This Is a Perfect Match

The trouble with golf--the reason the PGA tournament abandoned match play--is the decisive matches never offer marquee players. They’re quite often anticlimactic, Who-Dats vs. What’s-His-Names.

Take the PGA. A final some years would feature Felice Torza vs. Walter Burkemo. Henry Williams Jr. vs. Chandler Harper. Jim Ferrier vs. Chick Harbert. Hardly Dempsey-Tunney or Notre Dame-Army.

And this was in an era when in the fields were the likes of Hogan, Snead, Byron Nelson--even Arnold Palmer and Ken Venturi.

Television, of course, could not countenance this kind of off-Broadway, Little Theater casting. It was like doing “Gone With the Wind” with Don Knotts as Rhett Butler and the networks told the tournament to shape up or they would ship out. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does Channel 7.

It was about this time a producer named Fred Raphael conceived a way to repair this oversight in the fabric of golf. He would put on a series of matches, made for TV, featuring the certified giants of the game, the players that the structure of the game never seemed to pair together in the same twosome.

Oh, there had been a Masters playoff starring Snead against Hogan, a U.S. Open playoff once (1962) that put Nicklaus vs. Palmer, but these were exceptions. By and large, the seedings of the game found the drawing cards playing several twosomes or even hours away from each other.

Raphael proposed to rectify this by more adroit matchmaking than the standard rules of the game provided and he sold the idea to Shell Oil Company.

The Shell Wonderful World of Golf was a boon to television and to golf. It was, in its way, the forerunner of the Skins Games, Grand Slams and other offshoots of television golf we see today.

Its format was simple: Pit the best players in the world on the best courses in the world. It was pure theater.

It went on for nine years, a run most series would envy. Hackers everywhere loved it. No longer was the game a long-range artillery duel. It was hand-to-hand combat. Golf the way it used to be, maybe, the way it was meant to be.

The good news is, it has been revived. How do you like Fred Couples vs. Raymond Floyd at a course in the Dominican Republic aptly named Teeth of the Dog?

And how about Jack Nicklaus vs. Arnold Palmer at Pinehurst No. 2? Will that be any good? What about Nick Faldo vs. Greg Norman at Sunningdale in England?

How about narration and description by Dave Marr and Jack Whitaker?

The revival is the brainchild of ABC producer Terry Jastrow. In this era when top players not only miss competing against each other but miss cuts and compete against no one, there was a sense of incompleteness, he felt, in a game in which the only compelling head-to-head competition left was in the biennial Ryder Cup.

The Marr-Whitaker pairing was as felicitous as Nicklaus-Palmer.

Television today should be more than instant replays, harried interviews and description of green breaks and the depth and density of the left rough. There is a literary and historical component of the game that needs to be addressed. And nobody does this better in any sport than the medium’s Jack Whitaker.

Whitaker is an essayist in the mold of an Alexander Woollcott. A Thackeray of the tube in whom geniality and wit reside comfortably. There is no one more adept at setting a scene and historical significance to an event, whether it be a Kentucky Derby, championship fight--or the wonderful world of golf. Listening to Whitaker narrate is like listening to Crosby croon or watching Kelly dance. It seems so effortless. Whitaker is to sports what Kuralt was to the road or Toynbee to history. Its biographer. Its chronicler.

It’s a quality that makes cats purr. His voice could charm cobras, informative as it is mellifluous. It never violates the principle of audience empathy. There is no strain evident in a Whitaker telecast. He is never reaching for a high note, never makes the audience feel it is hard to keep all those plates spinning. Like Snead, he has a great swing that nothing could ever go wrong with.

It’s odd to remember then that this paragon of announcing decorum could be the only telecaster ever banned from the Masters. Completely to his shock, Jack was banished from that golfing Eden one year when he noted (correctly) that the throng around the 18th green was “a mob scene.”

The Masters’ master, Cliff Roberts, was seething. His galleries could not be categorized as a “mob.” (Cliff, you see, never got out among them. He got on the course only in the company of Presidents of the United States).

Jack was persona non grata at Augusta until one day, five years later, he grudgingly agreed to go back as a spectator.

He was sitting in the dining room when CBS producer Frank Chirkinian came in to announce his British commentator, Henry Longhurst, had fallen ill. “Get your hat,” he said, pointing at Whitaker. “You’re working.”

He marched Jack down to the office of Cliff Roberts, who had long since learned to regret his blunder. He looked at Jack. “Young man,” he told him, in the nearest thing to an apology Cliff Roberts ever came, “we are very happy to have you back. We are very lucky to have you back.”

So are the rest of us. This Saturday, on ABC at 1 p.m., you can catch Whitaker gracefully setting the stage for Nicklaus-Palmer, a confrontation as dramatic today as it was at Oakmont 32 years ago. And you will hear him from England on July 16 with Faldo and Norman in a rare head-to-head matchup.

It’s nice to have a painting worthy of his brush. It’s nice for the game to have the lions going at each other for a change, but, come to think of it, Whitaker probably could have made Felice Torza and Henry Williams dramatic if he had to.