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An eloquent essayist, he has specialized in horse racing and golf during his long career. A misplaced word has banished it from the Masters.
Jack Whitaker, sports scholar CBS and ABC, whose half-century of radio has been unjustly soiled by an apparently innocuous remark that has excluded him from the Masters, has passed away. He was 95 years old.
Whitaker died Sunday of natural causes in Devon, Pennsylvania, after a stay in a hospice, CBS announced.
Whitaker was part of the CBS team that worked at the first Super Bowl in 1967, and he participated in the triumph's spectacular victory of the Triple Crown at the Belmont Stakes of 1973. Male, analyst, host, journalist and essayist, he has participated in dozens of major golf tournaments. several Olympic Games, winter and summer; Major League Baseball; the America's Cup yacht competition; and track and field events.
"There will never be any other Jack Whitaker in sports programming," said Sean McManus, president of CBS Sports, in a statement. "His incredible writing skills, on-air presence and humanity are unmatched, and his unique perspective on sports from horse racing to golf to NFL football was extraordinary."
Known for his elegance and intelligence, the native of Philadelphia described the Old Course in St. Andrews, the birthplace of golf, while working at the British Open for ABC in Scotland:
"No one has designed this route," he said. "Nobody with a pencil and $ 2 million and five bulldozers, it was done by nature, it comes out of the ground, it was done with the wind and the rain and the sun and with the help of some So, while for most Americans and other peoples, it's not love at first sight in St. Andrews, the Old Course of St. Andrews is like a dry martini – an acquired taste and, as such that you are left forever. "
However, his choice of words at another golf tournament – the 1966 Masters – caused him trouble with Augusta National President, Clifford Roberts.
Working alongside analyst Cary Middlecoff on the cover of Monday's final that Jack Nicklaus would win, Whitaker angered the club's all-powerful president by describing the chaotic scene on the last hole.
"The trio played particularly slowly, and we knew we had to be at 7pm for Walter Cronkite," Whitaker recalls in an interview in 1979. "I was doing the 18th hole, and as players and galleries were climbing the fairway, I said, "Here's the crowd."
"It looked like a crowd of people running towards the green, but Mr. Roberts was offended, he said that the Masters Gallery was not a crowd, and that was all."
Although still employed by CBS, Whitaker only returned to Augusta in 1972, when he went to the tournament as a fan. Suddenly, he was called to fight to replace Henry Longhurst, the network presenter at the 16th hole, who fell ill. "I saw Cliff Roberts," Whitaker remembered years later, "and he says," Young man, I'm glad to see you here. "I'm not sure that he remembered our previous meeting."
(Another CBS golf announcer, Gary McCord, was also banned when he used the terms "bikini wax" and "body bags" to describe the sacred course of the Masters in 1994. He never returned to Augusta since.)
Whitaker worked with several other masters before leaving CBS for ABC in 1982.
Whitaker was born May 18, 1924 in the East Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, and graduated from Northeast Catholic High School for Boys. He had made two trips to St. Joseph's College – meanwhile, he was a US Army soldier who had landed at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, three days after June Day. 1944 – then had landed a 250-watt radio station in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.
He returned to Philadelphia when a sport job started at WCAU-TV and he worked around 11 pm. TV show on weekdays with presenter John Facenda, who would become the baritone voice of NFL Films, and the future sidekick Johnny Carson, Ed McMahon, who wrote a five-minute essay at the end of each show.
Whitaker also hosted the local show Meet me at the zoo and has been at WCAU for 12 years. But when CBS bought the station, reduced the bulletin to 15 minutes and made him a meteorologist, he and McMahon took the train to New York every morning to go around the agencies to try to find a new job. Then they would come back to the WCAU.
In 1958, McMahon met Carson for the televised game show Who do you trust? Whitaker found work during the weekend at CBS, switched to the full-time network in 1961 and organized the CBS Sports Spectacular (a series of anthologies prior to ABC The world of sports) And the ephemeral televised game show The face is familiar.
Much later, Whitaker reported for ABC news programs World news tonight, Nightline and 20/20 and play sports for TNT and ESPN. He wrote a book, Favorite Lies and other stories: hover over the cream of a life in sport, which was published in 1998.
Silver-haired Whitaker was a member of the famed Shinnecock Hills Golf Club on Long Island and, at his peak, was at PJ Clarke, New York's historic Third Avenue saloon, which drew artists, athletes and journalists .
He received the Emmy First Prize at the Outstanding Sports Performer in 1979 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the American Sportscasters Association in 1997. In 2012, the National Academy of Arts and Sciences of the TV has awarded him the Lifetime Sports Achievement Award.
Illustrated Sports in 2010, he was ranked # 17 on the list of sports broadcasters of all time.
Whitaker was married to tennis star Nancy Chaffee – after her divorce from baseball star Ralph Kiner – from 1991 to her death in 2002.
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