As Brooks Koepka returns to the PGA Tour at this week’s Farmers Insurance Open, Johnson Wagner will be making his debut on CBS as the network’s newest on-course reporter.
Wagner, a former PGA Tour player, has gained popularity among golf fans in recent years for his larger-than-life personality on Golf Channel, where he worked from 2023 to 2025 before signing with CBS this offseason.
Most notably, Wagner’s shot recreations at major championships and other top tournaments have been widely praised—like trying to hit the 17th island green at the Players Championship with Rory McIlroy watching, or attempting to match Bryson DeChambeau’s U.S. Open–winning bunker shot at Pinehurst No. 2.
That content usually played out on Golf Channel’s Live From show after a tournament’s final round. The shot recreation series will continue at CBS—albeit with some twists—potentially as soon as this weekend at Torrey Pines, which is the first of CBS’s four West Coast swing events.
“The plan is to do some stuff on the West Coast,” Wagner tells Front Office Sports. “We’re still having creative meetings about how it looks, how many cameras we’re going to have the ability to use, if it’s going to be on social/digital. We’re throwing around some ideas. We just don’t have anything set in stone.”
CBS annually broadcasts two major championships—The Masters and the PGA Championship—as this season is airing six of the PGA Tour’s eight signature events. “I think everybody’s going to be happy,” Wagner says. “We’re still trying to iron out some of the finer details as far as technology and all the stuff that we’re going to try to use while we do it, but we will be doing it for sure.”
CBS Was ‘No. 1 Option’
Wagner, 45, admitted it was hard to leave Golf Channel. “I developed a real family atmosphere at Golf Channel,” he says. “All the producers, researchers, I’m going to miss all of them. I enjoyed every single person that I worked with.”
But joining Jim Nantz, Trevor Immelman, and the entire CBS golf team was too good of an opportunity to pass up. “When I started TV three years ago—and I fell in love with it at Golf Channel—my goal was to someday get to a network position,” Wagner says. “In the three years I’ve been doing it, CBS clearly became my No. 1 option.”
Wagner, who will work alongside fellow on-course reporters Dottie Pepper and Mark Immelman at CBS, hopes he can help show the importance of the PGA Tour’s TV product to young players.
“Something I’d really like to do over the next few years is educate young players, rookies to the PGA Tour, about how TV is out there to make you look good as a player,” Wagner says. “Let’s face it: Golf is the hardest sport to cover. You’ve got 18 larger-than-football fields scattered out over 200-plus acres. To cover the game, especially the way CBS does, I just want more young players to appreciate it.”
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