54 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
A freelance TV editor, Crane specialized in quick-cutting
highlight packages that played within event broadcasts—the
type that would embroider any big game—and his career
was f lourishing. That year alone, he recalls having already
worked the Super Bowl, the Final Four and more than a
dozen other events. Now he would be venturing to the
most exalted golf course in the U.S., working for CBS on its
commercial-free broadcast of “a tradition unlike any other.”
Yet here it was, the Monday morning of Masters week,
and instead of focusing on Augusta National’s greens and,
ultimately, the green jacket, Crane was fixated on a differ-
ent color: red. As in the red dye spurting over his hands
and tracing an arc, before splashing onto his rented Chevy
Monte Carlo. An exploding cartridge, he would later realize,
had been placed in the pile of bills handed to him by a teller
at the Augusta bank he had just robbed with two strangers.
Clutching a wad of cash, a look of horror setting in,
Crane figured, quite rightly, that he would not be making
the final cut at the Masters, after all.¬ WHEN YOUNG MICHAEL CRANE
was asked what he wanted to do when he grew up,
ref lexively, he would reply: Play in the NFL. Or work for
ESPN. His father, an electrician in rural Warrior, Ala., a
half hour north of Birmingham, suggested the boy come
up with more plausible career choices. The son persisted.
Overcoming a deficit of size (5' 9", 160 pounds) with a
surplus of heart, Crane was a running back and an all-
state defensive back at Corner High. After one season
playing at what is now Western Alabama (in Division II)
he quit, in part because of homesickness and in part
because he’d married and had a son on the way. His NFL
ambitions at an end, he appeared to have abandoned his
ESPN aspirations when he took an entry-level job in state-
ment processing at a SouthTrust Bank in Birmingham.
Crane, then 22, spent a few months at that soulless
desk job before he got his first break: A friend offered
him some freelance work, first shooting, then producing
and editing, at a TV startup, College Sports Southeast.HOL
E
D- U
PMICHAEL CRANE WAS NO GOLFER.
BUT HE DID DREAM OF A STAR TURN AT THE MASTERS, A CHANCE
TO SHOW OFF HIS HANDIWORK AND SKILL, A CULMINATION OF
YEARS OF PRACTICE. AND IN APRIL 2007 HIS CHANCE ARRIVED:
AT 31 HE WAS HANDPICKED TO WORK ONE OF THE MOST-WATCHED
BROADCASTS ON THE SPORTS CALENDAR.
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