“Welcome to the graveyard of old fired golf announcers.”
That was the playful introduction for Roger Maltbie earlier this week when the former PGA Tour player and NBC on-course reporter joined Gary McCord and Drew Stoltz on their SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio show.
Golfweek was first to report last week that Maltbie and Gary Koch won’t be returning to NBC in 2023 after the network told the pair of longtime broadcasters it wanted to “refresh” the team for the future.
Maltbie was originally told 2021 would be his last year before Jim “Bones” Mackay left his on-air role with the network to caddie for Justin Thomas. He returned as an on-course reporter for 2022 but wasn’t renewed for 2023. A five-time winner on the PGA Tour, Maltbie, 71, had been covering golf for NBC Sports since 1992.
“Does it hurt when you hear the words? Sure. ‘You’re not in our plans.’ Thirty-one years I spent with NBC. ‘You’re no longer in our plans and you’re not part of our future. We need to go young,’ which is a nice way of saying you’re old, and I understand all that,” said Maltbie. “But you know, there’s hurt feelings and there’s also a lot of gratitude. They were great to me for 31 years. I don’t have a complaint.
“There’s hurt feelings and there’s also a lot of gratitude.”
The golf world is still reacting to the news that Roger Maltbie’s time with NBC Sports is ending. Maltbie himself reacts with Gary & Drew on McCord & Stoltz. Hear the full interview on the SXM App.@thesleezyman pic.twitter.com/BPQd78kdMi
— SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio (@SiriusXMPGATOUR) November 15, 2022
“I absolutely love the guys I worked with. I will miss watching the greatest players in the world play great,” he continued. “My role was to walk with the final group on Sunday, so I was watching the best players in the world playing their best and I still get a kick out of it to this day, even though I can’t do it anymore. I sure like watching it and I’ll miss all that. I will.”
If anyone knows how Maltbie and Koch feel, it’s McCord. In Oct. 2019, he and Peter Kostis, two longtime members of the CBS golf team, were not renewed for 2020. Both were told by the network that things were getting “stale.”
“I would have liked to have kept going but it’s a funny thing, the phases your career goes through over the course of 31 years,” Maltbie explained. “When I first started, hell, I knew every player, I was a player still. I was one of them and I was…
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