The $25 million greens fee the sponsors fork over effectively defrays CBS’ production costs, while providing access to sports TV’s most clutter-free ad environment. Win-win. And if CBS can manage to eke out a small profit from the enterprise, all the better, although the money’s not the guiding principle behind the enterprise.
Nantz makes this abundantly clear when he talks about the mystique of the Masters. “Isn’t it refreshing in a time in sport where all we ever hear about is money and guaranteed contracts and outrageous numbers that most people can’t relate to at all?” he said last week. “It’s just nothing but noise.”
For Nantz, golf immortality doesn’t have a dollar sign attached to it. “You won’t come up with anything that means more than just a green jacket,” he said. “In a world that is filled with NIL and guaranteed contracts and how much they get in the guarantee and all this, [it’s about] playing for a green jacket. … You achieve it, man, and you have found a place in history. It’s permanence. It’s forever.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be Augusta if there weren’t some kind of weird rule about said garments. Per club protocol, the winner of the Masters is allowed to take the Green Jacket home with him after he dispenses with the niceties at Butler Cabin, but the sartorial prize must be returned before the next year’s tournament tees off. The coat is then remanded to the player’s locker, where it just sort of hangs there, although winners are free to don their tropical-weight wool trophies at any time during the event itself, provided they remain on the grounds.
Rumor has it that one Masters champion managed to smuggle out a Green Jacket a few years back, splashing a little Pantone 342 around at a private event and returning the garment safely to its hook before anyone at Augusta got wise to the caper. Probably worth a shot for whoever wins this year’s title; just make sure you don’t run into Tom Watson when you’re rocking the spoils.
