Roger Maltbie on NBC career and stories from walking the golf course

RM: I was asked in the late ’80s, about ’88. NBC auditioned me at Kapalua when that was an unofficial event at the end of the year. I thought, well, that’s pretty cool, I’ll go to Hawaii, see what this is like. I was rehabbing from my first shoulder surgery. I had a couple of those. They offered me a job.

A couple of weeks later, they said, we liked you, and would you like to do it.  Well, the money wasn’t right, it was too many weeks and I couldn’t play anymore, and I said no.

They came back a couple years later in 1991. I’d had a second surgery on my shoulder, and I was rehabbing at the time, and they said, hey, we’ve got this new technology called the RF camera.  It doesn’t have to be hard-wired, they could move around.  

Larry Cirillo, the producer, called me and he said the leader at the old Bob Hope (The American Express now) could be on another course and they’d never see him, but now we can cover him. So we’d like you to come out and be that guy at the other golf course, if that happens, so on, so forth.  I said, I’ll agree to do it if you let me do the broadcast of the Ryder Cup, which was going to be at Kiawah later in the year. They said, you’ve got a deal.

So I did the Hope and did the Ryder Cup. It was kind of funny that for the Sunday singles matches I had David Feherty versus Payne Stewart, and Feherty was wiping the floor with Payne. It wasn’t much of a match. Up ahead a couple of groups, Mark Calcavecchia had this big lead on Colin Montgomerie. I don’t know if you remember how all that shook out but I think Montgomerie won like the last four holes with bogeys or something like that.  Calcavecchia fell apart, hit a shank on 17, and the match was very tightly contested. You really looked at that may cost the U.S. the Ryder Cup.

A guy named Terry O’Neill at the time was executive producer of NBC Sports and was there in the production truck. He gets in my ear, says Roger, leave your match. Go find Mark Calcavecchia and interview him.

I’m doing what I’m told, absolutely. So off I go, and I find him. He’s in the TV compound with Peter Kostis who was my instructor, and he was Calcavecchia’s instructor. Mark is beside himself.  I mean, his eyes are swollen shut. He’s crying. He’d been sick into a garbage can. I don’t know what a nervous breakdown is technically, but this guy was on the edge. I mean, he was not good.

So Peter kind of looked at me, and I kind of went, I get…