Mark Loomis last worked the Masters a decade ago, as a coordinating producer for ESPN overseeing 3D coverage of the year’s first major. But the 55-year-old Larchmont, New York, native is back among the azaleas and cathedral pines of Augusta National this week in his new gig as senior vice president of production for Golf Channel.
It’s the latest advance in a television career that began more than three decades ago, after Loomis had graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in political science, and during which he has won three Emmys. And he is more than a little pleased to be helping to tell the story of the Masters once again.
“Augusta National is kind of perfect, and the golf course has a way of producing such great theater,” he said. “I am happy to be here once again.”
Loomis arrived in Augusta on Friday and over the weekend took in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur for the first time and the Drive, Chip & Putt competition. Then, he was scheduled to go on to the Masters, with three days of practice rounds and the Par 3 Contest, followed by Tom Watson’s debut as an honorary starter with Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player – and finally, the main event.
“My role at the Golf Channel is to oversee all remote and studio production and to provide a fresh set of eyes on what the Golf Channel currently does, what we should keep doing, what we should change and what we might want to do in the future,” said Loomis, who will stay in Augusta through Wednesday of Masters week before heading north to work the rest of the tournament from the company studios in Stamford, Connecticut. “That includes covering tournaments and also our studio shows.”
It’s a big job and one that Loomis is certainly qualified to take on after a career in which he has produced many of the biggest events in golf, as well as games for Major League Baseball, NFL and NCAA football and college basketball.
“Brent (Musberger) was a great guy to work for. He was fun and so good at what he did. I was just 25 years old and remember learning so much about the business from him from the announcer’s side.”
Mark Loomis
Growing up in Westchester County, Loomis did not have any aspirations to work in television. But he did enjoy competing and watching his favorite sports on TV. He had a special affinity for golf, in no small part because he had grown up around the game. Both of his parents played, and they were members of Winged Foot, which meant he enjoyed early and easy access to that iconic club as well.
“That is where I fell in love with golf,” said Loomis, who has two college-age children with his wife, Steffi. “I could walk to Winged Foot from my house. They had a great junior golf program there and a great golf professional in Tom Nieporte. I could caddie as well, even as the son of members. It came to be my summer camp as a kid. I’d go there at 8 in the morning and stay until dark.”
Winged Foot fueled his passion for the sport in other ways. “I was 7 years old when the U.S. Open was held there in 1974,” Loomis said. “My dad and I walked nine holes with Gary Player, and I still have the ball that Player gave me that day. Ten years later, I was the standard bearer in Fuzzy Zoeller’s group when he won the Open at Winged Foot. It was great fun being part of the golf history made at that club.”
Loomis became a good-enough player to walk on the golf team at Vanderbilt, where his father, John, who had worked as an investment adviser on Wall Street, had earned his undergraduate degree and was also on the tennis team.
(As for Loomis’ mother, Carol, she was a longtime writer for Fortune magazine and as astute a chronicler of the business world as journalism has ever known. She has also been a friend and confidante for several decades of Warren Buffett.)
“As a freshman, I played only two rounds for the golf team,” said Loomis the Younger. “But I started my sophomore year and competed for Vanderbilt the rest of my time there.”
By his senior year, Loomis was swinging the club well enough to think for a moment about turning pro. “But I quickly realized I had no shot,” he said. “Many of the guys I was playing with were so much better than I could ever hope to be.”
As clear as Loomis was about what he was not going to do after graduating in 1989, he was not at all sure about how he would make a living after Vanderbilt. He worked for a financial firm on Wall Street for six months, but quickly determined that while that line of work might have suited his father, it was not what he wanted for himself.
“So, I started to think about what else I could do, and what industries I wanted to get into,” he said. “I also talked to a lot of people about what they did and how they did it.”
Those conversations led Loomis to ABC Sports and a freelance job as a runner.
“I was paid $50 a day, and I had to get myself to the games and tournaments,” Loomis said. “And we would do whatever they needed us to do. My first job was at the Tip-Off Classic, a college basketball tournament, in Springfield, Massachusetts. I picked up Dick Vitale at the airport one day, Cheryl Miller another time. I moved from event to event, and I loved it. ABC had such a vibrant sports division in those days, and the energy that came with the job, the adventure of competition and covering events in real time and being around the best athletes in the world was infectious.”
In time, Loomis started “running” for golf events and became Brent Musberger’s right-hand man when it came to scoring and research during tournaments. “That was such a great experience,” he said. “Brent was a great guy to work for. He was fun and so good at what he did. I was just 25 years old and remember learning so much about the business from him from the announcer’s side.”
From there, Loomis started to spend more time on football and basketball. Then in 1994, ABC Sports brought him on full-time.
“What I was doing did not feel like a job at all,” he said. “It was just so much fun.”
After 15 years at ABC Sports, Loomis became the coordinating producer for the NFL Network’s “Thursday Night Football” from 2006 to 2009, followed by a two-year stretch as coordinating producer for ESPN’s golf, college football and college basketball coverage. He then “toiled” at the MLB Network as executive producer (2012-2013) and before taking the job as executive producer of Fox Sports’ golf remote and studio production. It was in that position, the last one that he held before coming to Golf Channel, that he produced and developed Fox’s coverage of USGA championships.
Ask Loomis about his favorite moments, and he first cites this year’s induction of Tiger Woods into the World Golf Hall of Fame. “It made me think about when he first turned pro back in August of 1996, at the Greater Milwaukee Open,” Loomis said. “I was an associate producer at the time, and my job was to follow Tiger with two cameras the entire tournament, starting on the first tee on the first day and including his hole-in-one on Sunday and also his interview with Curtis Strange afterwards. It reminded me that I have been doing this for a long time, and also of all Tiger has meant to this game, and what it has meant to him, over the years.”
Another fond recollection is the 2005 Open Championship in St. Andrews, and Jack Nicklaus’ last competitive round in that tournament. “I remember Jack coming up 18 just as Tiger was getting ready to tee off on No. 1,” Loomis said. “We turned off the microphones in the booth as Jack came in to all that cheering. For 17 minutes, no one said a word. We just listened. We just let our viewers listen, to Jack and to the crowd.”
After pausing for a moment, Loomis added: “That was the tape that won one of the Emmys.”
If he has any regrets, it is that he was unable to produce a U.S. Open at his beloved Winged Foot in 2020, due to the demise of the deal through which Fox Sports had covered the national championship for the previous five years. “That was disappointing,” Loomis said. “But my son, Ben, who has won two junior club championships at Winged Foot and will be on the golf team at Vanderbilt this fall when he joins my daughter, Jenny, in school there, was the scorer for Bryson DeChambeau’s group on Sunday.”
Loomis chuckles as he tells that story. He then remembers the round of golf he played at Carnoustie before a British Open one year with Tom Watson, Colin Montgomerie and then-R&A chief executive Peter Dawson – and hitting 17 greens in regulation but never making a birdie. He recalls the five Opens he has produced, too, and the five U.S. Opens. The five Rose Bowls as well.
“Sometimes, I look back at where I have been and what I have done,” he said, “and wonder how in the world did I get to experience those things.”
As hard as Mark Loomis has worked in television, it never really has felt like work at all.
Top: Mark Loomis with his son Ben at Pine Needles
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