Greg, a great post. I've always been interested in TV technology, and these telecasts, and earlier years CBS has shown portions of, tell a story of technical progress.
What there is of 1972 was interesting from several aspects.
1. The use of the Ampex video-replay disk, which could hold 30 seconds of video, for a replay of Jim Jamieson's approach on 17 – and freezing it with the ball in the air.
2. The use later of a hand-held camera for Nicklaus' approach – the cable is clearly shown for a moment – and that the big camera on a cart for tee-shot receive on the other side of Nicklaus was useless with the gallery in the way, as it was only a few feet off the ground.
3. The electronic graphics. CBS Labs was the leader in second-generation electronic titles to replace the cards used since the start of TV. The font was one of its early ones – CBS News and NBC, which contracted for a set, got the first two.
4. And the continuing use (and into the 1980s, I think, though I haven't gotten that far) of the master scoreboard in Butler Cabin, with everything put up by hand. It's on the 1968 telecast and all those after.
Thanks, Tim. I've always had a bit of an obsession with The Masters telecasts (the first one I remember watching was Charlie Coody in '71 when I was 14) and by extension, CBS Golf, for reasons that aren't totally clear to me. I suppose some of the attraction was how the event signifies the coming of Spring and in the early years it offered a visual treat unlike anything else I'd ever seen. Plus here in my part of Canada this was the only CBS golf event we would receive all year (CBS didn't appear on our cable system here until the late '80s) so it was a treat in that respect too.
My viewing has now entered the '80s. I was very disappointed in the 1980 telecast as offered here, as it is severely limited. The first half has no CBS commentary or graphics at all, just ambient sound, seeming almost like an edited series of shots without a whole lot of continuity. No idea where that came from. The last half does have the commentary track and seems close to what aired, but there are occasional quick cuts of stuff that Chirkinian would never allow to be seen, like a handheld camera changing position so all you see is the turf and the cable as the operator walks it to the next shot. No Butler Cabin ceremony either with the infamous Hord Hardin question to Seve about how tall he is.
In the early 80s broadcasts the commentary team changed a bit, with Clive Clark coming on for a few years as another English voice, taking over from Jack Whitaker and doing a good job, Steve Melnyk starting his run with CBS, and Gary Bender, a CBS staff announcer, taking over from Jim Thacker. I had forgotten about Bender and thought he did a good job on golf, maybe better than on some of his other CBS assignments.
The technical progress is interesting to watch. The use of the Ampex disc seemed to be mostly in the early to mid-70s and for a while in those years they seemed in love with it, with lots of replays of shots ending in a sometimes awkward freeze-frame. In that same timeframe they liked to use a split-screen with a shot of the player on one side and a camera view following the shot on the other side. The electronic titles really changed a lot and fairly quickly, moving from the skinny dot matrix look of the early '70s to a more typeface font to the blocky font CBS News and Sports both used in the mid-70s. But in '78, CBS Golf used a very '70s-looking stylized font for that one year before changing again the next year to a straightforward wide sans-serif italic font that morphed by '82 to the slightly heavier multicolor version of it they used through the '80s. But I think the last year for the old manual leaderboard seemed to be '75 as in '76 they used an electronic leaderboard graphic and I don't recall seeing it since that telecast. Surprised it hung around that long.
The other thing that they did for a few years which I found bizarre and a bit annoying seemed to be a Chirkinian affectation. In the early/mid '70s when a player had a long putt that would require several seconds to get to the hole, he would rapidly switch a series of quick cuts from a close view of the ball moving, to the player's face, back and forth 4 or 5 times over the course of the putt. It was like an early version of an '80s music video without the music.
Speaking of music, the Loggins "Augusta" theme is indeed heard in the '81 telecast. By '82 they had also adopted the rather flowery-looking and very '80s-style"The Masters" logo on their graphics package to go along with it in place of the traditional AGNC map logo, which thankfully has returned for the last number of years. One of the telecasts, either '82 or '83, used the vocal version of Augusta over some beauty shots of the course to fill the time after the end of play and the start of the Butler Cabin ceremony. The version with vocals was not, IMO, an improvement.
Who will be the first of us to find which year CBS went from calling people fans and spectators and going to "patrons"?
Haven't heard that yet. Vin Scully did call them a "crowd" in the late '70s and surprisingly, he survived that faux pas.