I don't want to brag, but I do more homework on the course than any other announcer. I chart the greens to get all the breaks. I walk down into the greenside bunkers. I walk into the fairway bunkers to see whether a player can reach the green from them.
Most announcers play pattycake, pattycake with the players they're covering.
If you don't like my announcing, you don't like me.
It's been a great run. I've done everything I can do announcing wise.
I've had two lives. The golfing part... the younger generation sort of heard about me but maybe didn't realize I wasn't too bad at times. Then the announcing part.
I never really wanted to be No. 1 and a big shot, have people playing up to me all the time. I wasn't comfortable with any of it.
In golf, 'close' is like the north and south rim of the Grand Canyon.
Everybody has some part of their game that is easily influenced to choke.
People need to know that when I was interviewed when I played, I would really pat myself on the back when I did well and tell you how good I was playing, but I'd also tell you when I choked or I was playing terrible. I told it like it was.
For me, 'choking' is just another term in golf.
When people pick the best drivers of all time, nobody ever picks Lee Trevino. But when he played, like at Tanglewood at the '74 PGA, he missed one fairway in 72 holes.
I've played with amateurs for a million years, and they just don't hit many flush shots.
I try to really say what I think is happening, and I'm pretty forthright. I obviously hold back some things. But pretty much, what I see and feel, I say on the air.
Only one golfer in a thousand grips the club lightly enough.
When I was at my peak, I would go into streaks where I felt like it was almost magic, that I could knock down the pin from anywhere with my irons.
Nobody ever heard Jack Nicklaus say 'I don't know' about anything.
NBC sort of let me do my thing. They never told me what to say and what not to say. It was pretty weird.
I do like to point out the trick putts, the ones that look like they go one way but actually go another. I think the audience likes to know when a putt looks like it's two inches outside left, but it's actually two inches outside right.
You can be a guy who won 18 majors, but that doesn't mean you'll be a great Ryder Cupper. That's the rarest golf there is.
The hardest weeks for me are when I get to a course that I've never been to before or one that has been through a redesign.
