AUGUSTA, Ga. — When the moment of consequence arrived for Rory McIlroy on Masters Saturday afternoon, I had the best seat in the house.
Not from the side of the 11th fairway, where you can see everything on the opening hole of Amen Corner, or from the grandstand on 12 tee, where a great vantage point looks down over the action on the 11th green. Not even on the CBS broadcast, where the team bounced between shots from a frenetic afternoon at Augusta National, including up ahead on the closing stretch, where Cameron Young was on his way to briefly seizing the clubhouse lead.
Nope, I was instead watching on Prime Video, where a new Masters feed brought the biggest story in golf to life like nowhere else.
Before McIlroy’s approach on the 11th landed in the water, setting off an Amen Corner spiral that defined Masters Saturday and reopened the tournament as we knew it, the team on Amazon’s “Inside Amen Corner” stream had noticed something interesting. McIlroy had gotten the member’s kick of his life on his tee shot, which bounced off a tree and back into the center of the fairway. But the contact meant his ball had landed more than 60 yards behind where he’d wound up on the previous two days.
“McIlroy had better be careful on this approach shot,” John Wood, the stream’s analyst, said forebodingly. “Right is fine. The green is fine. Everywhere else is not.”
As McIlroy talked through his 213-yard approach with his caddie, Harry Diamond, the Prime team flashed a graphic on the stream that told the story, showing the difference in detail among the approaches on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and contextualizing how that difference affected McIlroy’s next shot, which might come to decide the tournament.
“This is a very different shot than he’s had the last two days,” said Justin Kutcher, the stream’s host, building the tension even further.
For reasons that are not difficult to understand, you almost never spend as long watching a player prepare for one of the most pivotal shots in a tournament as the Amazon team spent lingering over McIlroy’s decision on 11. Traditional golf broadcasts have a duty and an obligation to show as much of the action from as much of the course as possible. They can zoom in when necessary, but rarely to the depth they’d like, largely because there’s always another shot to show.
Augusta National debuted “Inside Amen Corner”on Amazon Prime this year to reverse that trend, giving the club’s new streaming partner a broadcast that married the club’s preposterously deep well of tournament data with the most drama-rich corner of the property. This is the kind of stats-driven storytelling that has made Prime’s work with Thursday Night Football so compelling, where a special stats feed called PrimeVision provides deeper, nerdier insight than anywhere else in football.
As with every second of broadcast coverage from the Masters, CBS Sports is responsible for the production of “Inside Amen Corner” this week. And, as with every second of broadcast coverage from the Masters, the team is the beneficiary of a truly delirious trove of data collected by the club for the use of improving the tournament.
It’s all an expansion upon the dance in quantum superposition Augusta National explores every April: Not a tournament that’s old or new, but old and new at the same time. Few ideas typify this tightrope walk better than the new broadcast, in which a streaming company leans on state-of-the-art technology to tell stories from the most timeless location in golf.
This week at the Masters, “Inside Amen Corner” has existed in this state of quantum superposition with a delicate touch. The Prime team has obsessed over the moments, players and decisions that decide holes Nos. 11, 12 and 13 — working with dedicated statisticians and graphics teams (and with new cameras and gadgets) to explain the how and why of Amen Corner in deeper detail and richer color than ever. The crew reacts in real-time to the actions and trends of the tournament, collects data and individualized stats for each player, and brings ideas from the club’s prolific research database to three-dimensional execution in the span of only a few seconds — all in pursuit of the best possible story.
The result has been moments like McIlroy’s approach on 11, which eventually tumbled into the water, setting up his first double-bogey of the tournament and dramatically altering the leaderboard. While the moment was plenty dramatic on CBS — and no doubt thrilling in Amen Corner — it was even more rewarding on the Prime stream, where producer Josh Weingardt had the time and bandwidth to zoom in on the gravity of McIlroy’s situation from all angles before the man in the arena finally made contact. By the time McIlroy finally did draw back his club, the story was complete but for the outcome — and the outcome was amplified by the story’s richness.
You did not have to be a stats geek to enjoy the fun on “Inside Amen Corner”— you needed only a thirst for the most interesting version of the story.
On Saturday, I found just that during McIlroy’s approach on 11, and it looked like nothing I’d seen on golf television before.
