The new Masters drama is in a place you wouldn’t expect

AUGUSTA, Ga. – When the moment of the result came to Rory McIlroy at the Masters on Saturday afternoon, I had the best seat in the house.

Not from the side of the 11th fairway, where you can see everything from the opening hole of Amen Corner, or from the grandstand on the 12th tee, where the best spot looks down on the action on the 11th green. Not even on CBS, where the team was impressed among the afternoon shots at Augusta National, including before the closing stages, when Cameron Young was on his way to briefly take the clubhouse lead.

No, instead I was watching on Prime Video, where the new Masters feed delivered golf’s biggest story like nowhere else.

Before McIlroy approached the 11th in the water, removed the Amen Corner spiral that defined the Masters Saturday and reopened the tournament as we know it, the group in the Amazon stream “Inside Amen Corner” saw something interesting. McIlroy had the kick of his life on his shot, which rolled off a tree and back into the middle of the fairway. But his contact meant his ball was sitting more than 60 yards behind where it left off two days ago.

“McIlroy better watch out for this shot,” John Wood, the broadcast analyst, said sadly. “Okay okay. Green is okay. Everywhere else is missing.”

While McIlroy was talking about his 213-yard approach with his coach, Harry Diamond, the Premier team flashed a photo on the stream telling the story, showing in detail the differences between the approaches on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and contextualizing how those differences affected McIlroy’s. The next one shot, which may come to decide the tournament.

“This is a very different shot than the one he had two days ago,” said Justin Kutcher, host of the show, adding to the tension.

For reasons that aren’t hard to understand, you probably never spend as much time watching a player prepare for one of the most important shots in the tournament as the Amazon team spent as much time over McIlroy’s decision on the 11th. Traditional golf broadcasts have a duty and obligation to show as much action from as many courses as possible. They can zoom in if needed, but rarely go as deep as they’d like, mostly because there’s always something more to show.

Augusta National debuted “Inside Amen Corner” on Amazon Prime this year to reverse that trend, giving the club’s new broadcast partner a broadcast that marries the club’s deep source of tournament data with a corner that’s rich with local drama. This is the type of statistics-driven storytelling that has made Prime’s work on Thursday Silence so compelling, where a special statistical feed called PrimeVision provides deeper, more intelligent insights than anywhere else in football.

As with every second of coverage from the Masters, CBS Sports is responsible for producing the “Inside Amen Corner” this week. And, like every second of the broadcast from the Masters, the team gains a wealth of interesting data collected by the team to use to improve the tournament.

This week at the Masters, “Inside Amen Corner” focuses on the moments, players and decisions on the 11th, 12th and 13th holes – working with dedicated math and photography teams (and new cameras and gadgets) to explain the hows and whys of Amen Corner in deeper detail and richer color than ever before. The team reacts in real time to the actions and trends of the tournament, collects data and individual statistics for each player, and brings ideas from the club’s continuous research database to three-dimensional implementation in a matter of seconds – all in pursuit of the best story.

The result was moments like McIlroy’s approach on 11, who ended up in the water, stopped his first double-bogey of the tournament and dramatically changed the leaderboard. While the moment was more dramatic on CBS — and no doubt exciting with Amen Corner — it was even more rewarding on the Prime broadcast, where producer Josh Weingardt had the time and bandwidth to zoom in on the gravity of McIlroy’s situation from every angle before the man on the court finally made contact. When McIlroy finally dropped his club, the story was complete but for the result – and the result was enhanced by the richness of the story.

You don’t have to be a math whiz to enjoy the fun in “Amen Corner”—you just need a thirst for a more interesting version of the story.

On Saturday, I found out just that when McIlroy teed off on 11, and it looked like nothing I’d seen on golf TV before.