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By Mark Spoor
PGATOUR.com Coordinating Producer

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- Walk into the NBC Sports production truck, and the first thought that rockets to any sport fan's mind is, "Wow, I need to get a setup like this in my basement."

A look inside the production truck. (WireImage)

DID YOU KNOW?

NBC utilizes 10 cameras on the 17th during its telecast of THE PLAYERS, including a microscopic lens embedded in the lip of the tiny front bunker.

It's a surprisingly dark environment, filled with monitors of every size and shape, each with a different view of THE PLAYERS Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. The whole thing almost begs you to run and find some chips and a frosty beverage. Where's my La-Z-Boy?

But this is no weekend in front of the television wearing pajamas. Hardly. Just ask executive producer Tommy Roy.

"In terms of your regular weekend-to-weekend events, golf is definitely the hardest," he said.

Wait a minute. Harder than Major League Baseball? NFL Football? NASCAR? All sports Roy has covered at the highest level, by the way.

Roy doesn't waiver. Not even a little.

"Because it's not one ball, like baseball or basketball," Roy said. "At any given time, 70 balls are in play. Each ball is being hit by a guy with his or her own story. Whereas with an event with one ball, you focus on the ball and wherever it goes, there's the story.

"In golf, it's up to me to decide who's the story."

Roy said to make that decision there are parameters -- but not rules -- to follow.

"Most of the time it's the leaders and you're focusing in on the leaders, but there's also other people in the field that you care about and that viewers want to see," he said.

Sometimes, though, stories come out of left field. It's that unpredictability, Roy said, that adds to golf's difficulty.

"If you cover an Indianapolis Colts game, you know that one of your key stories is going to be (quarterback) Peyton Manning. You just know that," he said. "If you're doing a golf tournament, you don't know for sure. I mean, there's a good chance that it could be Tiger (Woods), there's a good chance that it could be (Phil) Mickelson, but they may play bad and it may be Fred Funk.

"You just can't go in with a feature already produced, or graphics ready. You have to react to how the story unfolds."

As stories go, Roy's unfolded pretty unpredictably, as well. The son of a teaching pro, he was cruising along toward a business degree at the University of Arizona when his father got him a job as what was basically a gofer at the Tucson Open, one of the first events of the 1978 season.

"When I went there to find out what my job was, they said I could work one of those portable bars getting ice or something, or I could bring coffee to the NBC cameramen," Roy said. "I had known a guy who had done it the year before and not only had the club given him some money, NBC had given him a tip and they let him drive a rent-a-car all week long."

So NBC was the easy choice -- and a career decision was made.

"As I was sitting there, waiting to serve people coffee, the technicians and the cameramen all started arriving -- and they were all coming from the Orange Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl and the Peach Bowl and I was thinking how cool this was and they were heading from there to the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl," he said.

And then, the moment happened that changed everything.

"When they went on the air that very first day, they asked me to come in the truck and help spot for them because they knew that I knew golf and so I was in there and the adrenaline that was in there got to me and I knew right then and there that was what I wanted to do," Roy said.

Especially after being noticed by the folks at NBC.

"When that tournament ended, they asked me to be a runner for them the next week at the Bob Hope (Chrysler Classic)," he said. "That was still during Christmas break, so it was no problem. Then when we finished the Hope they asked me to do the rest of their tour, which back then was about 20 events.

"I immediately went home and dropped out of college. That didn't go over very well with the parents, but obviously it's turned out to be the right decision."

For all you parents out there, Roy still got his degree.

"I took two spring semesters off along the way to do the golf," he said. "It took me five years to graduate and then when I graduated I got hired full-time as a production assistant with NBC in New York."

So after nearly 30 years of making a living on the golf course, what moments stands out as the best of the best?

"For us, it would be the 1999 Ryder Cup, when the Americans made their great charge," he said. "That was great."