World Golf Hall of Fame member Lanny Wadkins is winding down his 13th season of serving as the lead analyst for Golf Channel’s coverage of PGA Tour Champions this week at the Charles Schwab Cup Championship at Phoenix Country Club in Phoenix. It will also be his last full season.
“I’ve had my run,” Wadkins, who turns 75 next month, told Golfweek in a phone conversation. “It’s time.”
Wadkins will retire after working one final telecast at the season-opening Mitsubishi Electric Championship at Hualalai on the Big Island of Hawaii in January, which also coincides with the Tour’s transition to having the TV broadcast team call PGA Tour Champions and Korn Ferry Tour events from its new studio that was built next to the Tour’s Global Home in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. [A test run of how this will work next season is being conducted this week for the first time.]
Wadkins, who won 21 PGA Tour titles over the course of his playing career, including the PGA Championship, and was a former U.S. Ryder Cup captain, has known for a couple of years this move was coming and it would require him to fly to Jacksonville 15+ weeks a year to be part of the broadcast team with host Bob Papa (and occasionally John Swantek) and fellow commentators such as John Cook, John Mahaffey, Billy Ray Brown and Phil Blackmar.
“I think that telecast is going to be losing something for all the positives that they can come up with,” Wadkins said. “I think the personal interaction with the players is one of the best things you can do. I know, for example, when I call the tournament in Hawaii, I have breakfast every morning with various players and you get them in a surrounding like that you’re able to get more info from them on what’s going on with their games, who they’re working with, how they’re hitting it, and what they’re trying to achieve, everything else.”
This week, Wadkins is in Phoenix but he noted cost-cutting means he doesn’t even call the action from a booth anymore.
“I’m going to call this tournament, which is arguably the biggest on the Champions Tour, and I’ll sit in the compound, a little 10-by-10 windowless room, and call it off monitors. You know, they’ve just taken it in that direction,” he said.
Wadkins said he found flying from his longtime home in Dallas to Jacksonville between 15 to 20 times a year to sit in a studio less appealing. Papa already has moved his family to Ponte Vedra Beach, and Swantek is a longtime…
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