Lundquist Revisits Past Experiences

The symmetry of it all hasn’t escaped Verne Lundquist.

A few weeks ago, the versatile veteran became a full-time sportscaster for Turner Sports, leaving behind CBS, which had employed him since 1982.

But this week he has been rubbing shoulders with some of his former CBS colleagues because his first assignment since signing with Turner is the PGA Championship, an event being covered by both CBS and TBS.

“This marks the beginning of a new chapter and the closure of an old one,” Lundquist said while relaxing in a TBS production trailer at Riviera Country Club.

Lundquist is one of the TBS hosts, along with Ernie Johnson. Dave Marr is also part of the TBS team, and, coincidentally, when Lundquist announced his first golf tournament, the 1976 Hawaiian Open for ABC, Marr was his partner.

“I really have come full circle,” Lundquist said.

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After today’s second round, Lundquist will head for San Diego to work his first NFL telecast for TNT Sunday evening, when the Chargers play the San Francisco 49ers in an exhibition “rematch” of last January’s Super Bowl.

He’ll be reunited with an old friend, Pat Haden. Lundquist, who has replaced Gary Bender at TNT, and Haden did Pacific 10 football together for CBS in 1986.

“One of the most attractive aspects of the Turner offer was that I’d again be working with Pat,” Lundquist said.

On NFL telecasts for CBS, Lundquist worked mainly with Terry Bradshaw, who had Lundquist introduce him at his Hall of Fame induction in 1989, and with Dan Fouts.

“My football partners have been two Hall of Famers, a Rhodes scholar and someone named John,” Lundquist said, referring to the fact that he occasionally filled in for Pat Summerall and was teamed with John Madden.

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In an era when networks are getting away from high-priced exclusive contracts, CBS allowed Lundquist to announce NBA basketball for Turner last season even though it still had him under contract. It was a concession to Lundquist, who chose not to join the exodus to Fox after CBS lost the NFL.

Now Turner has made a concession to Lundquist, 55. He’ll be Turner’s main man on the NFL, NBA and golf, but he’ll still be able to announce figure skating for CBS. That will include five or six events a year plus the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan.

Lundquist, somewhat of a winter sports nut, moved from Dallas to Steamboat Springs, Colo., 11 years ago with his wife, Nancy, because of the skiing.

In 1971, when he was working for the ABC station in Dallas, he went to Steamboat Springs to do a feature on Billy Kidd, who ended up teaching him how to ski. He vowed someday he’d move there.

In 1984, he had to give up his job as the radio voice of the Cowboys, which he had held since 1972, because of NFL assignments with CBS. That summer, he moved to his new home.

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For someone who never finished higher than fourth during a 10-year pro career, Mary Bryan is doing pretty well as a golf commentator.

She is working for both TBS and CBS at Riviera and joins ABC’s Judy Rankin as the only female commentators to work a men’s major tournament.

Bryan, 49, who lives in Orlando, Fla., has done women’s golf for CBS, ESPN and Prime. She said she was pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago when Frank Chirkinian, CBS’ longtime golf producer, called to say he wanted to assign her to the PGA Championship.

Bryan, who grew up in East Lansing, Mich., went to school at Eastern New Mexico in Portales.

She was the Michigan state amateur champion in 1969, and a couple of years later, at 23, was runner-up in the New Mexico state amateur tournament. She was beaten by a 12-year-old named Nancy Lopez.

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Bryan was in a CBS trailer talking to this reporter when colleague Ben Wright, the former British journalist who has worked for CBS for 23 years, stopped by to say hello. Wright, who had earlier declined--through a CBS spokeswoman--a request for an interview, is still reeling from a Delaware newspaper story in May that, he said, misquoted him as saying that lesbians in the LPGA were stunting the growth of women’s golf. He also denied that he had used the word boobs in describing the difference between the sexes.

“He got a bad rap,” Bryan said after Wright left the trailer. “Everyone I know on the LPGA Tour supported him 100%. We love that man.”

TV-Radio Notes

KMAX-FM (107.1) is among 55 stations carrying coverage of the PGA Championship by the new, St. Louis-based Radio Golf Network Saturday and Sunday, 2-4 p.m. Amy Alcott and Jack Whitaker are the network’s co-hosts. . . . Channel 9, which will have live coverage of Saturday’s St. Louis Ram-Oakland Raider exhibition game at 1 p.m., got a 6.7 rating for the Raiders and Dallas Cowboys last Saturday. That’s respectable, particularly when you consider most of the second half went up against the Dodgers and Hideo Nomo on Channel 7. Also, ESPN was showing the San Francisco 49er-Denver Bronco exhibition. However, on Aug. 7, 1994, a Raider exhibition from Dallas on Channel 9 got an 11.9 rating. . . . KMAX will broadcast the Ram-Raider game, delayed, following the PGA on Saturday.

Prime Sports has hired Tom Kirkland of CNN as a replacement on “Press Box” for Glen Walker, who is headed for WNBC in New York. . . . Last Saturday, ABC planned to show the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis on a three-hour delay on the West Coast. When the race was delayed four hours by rain, it seemed to give ABC an opportunity to show it live on the West Coast. But no, the race wasn’t shown until the next day on ESPN. “To show it only on the West Coast would have been a logistical nightmare,” ABC spokesman Mark Mandel said. “For one thing, because of baseball that night, we didn’t have satellite transponder space to show the race in its entirety.”