By John Antonik
There will be a significant West Virginia University presence at this year’s U.S. Open taking place at Oakmont Country Club just outside of Pittsburgh on June 12-15.
And, no, it’s not just because there will be lots of Flying WV logos in the gallery.
WVU School of Journalism and School of Physical Education graduate Joe Martin is now the lead golf director for NBC Sports, and he is turning West Virginia University’s athletics video production unit into one of the network’s farm teams.
No less than six former WVU video production crew members are working this year’s U.S. Open in some capacity. Eva Buchman will be the main camera operator on hole six, and she will be relieved by Seth Halverson.
Seth is also providing camera relief on holes four and five.
Alex Kraus will be seven stories high in a crane as its relief camera operator, while Adam Treadway, Alex Johnson and Chris Jones will be working the championship in various camera roles.
Additionally, on-site at Oakmont will be NBC Sports’ vice president of golf operations, Allison McAllister, a former Mountaineer swimming and diving performer who has been with the network since 2017.
Gary Quinn, NBC Sports vice president of programming and general manager, is another WVU alum who works on the business side, and he is the person responsible for getting Martin involved with NBC Sports nearly 30 years ago.
Back then, the WVU sport management program, overseen by Dr. Bill Alsop and Dr. Dallas Branch, had an internship component to its master’s curriculum. Students were required to get practical, on-the-job work experience in lieu of a master’s thesis. Their reasoning for this was simple: it was much better for the program to have people out in the workforce hiring WVU sport management graduates than it was for them having to read a bunch of mediocre theses, most of which would never see the light of day!
Martin worked two years as Mike Parson’s graduate assistant for the Mountaineer Sports Network and one of his class projects was creating the basketball show Mountaineer Jammin’ that became popular with WVU basketball fans in the late 1990s.
But Martin, eager to enhance his resume and expand his career, reached out to Quinn, a sport management classmate, to see if anything was available at NBC. Quinn talked to some of the directors, one of them being John Gilmartin, widely known in the sports broadcasting business as “Johnny G.”
Gilmartin eventually hired Martin to be his summer intern for 1996.
“When I say hired, that means I was working totally for free for those last couple of credit hours,” Martin recalled, laughing.
As luck would have it, Martin’s internship role at NBC included the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, and he immediately demonstrated his value as a dedicated worker, problem solver and creative thinker.
“The great thing for me was the summer of ’96 was the Atlanta Olympics, and being with NBC, they were doing a lot of remote work even then, and they had nine fiber lines running between Atlanta and New York,” Martin said. “It was one of the first times anything like that was ever done, and so on the second floor of 30 Rock is where they played back a lot of their Olympic programming.
“I wasn’t actually on-site in Atlanta, but I worked the Olympics all summer out of New York, so it was kind of a lucky time for me to be there,” he added.
In addition to the Olympics, Gilmartin’s other major role with NBC Sports was serving as its director of the NFL on NBC Pregame Show and NBA Showtime. Incidentally, it was WVU graduate Jim Fagan’s voice over narration that was used for NBC’s 1990s NBA coverage, which will be reproduced by artificial intelligence for next year’s regular season and playoffs when the network regains the NBA rights. Fagan, who came to WVU on a football scholarship in 1963 and graduated in 1967, died in 2017.
Nevertheless, Martin quickly recognized Gilmartin’s influence in sports broadcasting, and he wisely hitched his wagon to him.
“Once the Olympics ended, I said to him, ‘Hey, I’ve got nothing else going on after the Olympics and I’d like to stay in New York and continue to freelance.’ So (Gilmartin) talked to a producer, and they hired me to work as a production assistant on NFL on NBC and then NBA Showtime.
“That kind of turned into a career in freelance television pretty much since ’96, and on and off, I’ve done at least one event with NBC ever since,” Martin said.
Martin’s freelance assignments with NBC Sports through the years have run the gamut from the NBA Finals, Super Bowl XXXII, Summer and Winter Olympics, snowboarding and extreme skiing to professional golf.
When you work freelance, that essentially means a handshake is your contract and nothing is guaranteed. But Martin bet on himself and continued to do this for 24 years until longtime NBC golf director Doug Grabert retired at the end of 2020.
By then, Martin was focusing mainly on golf and the Olympics, and he had risen to the point where he became Grabert’s relief director for nearly a decade working various golf tournaments, including several PLAYERS Championship events at TPC Sawgrass. One year, when Grabert’s son graduated from college, Martin directed NBC’s coverage when Matt Kuchar won the event.
So, in 2020, when Grabert decided to hang it up, Martin became his logical replacement.
“After 25 years working for NBC, they finally decided to hire me as a staff employee,” Martin chuckled.
Legendary golf producers Tommy Roy and Tom Randolph were on board with the move.
“I wouldn’t be doing this without them,” Martin admitted.
Since then, Martin has directed NBC’s coverage of the U.S. Open championships at Torrey Pines, The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, Los Angeles Country Club and last year’s Open in Pinehurst, North Carolina.
His Open Championship work included taking the world feed from last year’s event at Royal Troon Golf Club for NBC viewers. During this year’s Open, to be held July 17-20 at Royal Portrush in Antrim, Northern Ireland, Martin will get the opportunity to cut the show for NBC for the first time in a few years.
“I’m pretty excited about this opportunity because this is our chance to cut it for the last five hours and really put our NBC stamp on the coverage,” he said.
NBC also has the broadcasting rights to the U.S. Women’s Open in Erin Hills, Wisconsin, the FedEx Cup playoffs for three consecutive weeks in August, and then the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black in Old Bethpage, New York, in late September.
The remainder of Martin’s fall will be spent touring venues and doing preliminary site work for the 2026 U.S. Open and Open championships.
Martin said he will arrive in Pittsburgh for this year’s U.S. Open on Saturday and will spend four days on site preparing for the broadcast.
“I think there are approximately 27 or 28 towers – one behind every green, plus a couple fairway towers and maybe a flanker position at a green,” he explained. “I will go up and down every tower and check all the views to make sure there are no obstructions. I will figure out which cameras will see a different golf hole because sometimes that’s the most important shot if you are tracking a golf ball that has landed off-line. It might be a camera on another hole that sees it.”
Once Martin gets up on a four-level tower, he can see two or three different golf holes at a time and from that view he can make a cheat sheet of notes for himself and the camera operators.
He also works with the USGA to make any adjustments, whether it’s moving a set of portalets 15 feet to keep them out of a camera shot or moving the evacuation vans if they are parked too close to an area where they will constantly be in sight.
On Monday, most of the crew will arrive and Martin will begin with the robo camera positioning to make sure it captures golfers walking to and from the first tee to the scoring room.
“Sometimes, we have a hand-held camera walking with them and sometimes we place robos along the route so we can see them get from point A to point B,” Martin said. “We’ll look at the interview room and set up what chairs we’re going to use for the interviews and what the background is going to look like.”
Tuesday morning, Martin will drive the course with the USGA rules officials to determine where the mobile cameras should be located. NBC has three cameras positioned on the back of Gator utility vehicles that will be elevated approximately 18 feet in the air to cover different fairways. The rules officials will determine where the Gators can be parked along the fairway to avoid obstructing play.
Martin’s Tuesday afternoon starts the planning process for the big camera meeting on Wednesday involving roughly 86 different camera positions for NBC’s championship coverage. Martin will coordinate various production meetings for the remainder of the day.
“When you look at our production memo for the U.S. Open, including vice presidents, we end up with about 500 people on site,” he noted.
From Sunday until Wednesday, Martin’s sole focus is doing all the necessary legwork for the actual golf telecast from Thursday until Sunday.
Once coverage begins, Martin will split time with assistant director Jeff Jastrow, the son of legendary television and film producer Terry Jastrow. Jastrow will direct the morning telecasts on Thursday and Friday.
“Between the two of us, we will direct close to 28 hours of golf on those two days,” Martin pointed out.
Martin will not need to apply any sunscreen because nearly all his time will be spent inside the television compound.
“I tell people all the time, if I’m out on the course after Wednesday then something is probably wrong,” he laughed. “I do all my work on the course before Wednesday, and then the day before we air, my entire day is spent in the TV compound in the control room making sure everything is correct in there. I’m giving final assignments to the camera people.”
Martin admits a considerable amount of preparation goes into a U.S. Open telecast.
“We call the USGA every two weeks just to touch base to address the little things that can come up,” he said. “Say somebody in the fourth to last group started three strokes behind but has the round of their life and shoots the Johnny Miller 63 to jump into the lead at the U.S. Open. Well, where is that person to make sure we have a camera on them?
“We have to make sure we have all basis covered,” Martin observed.
At last year’s U.S. Open at Pinehurst, Martin had a camera on Rory McElroy in the scoring room when Bryson DeChambeau had to get up and down out of the bunker on 18 to win the championship.
There were cameras on the course to get DeChambeau’s reaction to winning the U.S. Open as well as in the scoring room to get McIlroy’s response to losing it.
“You just have to be ready to capture those moments,” Martin explained. “Our U.S. Open coverage last year was well received and got nominated for a live sports special Emmy. We didn’t win it because of a little thing called the Olympics, but I was at the Olympics also, so it all worked out.”
Martin now possesses eight Emmy Awards for his television work in golf and the Olympics, while his wife, Holly McClure, has three more for her freelancing efforts with the network. Thanks to Tiger Woods, they both won an Emmy for their coverage of the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines.
The couple make Brooklyn, New York, their year-round residence and Martin has his hands full keeping up with his two children from a prior marriage. His son, Wil, is a lighting designer for a theater company in Cooperstown, New York, while his daughter, Joely, is a junior to be at Western Carolina University where she is the head drum major for the Pride of the Mountains Marching Band.
Through the years, Martin has remained connected with his alma mater. He was inducted into the CPASS Hall of Fame in 2021 and has continued his long relationship with WVU’s television production unit, led by Scott Bartlett and Chris Ostien.
Ostien recently asked Martin to come back and speak to one of his classes and that’s where WVU’s pipeline to NBC Sports was established.
“I asked (Ostien), ‘Hey, do you have any people to recommend for camera because we are at a point where a lot of our long-time camera operators at NBC are retiring and we need to have a changeover?’” Martin recalled. “He recommended Eva Buchman, who came to us as a utility worker.”
From there, Buchman demonstrated her ability as a camera operator during a match play event in Austin, Texas. Martin was directing the telecast and his focus was on the back nine, but he had Eva practice shooting the first hole and occasionally he would glance up at the monitor to see how she was doing.
“It’s hard to break in new people,” Martin admitted. “You have to make sure they can do it before you just put them out there and after that first week, Eva showed me that she could follow a golf ball, which is one of the hardest things to do, and we eventually added her to the team.”
Now, five more of her former Mountaineer video colleagues have joined her, and they are paying their dues and working their way into more prominent roles, just as their big boss once did as a young WVU graduate nearly 30 years ago.
It’s been a long journey for Joe Martin from Woodsboro, Maryland, just outside of Frederick, to Morgantown, West Virginia, to where he is today. He followed his brother, Kenny Smith, a record-setting pitcher on the Mountaineer baseball team, to West Virginia University.
As a WVU student, Joe hacked around all the local golf courses – Meadow Ponds, Mountaineer Golf Course and Paradise Lakes – the ones he could afford to play back then. Today, he frequently visits some of the finest golf courses in the world while working for NBC Sports.
However, Martin said he no longer owns a set of golf clubs.
“I stopped playing a few years ago. I played my last round at Bay Hill and then I gave my clubs to Alex Kraus,” he admitted. “I told him, ‘These are yours now.’”
That’s another valuable lesson Joe Martin has learned during his long and successful tenure at NBC Sports: it’s impossible to shoot low rounds when you are always indoors.
