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Masters Countdown: Why CBS refused, for 16 years, to show Augusta National's 12th hole

April 07, 2015

The Masters first appeared on TV in 1956, on CBS. (NBC, which covered the tournament on radio, had turned it down.) CBS initially wanted to show little more than the eighteenth hole, but the club said it would forego $5,000, half its fee, if more of the course could be included. CBS added a second transmission station, but the coverage was still minimal: two and a half hours over three days, showing just parts of the last four holes.

Augusta National argued for more. The club's television committee, in its report on the second broadcast, in 1957, wrote, "A most picturesque part of our golf course lies about the twelfth hole and thirteenth green. An attempt should be made through employment of portable cameras to bring this area into live broadcast. If this is impractical, a few films of the area could be shown."

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CBS disagreed that there was any need to show more of the course, even on film, and it stuck to that position. Seven years later, Clifford Roberts, the club's chairman and co-founder -- after reading in Golf World* *that CBS was planning to cover six holes at a lesser tournament, the 1964 Carling World Open, at Oakland Hills -- wrote to Jack Dolph, who was then the network's director of sports, to ask why the Masters could not be given the same treatment. Dolph replied: "It's true that we are covering six holes of the Carling's rather than four as we do at the Masters. This was a commitment made in acquiring the rights to the Tournament; one on which Carling's insisted. We have grave doubts that this extra hole coverage will add to the overall impact of the tournament, and we are, in fact, giving the extra two holes the very minimum of coverage."

Roberts did not give up, and in 1966 CBS finally agreed to extend its coverage beyond the fifteenth hole, by adding a camera near the fourteenth green. Coverage of the thirteenth green began two years later, in 1968, after Roberts suggested moving a camera from the far less interesting fourteenth tee. The twelfth hole wasn't shown live until five years after that, in 1973 -- sixteen years after the club's original suggestion.

The twelfth hole might not have received its own camera even in 1973 if Roberts had not effectively tricked CBS into putting one there. The year before, ABC Sports had asked the club for permission to film the twelfth hole during the 1972 Masters, for a prime-time sports special that it planned to broadcast on the Monday following the tournament. "As you know," an ABC executive wrote to Roberts, "this hole has never been shown on the live presentations of the Masters, and our segment, which would probably be only five or ten minutes in length, would not only show how some of the top finishers play this hole but would also capture the many moods and some of the unique happenings that transpire at this locale."

Roberts -- who knew that ABC for years had yearned to win the Masters contract away from CBS -- agreed. CBS noticed. The following year, for the first time, it placed a camera of its own on the twelfth hole.

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