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Dad is never far away
CBS announcer's book shares rich life, struggles of father
RON GREEN JR.
rgreenjr@charlotteobserver.com
Last Sunday afternoon, when the CBS Sports telecast of the Wachovia Championship came to life, the television was on in Room 201 of the assisted living center in Houston where Jim Nantz Jr. lay.
The audio was turned to 75, three-quarters of the way between 0 and 100 on the set, loud enough to reach across the quiet room.
That's the way Jim Nantz III wants it when he's on the air, loud enough so that perhaps some little piece of the voice that has narrated so many sports moments will register someplace deep within his father, who is spending his final days lost in the fog of Alzheimer's.
"My voice at least is going to be in his room," Nantz said, sitting in a CBS production truck at the Quail Hollow Club three hours before air time last Sunday.
Thirteen years ago, Nantz's father, 79, suffered a stroke as he left the tower behind the 18th green at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, where his son was calling the golf tournament.
Nothing has been the same since for Nantz, the son.
His voice, as familiar as the road home, has told us the stories of the Masters, the Final Four, the Super Bowl. He has taken viewers where most could never go. Nantz has become the pre-eminent broadcasting voice in American sports and he has done much of it with a sadness he has kept hidden until now.
Nantz, who was born in Charlotte almost 49 years ago, has written a book "Always By My Side, A Father's Grace And A Sports Journey Unlike Any Other" (Gotham Books, $26) that was released May 6 and tells his story largely behind the camera.
It is a book that starts and ends with his father -- what happened when he was first stricken and how his life will end, perhaps soon -- and blends in stories about the places Nantz has been and the people he has befriended.
He tells about relationships with former President George H.W. Bush, and fellow broadcasters Ken Venturi, Jim McKay, Pat Summerall and others. He tells their stories because they have influenced his life, often profoundly.
"I got to talk about what I think is very important in that you do lean on people to guide you. In my case, surrogate fathers, mentors, guiding lights. Father figures I always looked up to," Nantz said.
It is not a maudlin book nor is it a recounting of anecdotes from his access in the closed world of athletics and television. It's a gentle, amusing, warm book about the people who have most influenced his life in the years since his father began to fade away.
And his father, who was born in Mount Holly and married Doris Trull from Charlotte, is never far away.
The idea for the book came, Nantz said, when he was preparing for the greatest run any sports broadcaster has ever had -- a 63-day journey in 2007 in which he was the lead announcer on the Super Bowl, the Final Four and the Masters, a broadcasting first.
Nantz realized he had everything but his father, who used to sit in television booths, headphones strapped on his ears, watching his son rather than watching the action.
"When my career is over, when it's all said and done, I'm going to look at that book and say I'm more proud of that than anything I ever did. I got to tell people how my father looked at life," Nantz said.
The Nantz ties to Charlotte run deep. Even after the family moved away in the early 1960s, they returned every summer to visit relatives. Nantz's grandparents on his mother's side lived in the same two-bedroom, one-bathroom house on Camp Greene Street for 63 years.
Last October, when Nantz was in Charlotte to broadcast the Carolina Panthers game against the Indianapolis Colts, he reached a peace about his father's condition, which he describes today as "barely, barely alive."
Getting there, however, has been a 13-year grieving process.
With images of the golf tournament he would soon broadcast flickering behind him in the CBS production truck, Nantz talked about the pain of dealing with the effects of Alzheimer's on everyone touched by it. The decision to move his dad out of his Houston home and into a care facility eight years ago was wrenching.
"How does a loving son, one day drop (his dad) off somewhere? How you do that?" Nantz asked.
He was at Pebble Beach in 2000 during the U.S. Open when, after walking the beach at Carmel by himself, he phoned his mother and sister, Nancy, and asked them to come to California for a vacation.
"I was really despondent at that time. CBS didn't know what I was going through," Nantz said. "(My mom and sister) were at wit's end, dragging my father up and down the stairs at home. I said, pack up, come to Pebble Beach, you need a break. Stay as long as you'd like.
"They said `who's going to get your father?' I said I will. I'll take care of him. For five days I did what they'd been doing for years.
"You bathe them. You dress them. You take them to the bathroom. You do everything that goes with that."
And, Nantz learned, you decide when they need more than you can give them.
Connecticut is home for Nantz, but he regularly flies through Houston, on his way to or from an assignment or just to spend a few hours with his father.
He has lost his father gradually and in plain sight.
"In the last year we've gone from faint, faint, faint recognition; we could walk into a room and haven't seen him in a month and you'd have that flash," Nantz said. "For a year, we were hanging onto that flash. That was a win."
For a time, Nantz took to identifying himself almost every time a broadcast would return from a commercial break. "This is Jim Nantz" he'd say, not for the viewers or his ego but in hopes it might register with his father. After a while, Nantz dropped the subtle attempt at therapy.
In hopes of clearing the cobwebs from his father's mind, Nantz would sit with him and play word association games, asking him to remember names.
"That's been long gone," Nantz said.
"I was there (two) weeks ago Thursday and you go in and there's nothing. He's off in the distance. He's oblivious to the world."
When Nantz was in Charlotte for the Colts-Panthers game last October, he drove to Mount Holly again. He had finished his Saturday prep meetings with Panthers players and coaches and drove to the town where his father was raised.
He had planned to bury his father in the National Cemetery in Houston, a recognition of his military service, until his sister recalled her father saying he'd like to go back to Mount Holly.
The Nantz family plot in the town cemetery had one spot remaining. On one side of the headstone are Jim III's great grandfather, great grandmother and great uncle. On the other side are his father's mother and father.
Nantz went to the Mount Holly cemetery on a Saturday when the clouds were breaking, the wind was blowing and a football game was being played down the hill at the school where his father was educated before going away to Guilford College, where he played football.
"It felt like a movie set," Nantz said.
He walked down the hill and bought a $3 ticket to the football game. He did one lap around the field, always looking back up the slope toward the juniper tree that marked the family plot.
"I walked back up and I called my mother and said this is the place," Nantz said. "Here was a football game. All the things that represented my dad, his school, his town, his mother and father. I said we're going to bring him here."
One day soon they will.
Until that day, there are telecasts to do like the one Nantz did last Sunday from high above the 18th green at Quail Hollow. His mother, Doris, was in the booth, watching her son work.
In Room 201 in Houston, the television was on.
