James William Nantz III is an American sportscaster who has worked on telecasts of the National Football League (NFL), NCAA Division I men’s basketball, the NBA and the PGA Tour for CBS Sports since the 1980s.
Nantz joined CBS Sports in 1985, initially working as a studio host for the network’s college football and basketball coverage, and as an on-course reporter for PGA Tour golf, as well as calling NFL games on Westwood One
He has anchored CBS’s coverage of the Masters Tournament since 1989 and has been the lead play-by-play announcer on CBS’s NFL coverage since 2004.
Nantz is also one of two men to host a Super Bowl, announce an NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship game, and host coverage of The Masters from Butler Cabin with Brent Musburger being the other.
During Super Bowl XLVII, Joe Flacco unknowingly hit Nantz with the Vince Lombardi Trophy during the presentation, but Nantz simply brushed it off.
Nantz and broadcast partner Phil Simms called Thursday Night Football games in a deal with CBS and the NFL Network. Tracy Wolfson was the sideline reporter for the Thursday games along with the Sunday games on CBS.
Did Jim Nantz play a sport?
Yes, Nantz loved sports, playing basketball and golf in high school and golf at the University of Houston. But he was consumed by the broadcasters who chronicled the events on TV.
“They were classical storytellers and I was mesmerized by them—I’m not exaggerating,” Nantz says. “I had a strange way of looking at sports because I was so into the broadcasters.”
Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Nantz recalls, there were no 24-hour cable networks devoted to sports.
Nor were there VCRs or DVRs, and sporting events were generally only broadcast on Saturdays and Sundays.
So, to get his daily sports to fix, Nantz would spend his weekends recording whatever events were being broadcast—from golf tournaments and NFL games to the long-running “ABC’s Wide World of Sports”—on his little cassette tape recorder, winding the microphone around the TV dial so it hung next to the speaker.