Roger Maltbie is back - again. Here's why golf can't quit him

Roger Maltbie at the Players Championship last year.getty images

Good news for fans of the Course Whisperer: Roger Maltbie, beloved NBC Sports/Golf Channel inside-the-ropes foot correspondent, is coming back for nine more events this year, starting this week with the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Rajah played in the Pebble tourney as a PGA Tour rookie. That was in 1975.

It brings to mind this Steven Wright bit:

“How ’bout those Stones? Still doing it after all these years.”

Suitable pause.

“Fred, Barney.”

Along with Fred and Barney, and Mick and Keith, you can add Roger to that list. Still at it, after all these years. When Roger gives you an observation or an insight, it’s a considered one.

“In my opinion,” Maltbie said in a recent phone interview, “the Tap Room at The Lodge at Pebble Beach is the best watering hole in golf.” As for gardens, he’ll take the backyard at the La Playa Hotel in residential Carmel, a couple miles from The Lodge. Maltbie and his wife, Donna, were married there in 1980.

In the fall of 2022, when it became known that NBC Sports was not renewing Maltbie’s contract for 2023, golf fans staged peaceful protests at 30 Rockefeller Center. Well, no — but there were a lot of upset people. Maltbie knows the game inside and out but never presents it as a life-and-death matter. Plus, you could hear his famous mustache ruffle the microphone speaker now and again. He worked tournaments in ’23 and ’24 and ’25, but they were nothing like prime-timer affairs. This year Maltbie will be working nine events, including some of the biggest of the year, the Players Championship among them. When Maltbie says the Players is very, very close to a major, it’s a considered opinion. His take on the Tap Room at The Lodge, the same. His views are his own and they are earned. His love of the game and life shines through all of it.

For some years, Maltbie’s partner at the Pebble Beach pro-am was Eddie DeBartolo, the owner of the San Francisco 49ers. In the football season, DeBartolo would organize little outings, Maltbie among the invited, in which various co-conspirators would play Pebble on a Monday, watch Monday Night Football in the Tap Room, then play Cypress the next day. Maltbie was back at Cypress last year, for the Walker Cup. He was in fine form, and he knows the course well. In Maltbie’s first decade on Tour, the Cypress Point Club course was part of the three-course rotation for the Pebble Beach tournament.

Now the tournament is a so-called Signature event — 80 players, no cut, two courses, Pebble and Spyglass Hill. But there are certain constants at the AT&T. Clint Eastwood has been associated with the tournament forever. The legendary actor, director and make-my-day golfer is now 95. Jim Nantz has been covering it for decades, as a CBS Sports broadcaster. Maltbie, as a TV talent, has always been associated with Golf Channel and NBC Sports, going back to the late 1980s. This week, on the weekend, Maltbie will be roaming the fairways for Golf Channel for all four rounds. On the weekend, there will be coverage, as is customary, on Golf Channel before the hot mics get passed to Nantz and Co. “I haven’t seen Jim in forever,” Maltbie said. “Look forward to that.”

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Roger Maltbie at the 2024 Players Championship.

Maltbie will also be returning to Muirfield Village for Jack Nicklaus’s Memorial tournament in early June. “Haven’t been there in years,” Maltbie said. “That will be fascinating, to see what Jack has done to the course.” Maltbie won the first Memorial, in 1976. “If I was born the day I won that tournament, I’d be eligible for the senior tour pretty soon here,” Maltbie said.

Maltbie will be working the U.S. Open at Shinnecock and the U.S. Senior Open at Scioto, where Nicklaus learned the game in the 1940s and ’50s. Some of Maltbie’s most exciting broadcasting was covering, at close range, the extreme intensity of Woods competing in U.S. Opens, most particularly at Torrey Pines in 2008. Maltbie called shots Woods played before, during and after with the fewest and most incisive words possible, and could often corral Woods for post-round interviews when Woods was still breathing fire. Woods liked Maltbie — you could tell. Maltbie was as chill as Woods was wired. Both are native Californians. Woods went to Stanford. Maltbie, under considerably less pressure, went to San Jose State.

Maltbie will also be working the Senior PGA Championship at the Concession Golf Club in Bradenton, Fla., right after the Masters. Woods could make his senior major debut there. He’s eligible, to say the least. “I’m hoping what everybody’s hoping,” Maltbie said — that Woods will be healthy enough to play the 72-hole walking-only tournament.

Maltbie will work two other Florida tournaments that are mainstays of the NBC Sports calendar, the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Players Championship. The Players, you may have heard (per recent commentary by Brandel Chamblee), is not only a major but the best of the majors. “I can see how you could make that case,” Maltbie said. “Great field, great course, improving all the time. But would I want to win the Players over the other four majors? No.”

As player and broadcaster, the Tour was a way of life for Maltbie. If you’re at a watering hole and Maltbie is around and somebody is tinkling the keys, chances are good Roger will be listening intently. That was the case for a fortnight at the Pinecrest Inn in Pinehurst, when two U.S. Opens, one for men and one for women, were played on the No. 2 course in consecutive weeks in 2014. The piano player each night was Randy Carmichael, son of the legendary pianist and composer Hoagy Carmichael. At the Bohemian Grove, a vast private campground where Roger pitches tent now and again, Maltbie would sometimes hear Bob Weir, the late Grateful Dead member, strumming an acoustic six-string under the stars. Good times.

When all those people were upset a few years ago, when NBC didn’t renew its deal with Roger, they were protesting a corporate effort to extinguish a singular voice that celebrates golf’s good times, whether the player is making a 2 or a 7. What Maltbie’s commentary really adds up to is this: Golf is a good time. He played in 520 PGA Tour events. He’s worked at least 400 as a broadcaster. He doesn’t know the precise number, and doesn’t particularly care. But he’s adding one more to the grand total this week. He’s working the Pebble stop, and it’s all good.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.

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