RIP to a giant. It wasn't bikini wax that got him banned from the Masters. But "mob."
Legendary sportscaster Jack Whitaker dies at 95
But it was one word – “mob” – that got Whitaker booted from the CBS Masters telecast for six years.
Whitaker was working the Masters telecast in 1966 when he said something that upset Augusta National Golf Club chairman Clifford Roberts.
“The threesome was playing particularly slowly, and we knew we had to be off at 7 p.m. for Walter Cronkite,” Whitaker recalled in a 1979 interview. “I was doing the 18th hole, and as the players and the galleries were coming up the fairway, I said, ‘Here comes the mob.’ ”
“It looked to me like a mob of people scurrying toward the green, but Mr. Roberts took offense. He said the gallery at the Masters was not a mob. And that was that.”
“Every time you use a cliché you get in trouble,” Whitaker said years later in an interview with Inside Golf.
“It was very crushing. I didn’t know about it until the following March,” Whitaker said of being told that he was being pulled off the Masters.
“All of a sudden there was a backlash in the papers,” he said. “I got some very nice press so that made me feel a little better. Oh but it hurt.”
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