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With images of the golf tournament he would soon broadcast flickering behind him in the CBS production truck, Nantz talked about the pain of dealing with the effects of Alzheimer's on everyone touched by it. The decision to move his dad out of his Houston home and into a care facility eight years ago was wrenching.

"How does a loving son, one day drop [his dad] off somewhere? How you do that?" Nantz asked.

He was at Pebble Beach in 2000 during the U.S. Open when, after walking the beach at Carmel by himself, he phoned his mother and sister, Nancy, and asked them to come to California for a vacation.

"I was really despondent at that time. CBS didn't know what I was going through," Nantz said. "[My mom and sister] were at wit's end, dragging my father up and down the stairs at home. I said, pack up, come to Pebble Beach, you need a break. Stay as long as you'd like.

''They said, 'Who's going to get your father?' I said I will. I'll take care of him. For five days, I did what they'd been doing for years.

"You bathe them. You dress them. You take them to the bathroom. You do everything that goes with that."

And, Nantz learned, you decide when they need more than you can give them.

Connecticut is home for Nantz, but he regularly flies through Houston, on his way to or from an assignment or just to spend a few hours with his father.

He has lost his father gradually and in plain sight.

"In the last year, we've gone from faint, faint, faint recognition; we could walk into a room and haven't seen him in a month and you'd have that flash," Nantz said. "For a year, we were hanging onto that flash. That was a win."

For a time, Nantz took to identifying himself almost every time a broadcast would return from a commercial break. "This is Jim Nantz" he'd say, not for the viewers or his ego but in hopes it might register with his father. After a while, Nantz dropped the subtle attempt at therapy.

In hopes of clearing the cobwebs from his father's mind, Nantz would sit with him and play word association games, asking him to remember names. "That's been long gone," Nantz said.

When Nantz was in Charlotte for the Colts-Panthers game last October, he drove to Mount Holly again. He had finished his Saturday prep meetings with Panthers players and coaches and drove to the town where his father was raised.

Dad will return to N.C.

He had planned to bury his father in the National Cemetery in Houston, a recognition of his military service, until his sister recalled her father saying he'd like to go back to Mount Holly.

The Nantz family plot in the town cemetery had one spot remaining. On one side of the headstone are Jim III's great grandfather, great grandmother and great uncle. On the other side are his father's mother and father.

Nantz went to the Mount Holly cemetery on a Saturday when the clouds were breaking, the wind was blowing and a football game was being played down the hill at the school where his father was educated before going away to Guilford College, where he played football. "It felt like a movie set," Nantz said.

He walked down the hill and bought a $3 ticket to the football game. He did one lap around the field, always looking back up the slope toward the juniper tree that marked the family plot.

"I walked back up and I called my mother and said this is the place," Nantz said. "Here was a football game. All the things that represented my dad, his school, his town, his mother and father. I said we're going to bring him here."

One day soon they will.

Until that day, there are telecasts to do like the one Nantz did last Sunday from high above the 18th green at Quail Hollow. His mother, Doris, was in the booth, watching her son work.

In Room 201 in Houston, the television was on.

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