Cbs Producer Gets On Board Masters’ Fogyish Bandwagon

HBO calls the Masters an American Singapore, immaculate and an absolute dictatorship. CBS Sports coordinating producer Frank Chirkinian calls that insane.

“I hate that they’ve developed this analogy between Singapore and Augusta,” Chirkinian said. “How could they come up with that one? Why didn’t they just use Nazi Germany? How about Adolf Hitler?

“Frankly, I’d have preferred Attila the Hun.”

CBS Sports will televise its 40th Masters tournament this week, and Chirkinian will be doing his 37th. Before he saw “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” on HBO last Sunday, Chirkinian had heard about its Masters segment.

In the piece, Chirkinian calls Augusta humorless and describes its green jacket ceremony as boring. “You can just hear the TV’s clicking off,” he tells HBO reporter Frank DeFord.

Chirkinian admits that, sure, the ceremony “theatrically is bad,” but he’s no critic of the Masters. In fact, he’s just about as much a part of the Augusta tradition as club founder Bobby Jones or Amen Corner.

“I’ve said before that babies don’t cry, dogs don’t bark and nothing is funny at Augusta,” Chirkinian said. “It’s becoming like an outdoor cathedral.”

You can’t run, you can’t drink coffee out of a McDonald’s cup and you can’t say “bikini wax.”

That’s what CBS analyst Gary McCord found out last year. Searching for a way to describe the greens, he said they were so fast, they looked like they had been bikini waxed.

Tom Watson was offended and actually wrote a letter to both the Masters committee and Chirkinian, proving at least one thing.

John Madden might get paid $8 million a year to say that kind of stuff on TV, but remember, the geezers of Augusta don’t run the NFL or Fox. They do run the Masters tournament and have the right to approve or disapprove CBS’ announcers.

McCord was offered up willingly on the altar of highfalutin’.

“Why does everybody want to tear down something great, something lofty? The club’s been accused of being mean spirited by firing McCord,” Chirkinian said. “I think the club probably did McCord a great service. On top of everything else, they afforded him more publicity through one single act than he could have accumulated in a lifetime of performances.”

Chirkinian says the irony in the criticism of Augusta National is that “this place for years has taken great pride in being innovative.”

Chirkinian says that Jones, who founded Augusta National, once told him “that a golf course is a living thing that should be in a constant state of change, and this golf course changes every year without people knowing it.”

“The left side of the third green was changed this year without fanfare. It was enlarged and softened. The right side of four has a whole new pin placement that was never there before, and the mound on the left side of 17 has been removed and the green redone,” he said. “But only a trained eye could pick these things out.”

CBS has live coverage Saturday and Sunday, plus taped highlights tonight and Friday night. USA Network has the first two rounds live.

Out takes

Remember those early reports that had Mike Tyson throwing Don King out of his house when he found a Showtime television crew there filming a documentary? Forget them.

“What amazed me was how many people picked up those reports,” Showtime vice president Jay Larkin said. “I can understand one of two reporters writing what they want to write and letting their own journalistic integrity go out the window. I couldn’t understand how so many papers picked up on it.

“It had absolutely nothing to do with the truth, and it was funny in a way. We were literally in Mike’s house when all these events were going on.”

Larkin said Showtime’s three-year contract with Tyson, however, does not include a documentary.

“We’d love to do a documentary with Mike about boxing because he’s such a historian of the sport,” Larkin said.