Augusta, Georgia
CNN
—
It could easily have been a scene from a movie, or at the very least a commercial.
In 2005, the tension was palpable as Tiger Woods’ Nike ball tracked towards the 16th hole at Augusta National. Its momentum slowed to a pause for a moment, and then – with one more revolution – it revealed the iconic Nike swoosh and dropped into the cup.
The roar from the patrons was deafening as Woods strode off the green, clinching his fourth Masters title shortly afterwards. The magnitude of the moment wasn’t lost on anyone who’d witnessed it as it instantly became one of the greatest highlights in the history of broadcast sports and is remembered as such 20 years later.
But we might never have seen it. The television viewers at home might only have heard it.
Lance Barrow had a ringside seat to the events of that day as the coordinating producer for CBS’s golf coverage of the 69th Masters Tournament.
“I saw Tiger hit shots that no other human being possibly could,” he told CNN Sports, adding that this birdie attempt, a tricky chip shot from up against the second cut on the edge of the green, was likely the best golf shot that he was ever a part of.
“You think about all the things that could have gone wrong and there’s only a few things that could have gone right,” he said. “There was a possibility that Tiger could knock it in a bunker or knock it in the water. He hit the shot, it went in the hole, and 20 years later, we’re still talking about it.”
Describing his role as the head coach of the broadcast team, Barrow sat in the front row of the operations room in the truck. Ahead of him was an array of some 200 screens, each offering a view from one of the many cameras on the course, a replay clip or a graphics package. To his right was the director Steve Milton and then the technical director Norm Patterson, the man who punched the buttons on the vision mixer.
As Woods paced back and forth on the green to assess his options for the shot, the tension was building. He was trailing Chris di Marco by a stroke, and he needed to pull off something special. Barrow says he wasn’t following the action on the main screen in front of him, the “on-air feed” that corresponds to what the viewers see at home.
“If you start looking at the main monitor,” he explained, “you become a fan and you forget what you’re supposed to do. I’m not really watching, because I’m thinking what am I going to do next.”
As Barrow relives the moment, he recalls something that he and many of his peers were told by one of their mentors when they were starting out in the business: “There’s nothing more boring than a stationary ball.” And so, when it looked like the ball had stalled on the edge of the cup, director Milton called for a shot-change to a close-up of Woods, who was crouching by the side of the green in a state of agonized expectation.
“When the ball went in,” said Barrow, “Replay producer Jim Rikhoff hits me in the shoulder as hard as I’ve ever been hit in my life, and he said, ‘That’s the greatest shot I’ve ever seen.’ And then I looked at Steve, and Steve goes, ‘I’m sorry, I missed it.’”
But it turns out, he hadn’t. Patterson had stayed with the shot and the whole world had, in fact, seen the ball drop.
“For whatever reason, he didn’t punch it fast enough,” Barrow explained, “Maybe he knew something we didn’t see, maybe he was a little late hearing Steve, and we got arguably the greatest shot in major history.”
In that moment, nobody felt worse than Milton, who’d given the order to cut to the flank camera on the 16th green.
Speaking about it 15 years later to Golf.com, he said, “I looked at Norm and said, ‘Did we see it go in?’ He said, ‘Yes, I stayed with it. I stayed with the shot.’” Having breathed a sigh of relief, Milton thanked his colleague, who replied, “Steve, we’re a great team.”
Barrow also produced NFL coverage for CBS, but he believes that golf is the hardest sport to cover on television. As he recounted the drama of that moment 20 years ago, he noted that it took him several minutes to describe something that was as fast as the snap of your fingers, highlighting the delicate hire-wire balancing act that live sports broadcast teams are constantly navigating.
“Somebody asked me one time, ‘What keeps me up at night? What makes me nervous?’ I said, ‘Not this job.’ It’s live television, there’s nothing we can do. We’re walking this tightrope and at any moment, disaster could happen; you could miss a touchdown or a basket or a goal and we can’t sit around discussing it,” he said. “We have to make those decisions in a split second, you’ve got to have a short memory, and you’ve got to keep going.”
By capturing the full scope of the drama, though, they helped to cement Woods’ legacy as an icon of the game, and it surely helped secure an Emmy award for the CBS coverage. Barrow admits their tournament coverage probably wouldn’t even have been entered for consideration if they’d missed the ball dropping.
Barrow has now retired, but Milton is still on the front line, directing CBS’s coverage of the 89th Masters. Sadly though, 2005 was Norm Patterson’s last Masters tournament – he died of a sudden heart attack just a few months later, at the age of 45.
Speaking to the San Diego Union-Tribune at the time, Barrow said, “This is a slap in the face. We’re like family, we spend so much time together.”
In 2020, Milton said, “I remember Norm every time I see that shot, it reminds me of him. It was his moment. He and Tiger created one of the most iconic moments in sports television history.”
You’ve seen the images of Tiger’s chip-in at the 2005 Masters countless times. But you may not know just how that iconic moment came to fruition.
CBS Sports Director Steve Milton brings you inside the production the truck during that unforgettable shot. pic.twitter.com/aqdVlSgn9S
— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) November 11, 2020
It wasn’t a scene from a movie, but it could so easily have been. Nine years previously, Barrow had made a cameo appearance in the Kevin Costner blockbuster “Tin Cup.” Playing himself in a CBS broadcast truck, he had watched the fictional character Roy McAvoy attempt an audacious, high-risk, shot to win the US Open.
“That shot was a defining moment, “McAvoy said to his caddie, “And when a defining moment comes along, you define the moment, or it defines you.”
Everybody involved defined the moment at the 2005 Masters, and like a great movie, it seems to get better and better every time you watch it.
