Johnny: "Too many announcers want to be friends with their fellow players, even though they’re announcers."

Great stuff top to bottom in part one of Adam Schupak’s conversation with Johnny Miller, but his comments on the state of golf announcing and long broadcast windows is of particular note.

I’m sure sensitive flowers will be put off by the reference to himself as the “one Simon Cowell” in golf, but get past what is essentially true and read the full answer.

GW: Have TV golf announcers gotten too soft? 

JM:  Well, they’ve always been soft. There’s only been one Simon Cowell and you’re looking at him.

This is a really an important thing I’m going to tell you. The greatness of golf – whether you’re a 100 shooter or whatever – is how well you can finish off your milkshake bet or whatever. The greatness of golf is handling your nerves and your choking point and whether you can perform when you need to.

So to ignore that, which has been basically ignored by every golf announcer except for me, and say a guy has swung all over, he’s choking – my very first tournament, Peter Jacobsen has got this downhill lie over water in front of the green, and when you try to hit it over water on a downhill lie, like 15 at Augusta, and you try to hit it high off that downslope, you either hit it thin or fat, that shot. It happened to Seve when he hit it in the drink at the Masters. I said, this is like the perfect situation to choke on.

Now, I didn’t say that Peter would choke on that shot, but no one had ever said choke in the history of golf, OK. Now, I’m not bragging, but that’s the way I viewed the game. It’s how well can you handle the choke factor, and to sort of ignore that because it’s uncomfortable or – you don’t have to say choke, but to not talk about the pressure, that’s why people loved Tiger is because he could actually raise his level to win tournaments. He was the opposite of folding under pressure. He was the best ever at that, better than Jack even.

Fighting words!

Here’s the strongest case made by Miller:

The great champions can lift their game to get the job done or make the great shot, and I was willing to go there. Too many announcers want to be friends with their fellow players, even though they’re announcers. I don’t know, they just don’t talk about it.

The people are starving for the truth. They’re starving to know what’s really happening. But you can’t just say a guy is choking. You have to say the guy has played fades all week long, now all of a sudden he’s hitting hooks, you know he might be choking. Or he hasn’t missed a putt inside six feet, now he’s missed three in a row. In other words, you can’t just pick it out of thin air and say the guy is choking. I would never just say it without showing you why it’s choking. It would be unfair to say a guy is choking. A guy who’s never hit a hook and he starts duck hooking it on the last five holes, he might be choking. If you’re hitting shots you’ve never seen before or it’s not you, you’re not handling the pressure. You’re folding.

I don’t know if anybody will go there again. Maybe they don’t need to. But I think it’s part of the greatness of golf how well can you handle pressure.

I was glad to see him not shy away from questioning his longevity in an era of all day broadcasts since it highlights the issue of prioritizing showing a ton of shots over storytelling or drama.

I’d rather be going nowhere fast than somewhere slow. I like to be going fast, so for me to be on the air for the Ryder Cup for 11-12 hours straight was like – that was so not me, I can’t tell you. That’s where golf is going. It’s getting where the hours that they’re demanding to cover and all the coverage, I got out at the right time because that’s just – if they said, come on in and do the last four hours, that would be fine, but I don’t have the patience to – golf has gotten almost crazy compared to what I knew.

When I first started announcing, two-hour coverage was normal. At the Masters, they just used to do the back nine on Sunday, right? Or did they do it on Saturday, too? I guess they did. Yeah, it’s changed so much. But you know, I think it’s good. It’s just not good for me. I probably wouldn’t have lasted 29 years if I had to do that kind of schedule and not only just Saturday and Sunday, but now sometimes you’ve got Thursday and Friday of the events.