For Jim Nantz, it's a position unlike any other.
Welcoming viewers back to pro golf at the Charles Schwab Challenge this week on CBS and Golf Channel, he said, will demand more than a simple "Hello, friends" amid a global pandemic and national unrest.
"People are tuning in to watch a golf tournament, but I don't think we would be handling it properly if we didn't recognize that there is a lot going on in our country right now," Nantz said Monday in a call with reporters.
"I'm 61 years old and I consider this to be, perhaps, the most important moment in this country in my lifetime. We just have to get this moment in history right. We can't let this opportunity pass without real and meaningful progress when it comes to equality, diversity, justice, love and empathy, and I hope to express that at the top."
Beyond whatever Nantz says by way of introduction, however, coronavirus precautions make it impossible for him and his colleagues to see things as they once did.
Literally.
Nantz normally shares his perch at golf tournaments above the 18th-hole gallery with five or six people. He'll have only a robotic camera for company in the tower at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas. There'll be no spectators below.
Nick Faldo and fellow analysts Frank Nobilo and Ian Baker-Finch will be monitoring play from a Florida studio more than 1,100 miles away.
The unusual circumstances have opened the door to innovation. For example, some players are expected to be miked up for sound. But the real triumph may be just getting the tournament on the air after two months of planning and accounting for contingencies of all sorts.
"It's one of the great challenges I've seen ever in my 30 or 35 years, but this crew's ready for it," Nantz said. "It's as well-planned out as anything I've ever been a part of."
The main production truck in Fort Worth, which ordinarily would be packed with 22 workers, will be staffed by just nine. Extra trucks will be brought in to facilitate social distancing, but the on-site network crew will be roughly half the size typically assigned to a PGA event.
Additional technicians will work off-site from as far away as Connecticut, California and even New Zealand, some working from their homes.
"Certainly, this is a production unlike any golf production we've ever done at CBS," CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus said. "First and foremost, the health and safety of all of our personnel on site and in control rooms across the country has been paramount. ... The thing I worry about the most ... is somebody in our crew getting sick."
The same behind-the-scenes team at Colonial will travel to Hilton Head, S.C., for next week's RBC Heritage. But a completely different crew will work the Travelers Championship in Connecticut and Rocket Mortgage Classic in Michigan in the two weeks after that.
"I don't want to get into the specifics of the medical protocol, but there has been sufficient quarantining for this production team and there will be for the other production team also," McManus said, calling this "the most complicated production plan I've ever been involved in, including Super Bowls and Final Fours."
Yet by producing a telecast when so many sports have been idled, CBS _ and the PGA _ have entree to an audience hungry for live competition.
With that in mind, McManus' team has pushed for cooperation from players and tour officials to break down old barriers to make the coverage more engaging and introduce viewer to golfers in new and more intimate ways.
"This is a wonderful opportunity for the game, for the PGA Tour," Nantz said. "They have a chance to go before a sports-starved nation and have a chance to create a fan base, a wider fan base, than it has ever had before.
"How do you do that? A lot of it has to be personality driven. We need to hear from the players. ... It's an opportunity for the players to invest in their own game and again widen the audience base for the PGA Tour, make it more fun, more insightful. Bring us inside the ropes. Bring us inside their minds."
Players on the back nine will be invited to pop into a tent with only a camera and a microphone in it to answer a question printed on a card.
The absence of fans may enable some golfers to be heard talking with their caddies on the course, but the TV people are trying to convince some players to wear microphones.
"The no-fan thing is interesting," McManus said. "I think it's going to definitely affect the nature of the broadcast. When somebody makes a birdie putt or an eagle put, you're used to fan reaction, and then our announcers play off that fan reaction. It makes it easier on the announcers."
Said Nantz: "Someone conceivably on Sunday could hole a putt from 20 feet on the 18th green. There is no roar. There's not even presumably a handshake with his caddy. It's going to be one of the interesting things that we're going to have to figure out how to play it naturally."
But Nantz said he is very much against the use of fake crowd noise in sports coverage, regardless of the sport.
He acknowledged he doesn't expect to have a say in the matter, but Nantz left no doubt he opposes those who have suggested NFL games will require recorded crowd noise if games are played in empty or half-empty stadiums.
"It doesn't feel authentic to me, just the sound of it," he said. "At first pass, it doesn't seem to have integrity to me.
"I'd rather just take it for what it is. Give me the real scene and let me deal with it and don't have somebody souping up the audio off a big play. I know it would be easier for us as broadcasters ... but too bad."
