His voice has been heard on television broadcasts the past 30 years at Super Bowls, Masters Tournaments and NCAA Final Fours, but Jim Nantz is most passionate these days being a voice in the fight against Alzheimer’s.
It’s a disease the CBS broadcaster knows about personally, having seen his father suffer from it before dying in 2008. Nantz will share his story tonight at the Little Rock Marriott Grand Ballroom in “An Evening with Jim Nantz,” a fundraiser hosted by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences to raise awareness in the fight against Alzheimer’s.
Nantz, who will be in Dallas on Thursday to broadcast the Cowboys-Panthers game, isn’t being compensated for tonight’s speech. He said he could never make a dime off a cause this dear to his heart.
“There’s nothing that I do when it comes to funding Alzheimer’s that I am going to prosper by one cent,” Nantz, 56, said. “The bottom line is we give our money to Alzheimer’s. We don’t take. I’m there to roll up my sleeves and put my time, energy and money to helping the cause.”
Nantz’s father, Jim Nantz Jr., played college football in the leather-helmet era at Guilford College in North Carolina, even playing in 1945 as a 16-year-old two-way end against a Bear Bryant-coached Maryland team in what would be the first of Bryant’s 323 collegiate victories.
Nantz said his father had total hearing loss in one ear after getting kicked in the head trying to block a kick in one game and complained throughout his adult life of ringing in his head.
“He always thought it [the ringing] had to do with that blow to his head,” Nantz said. “So, I believe that my dad, it’s very possible, we don’t have the autopsy to prove it, that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and it may have cost him his life.”
Nantz’s father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1995 after suffering a stroke attending a golf tournament the younger Nantz was broadcasting in Texas.
“He suffered a stroke at the base of my tower,” Nantz said “My dad had been up in the booth during rehearsal and he was very overheated looking to me I implored him to go into the clubhouse and drink a lot of water and cool off. He climbed down the steps when we were two minutes from going on the air and he just got dizzy and passed out. I had a ride for me right when I got off the air and I was hurried over to the hospital. My dad was lucid when I got there and had some temporary paralysis on his face.
“The interesting thing was a couple of months later we noticed he was kind of off in some of his recall and some of the names of people that were figures in his life like our nextdoor neighbors. He would get their names coming out upside down. The words weren’t coming out cleanly so we all became concerned. We took him to see some neurologists. We were told after getting several opinions that it could be early Alzheimer’s.”
Nantz’s book, Always By My Side, was published Mother’s Day week of 2008. His father died a short time later on June
28.
“I didn’t know it at the time how perfect it would be for me to write a book about my dad,” Nantz said. “He was in the last year of his life. I didn’t know it was going be the last year but pretty much could figure he was in the closing stage in his battle against Alzheimer’s. Here is the thing. The three-event series of the Super Bowl, the Final Four, the Masters that I was calling in 2007 is the backdrop. How I found my father with me figuratively everywhere I would go. The book was filled with goodness because that’s what my dad was. My dad was filled with goodness. I used the backdrop of those three sporting events and wrote openly about how people I met along the way on the journey during that threeevent series reminded me of my father.”
Nantz said his University of Houston days where he played on the same golf team with PGA Tour veterans Fred Couples and Blaine McCallister prepared him for CBS, the only network he has worked at during the past 30 years. He said even before he did one Masters green jacket ceremony in Augusta’s Butler Cabin, he had prepared plenty in Houston’s Taub Hall to overcome any nervousness.
“As I masqueraded as a college golfer, I was still talking about, as I had been since I was a little boy, about working for CBS,” Nantz said. “I could see Fred had this phenomenal talent. His goal was to one day be a Masters champion. He talked about it openly. I talked about how I wanted to one day to broadcast the Masters. Somewhere along the line we’d rehearse the green jacket ceremony a time or two in Taub Hall [in the late 1970s]. Now you fast forward not really that far down the road in 1992 and Fred won the green jacket and I was there to present it to him, sitting next to Augusta Chairman Arkansas’ own Jack Stephens when the whole thing happened.”
This isn’t the first time Nantz has visited the state.
His most notable recollection came from 1991 and broadcasting an NCAA basketball game between No. 1 UNLV and No. 2 Arkansas. He said an unexpected visitor caught he and Billy Packer, his broadcast partner of 18 years, by surprise just as they were about to go live in a very revved-up Barnhill Arena.
“Right before the game we were standing on the floor and the producer is trying to count me down for the beginning of the broadcast into my little earpiece and it felt like the building was shaking,” Nantz said. “It was so loud I couldn’t hear the producer’s cues. I didn’t know if we were 30 seconds away or a minute. I just knew that we were close. The place was stirred to a frenzy.
“Just before I looked over at the monitor … a gentleman leaned over and straddled the press table and stepped over onto the courtside and approached us. It was Governor [Bill] Clinton. I was seconds away from going on the air. He just came over and said ‘Jim, Billy, I am Governor Bill Clinton, I just want to welcome you guys to the great state of Arkansas.’ I said thank you and next thing you know, ‘we are live at Barnhill Arena in Fayetteville Arkansas for the much talked about match-up of 1 against 2. UNLV and Arkansas next here on CBS.’ ”
In 2011, Nantz founded the Nantz National Alzheimer Center at Methodist Hospital in Houston. He knows he has plenty of irons in the fire with CBS, but he said he will always make sure he’ll have time to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s.
“As I juggle the NFL, college basketball and golf I devote just as much time away from the broadcast booth to working on finding new things that are going to make a difference at the NNAC,” Nantz said. “I’m truly not even asked about it that often in the media and that’s OK. I’m not doing it as a media play. I do it when I am asked because I am passionate about Alzheimer’s research and finding a cure to this insidious disease.”
Jim Nantz at a glance
AGE 56 (born May 17, 1959)
BIRTHPLACE Charlotte, N.C.
RESIDES Pebble Beach, Calif.
PROFESSION CBS broadcaster covering the NFL, NCAA’s Final Four and the PGA Tour
NOTES Was teammate on the University of Houston golf team with PGA Tour veterans Fred Couples and Blaine McCallister … Joined CBS in 1985 … Has won three Emmy Awards and named National Sportscaster of the Year five times. … Will be the play-by-play broadcaster at Super Bowl 50 for CBS on Feb. 7 in Santa Clara, Calif.
At a glance
WHAT An Evening with Jim Nantz, a benefit to raise awareness in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease
WHEN 6:30 p.m.
WHERE Little Rock Marriott Grand Ballroom
INFO Tickets are not available, but donations to the STOP Alzheimer’s fund at the UAMS Reynolds Institute on Aging can be made online at aging.uams.edu/giving or by contacting Dr. Shannon Fleming at
(501) 686-8401.