John Wood, Golf's Best On-Course TV Analyst, Has His Eyes Wide Open
To call John Wood golf’s best-kept secret would be comparable to landing a 7-iron 20 yards short of its intended destination. As he nears the end of his second season of full-time duty at NBC, Wood already stands clear as the game’s top on-course analyst, tackling the job with the ease of a man who has been holding a microphone for decades.
In a business where talking and thinking often seem to come from different skill sets, Wood’s ability to do both on the fly in a timely and insightful manner impacts telecasts to a greater extent than do other ground reporters. Peter Kostis established the benchmark during his 28 years at CBS, which made the network’s decision to dismiss him all the more puzzling—the swing instructor employed his expertise to tell you why a shot went awry instead of regurgitating another canned phrase about something you just saw.
Original thoughts can become priceless when calling a methodical sport for a major network. Wood has a knack for delivering an abundance of self-obtained information in a very short period of time. He educates viewers without belaboring them, an admirable quality in itself, and always sounds like a guy who wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Knowledge, energy, credibility. Wood is the complete package, a PGA Tour caddie for 24 years before making an effortless leap into TV.
At a major network, no less. “John was a professional from the day he got here,” says Tommy Roy, NBC’s lead golf producer since 1993. “He immediately knew how the X's and O's work.”
Anyone with 29 Emmys over a 44-year career covering sports is unlikely to suffer fools without at least a poignant pause. Roy’s outside-the-box mentality is the reason Wood and Jim "Bones" Mackay were hired—Mackay accepted NBC’s offer shortly after parting ways with Phil Mickelson in 2017 before returning to caddie for Justin Thomas last September. Wood was into his third year working for Matt Kuchar at the time of the Mickelson-Mackay split, but the TV thing never left his future plans after getting his first taste of it in 2015.
Roy had invited both loopers aboard for what amounted to a de facto tryout during the Tour’s Fall Series event at Sea Island. “I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, and that planted a seed in my head,” Wood says. “I never would have pursued it if I hadn’t enjoyed it as much as I did.” Five years later, Wood turned 50 the summer prior to the onset of COVID-19 and terminated his partnership with Kuchar one event after the Tour’s pandemic-induced suspension ended.
NBC Sports had an opening. The timing couldn’t have been better. “It’s not easier than I thought, just more interesting,” Wood says. “It takes a lot more homework and research than I thought, and I love that stuff. In 24 years as a caddie, you go about learning the course with one style of play in mind. Now it’s about studying for all kinds of play.”
It leads to an interesting discussion point. With Kostis, Mackay and Wood earning acclaim as pro golf’s most effective on-course analysts over the years, why aren’t more people who didn’t play pro golf given an opportunity to do the job? Roy’s decision to hire a pair of caddies was hardly a calculated risk. The duties that come with the position are a lot more synonymous to those handled by the dude on the bag. Real work. Grind over glamor, or something like that.
Former Tour pros aren’t exactly prepped for such toil, which is one reason Davis Love III walked away from CBS in 2020 after about three months of relatively modest labor. “I struggled at it, frankly,” he would say. “I found out it was a lot harder than I thought.”
An avid outdoorsman, it’s not like Love is afraid to get his hands dirty. He just doesn’t have the verbal chops or perhaps the mental stamina to excel at a task that requires an acute examination of an assigned group, then articulating those thoughts to millions of viewers while walking four or five miles over a four- or five-hour stretch. Oh, and then you have to do the same thing tomorrow.
Roy believes there will always be a purpose for announcers calling the action from a booth, but with each passing year, the role of the green-grass grinder continues to grow. CBS has a very good one in Dottie Pepper, although her value would increase if her fellow analysts, all nice and comfy in their 25-foot towers, brought something other than cupcakes to the party.
When Wood called out Lexi Thompson for playing too conservatively two months ago at the U.S. Women’s Open, it was with a voice of reason and an appropriate amount of bite. LPGA players rarely get criticized in any context, even after committing colossal blunders, but Wood loves the game too much to cast a blind eye on the truth.
“You’re not going to win a tournament unless you do it with the best part of your game,” Wood said of Thompson’s unwillingness to fire at reachable par 5s after superb drives in the fairway. “It’s my job to be honest.” Not many people in his profession can say that with a straight face, owing to the fragile sensitivities of the respective tours while remaining blissfully oblivious to the notion that golf is a much better game to watch when everybody is treated like big boys and girls.
You take all that bread, you deal with the dread. It’s part of performing on the biggest stages in professional sports, and that also goes for the men and women fortunate enough to make television for a living. More than any of his attributes, it’s John Wood’s appreciation for the game and the opportunities it has given him that serves as the primary reason for his excellence.
A lot of players think they deserve it. A caddie really has to earn it, and as Tommy Roy will tell you, “John’s not afraid to talk like a caddie.” A man with 29 Emmys is never, ever wrong.
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