Top 60 Jim Nantz Quotes

I’m more likely to quote the golfer George Burns than the legendary late comedian by the same name who lived to be 100.

When people ask me, ‘What are you most proud of,’ I say it’s that I’ve had five people close enough to ask me to present them at the World Golf Hall of Fame. There were any number of people they could have used, but they asked me. It really means a lot to me.

The sentimentality that people see and hear in my commentary and sometimes ridicule, parody or just don’t like – that’s okay. We’re all wired differently. I think about that a lot. I can’t explain it. That’s just what runs through my blood. It’s just the way I look at the world.

Alzheimer’s is such an insidious disease.

The Masters runs deep in my heart; it’s a love affair that I’ve had since I was a little boy with that tournament, that club.

My father got to see the first 10 years of my career. He implored me to always appreciate people who are not operating under any sort of false pretense or who weren’t caught up in their own success.

I had first-hand experience watching my father’s health decline over the stretch of 13 years.

I don’t like hot takes any more than I like hot cakes.

I think I shot 78 one time. My golf game is so overrated.

How can we grow the game? It’s a conversation in every sport, how do you tap into the millennials? Golf is no different.

The Masters isn’t about Jim Nantz and his storytelling. It’s about golf’s greatest tournament.

I’m looking at the world through a very positive prism.

I live every day the job that I dreamed of as a boy.

As we all know, the concept of the gimme putt is anathema to the PGA Tour.

I think when you have a National Championship Game, a Super Bowl, a Final Four, a World Series, I don’t see why there is any reason to pick out one individual as the MVP because it is about a team winning a championship. Maybe that best explains what I believe in at the core in my work as a broadcaster.

My father passed away due to Alzheimer’s disease, and many things I do are nods to him.

I love being a part of CBS.

I love stone crabs. And I love popcorn.

Golf is a central part of my life and I look forward to working with the great folks at Vineyard Vines to create an authentic golf apparel brand that speaks to the golfer.

People say ‘dream big,’ that’s kind of one of those motivational sayings, but I would dream hard, meaning I just wanted it so badly, I could feel it.

Every little crazy dream that I had has come true, and more. And I’m always mindful that this is not a birthright, that one day I would have the chance to come to Augusta every year. Just a crazy, really, almost obsession for me.

The sport is not about one player, and I say that with a world of respect for his talents on the golf course. But the game is bigger than Tiger Woods.

From 1975-’79, I worked for PGA professional Tony Bruno. For five years I watched, lost in admiration, as Tony ran the golf shop at Battleground Country Club in Manalapan, N.J. Tony put in 80-hour weeks doing what nearly 29,000 men and women club pros do every day: Keeping the game alive with a smile.

I have a pretty good memory.

I like stories. I like to figure out how history ties to the present.

I was named first-team Jersey Shore by the Asbury Park Press, the paper I used to deliver as a young boy. I got to Houston and Coach Williams invited me to walk on the golf team. I was the 18th man on an 18-man golf team.

Chemistry’s a word that people who make hires and decisions say, ‘Hey, you guys go out and work on your chemistry!’

Hello, friends.’ I’ve had fun with that expression to satisfy the cynics, but it comes from the heart, and I don’t apologize for it. Like my dad – for whom I designed the expression during the 2002 PGA Championship, when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease – I’ve never met a stranger.

I hate whenever there’s a social issue that comes up in golf and people in the mainstream media who hate golf and who’ve conjured up all these stereotypes of people who are in the sport, the way they tear it down… I resent it, and I’ll defend golf and people in golf until my dying day.

People think I can just walk out and shoot 75 without taking a warm-up shot. But believe me, it’s not that easy.

I just enjoy seeing people break through those ceilings when people press them down and say, ‘He can’t do this or that.’ It’s always fun to document those types of stories when someone breaks through.

Every champion golfer comes to Augusta imbued with a towering source of inspiration. It’s a solitary journey, but it’s one that no player… makes alone.

I don’t like scripts.

On June 3, 2015, in keeping with a long tradition, I visited my home club in the Pepper Pike suburb of Cleveland, known simply as The Country Club. It’s an old William Flynn design and perhaps the most underrated course in America. It’s elegant, challenging and filled with old-world charm.

The job I wanted before I was in college was to work for CBS.

I actually went to the first game in Saints history. We were living in New Orleans at the time. I was eight. They opened against the L.A. Rams in 1976. I went with my dad, and we bought standing-room only seats at Tulane Stadium. We actually sat in the aisle.

If there is only one event you could work the rest of your life, it would be Augusta.

My dad had nothing but friends in his life.

I want Alzheimer’s. I want Lou Gehrig’s disease. I want Parkinson’s. I want Huntington’s. I want to be the face and voice of all these neurological traumas. I want them all.

I would like to work 50 Masters Tournaments.

My father is truly always by my side.

Just as many golfers feel a kinship with Ben Hogan or Bobby Jones after studying their lives, such is the closeness I feel with Lawson Little Jr. Little quite simply is the most underappreciated golfer of the first half of the 20th century.

Lance Barrow’s a great producer and we work together exceptionally well.

I love what I do. Every show is it’s own challenge and I love it.

Far and away, the question I’m asked most often is, ‘What’s your favorite sporting event to call?’ I can’t say I’ve ever answered the question well, simply because the three biggest events I broadcast for CBS Sports – the Super Bowl, the NCAA Men’s Final Four and the Masters – each are incomparable.

I was raised in just about as perfect a home environment as you could ever imagine.

The Super Bowl is the biggest event in America, the biggest event in television. The preparation and all of the behind-the-scenes detail is immense. The Final Four is just a fraction behind that in terms of the preparation.

When I tell people that I get interviewed five or six times more than I will interview players or coaches leading up to the game that comes as a surprise. That’s part of it and it just goes with being part of a Super Bowl broadcast team. I enjoy it.

Since 1934 every accomplished player in golf has come to the Augusta National looking for an introduction into history.

I like parades.

I try to talk openly from how I feel. People may not agree with it. It may sound foreign to them. That’s an uncomfortable position for some people, to be sentimental, nostalgic – it’s all kind of the same.

Any time you factor in the enthusiasm that comes with college sports, it comes with a whole new level. It is less corporate, it’s more of an unharnessed kidlike enthusiasm.

I loved Tom Landry and Roger Staubach.

No matter the event, a Super Bowl, an NFL game, a rank-and-file golf tournament, there is a demand when you are live and exposed to try to get it right and do justice to the event. That’s the way I have always approached it.

I can’t get people to understand how important the Alzheimer’s fight is to me.

Super Bowl V was the Colts against the Cowboys and Jim O’Brien kicked a 32 yard field goal to beat the Cowboys. I was traumatized by it. Everyone at school knew I was the only Cowboy fan in the area. I didn’t want to go to school and I begged and pleaded with my parents. Those are indelible memories when you are a kid.

Jim Murray’s greatest writings were golf writings.

I love Augusta. I get to cover what I consider to be the best golf tournament of the year, and I really would like to think that one day – God willing, CBS willing – I’d be able to say that I worked 50 Masters.

In 2011, my wife, Courtney, and I, with my amazing mother and sister, opened the Nantz National Alzheimer Center at Houston Methodist Hospital.

I used to write letters to Jim McKay in college. ‘Wide World of Sports’ was this travelogue, really, that introduced us to sports and it introduced us to parts of the world that we had never seen before. And no one was a bigger tour guide than Mr. McKay.