Johnson Wagner (left) talks with Rory McIlroy at the 2025 Players Championship.
BEN JARED, PGA TOUR VIA GETTY IMAGES
CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA | It was October 2022 and Johnson Wagner had missed the cut in the Butterfield Bermuda Championship, having slipped into the field late when another player withdrew after a scooter accident on the island.
A three-time PGA Tour winner, Wagner’s playing career had flatlined. He missed his last four cuts in 2021 and the Bermuda event, played in October, was his only start in ’22. Knee surgery in the summer had sidelined him long enough for Wagner to seriously consider what was next for him.
“I was really worried about what was going to happen next,” Wagner said last week, having lunch in the grill room at Quail Hollow Club, where he is a member.
Wagner considered creating a business built around corporate outings, relying on some friends to help get it off the ground. One problem: Wagner never particularly liked doing outings but he needed something to get him motivated and out of the house.
That same weekend in Bermuda – the one Wagner did not qualify to play – he did his first on-air work for Golf Channel and his career took a happy detour he never saw coming.
Quickly, Wagner found himself enamored with television work. He liked the immediacy of it, bolstered by his successful playing career which gave him instant credibility, and his personality made him a natural for sharing with an audience what he was watching.
It’s an inexact science, finding athletes and coaches who can transition from inside the game to outside and connect with the audience. They can talk too much about themselves or they can’t condense their thoughts into seven-second sound bites or they seem awkward on camera.
None of those apply to Wagner and, just entering his fourth full season on the television side, he will debut as the newest member of the CBS Sports golf team at this week’s Farmers Insurance Open. It’s like joining the New York Yankees or the Boston Celtics.
“The last year and a half [on tour] was such a struggle, missing a bunch of cuts, missing way more cuts than I made. And now I get to make the cut every weekend, and I still have no other qualification in life than to be in the game of golf,” Wagner said.
“I mean, I didn’t graduate college. My first job was working the pro shop at a rinky-dink club in New York. My second job was being a caddie. Then I went to college and then I started playing professionally. So I don’t have any other qualification.”
“He brings a swagger. He brings a demographic with him that is appealing. He brings credentials as a three-time tour winner.”
Sellers Shy
Wagner had imagined the 2023 Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow would be his final tour start, a fitting place given his roots in Charlotte and at the club. But by then, his television career was ascending and, while the event went on at his home club, Wagner was in New Mexico doing television work and loving it.
What no one anticipated was how popular Wagner’s appearances on Golf Channel’s “Live From” shows from major events would become. It was a simple premise – Wagner would try to recreate an important shot from that day during the live broadcast – and it took on a life of its own, similar to what the “Top Ten” list did years ago on “Late Show with David Letterman.”
Viewers waited for the segment because Wagner wasn’t perfect. He chunked and skulled chip shots. He mis-hit longer shots and sometimes he pulled them off brilliantly, including his extraordinary recreation of Bryson DeChambeau’s U.S. Open-winning long bunker shot at Pinehurst in 2024 with the champion watching him in the darkness.
“It was a mulligan,” Wagner admitted. “The first one I rolled into some bushes.”
The segments made Wagner more than a voice and a mustache. He became a personality.
Then two things happened.
During a dinner at the PGA Championship last May, Trevor Immelman, the brilliant lead analyst for CBS Sports, asked Wagner a simple question.
“He’s like, ‘What do you want to do?’ Well, I want to be taken seriously for my broadcast, and I’d eventually like to be a hole announcer,” Wagner said. “He said, ‘You need to tell people that, because you’re in danger of becoming a sideshow with all the recreations and your skulling chips and chunking them. People are like, ‘Is this serious?’
“It is all real. I've never intentionally hit a bad shot. I’m just not very good at golf. I want to be known as an intelligent, analytical broadcaster that loves the game of golf.”
The second moment came when Ian Baker-Finch announced he was retiring from the CBS team at the end of 2025, ending a 19-year run and creating a potential opening with Jim Nantz, Immelman, Frank Nobilo, Dottie Pepper, Colt Knost, Mark Immelman and Amanda Balionis.
Wagner was working the 3M Championship in Minnesota for Golf Channel when the Baker-Finch news broke and he texted Sellers Shy, the lead golf producer for CBS Sports, to express his interest.
They had worked together when Shy produced the Thursday-Friday telecasts on Golf Channel and Shy had Wagner in mind when he knew a spot was opening.
“He brings a swagger. He brings a demographic with him that is appealing. He brings credentials as a three-time tour winner,” Shy said.
Fitting into the CBS culture, which has been cultivated by Shy since he succeeded Lance Barrow as lead producer in 2021, was a critical part of the equation.
“There’s a personality about him that is appealing. I spent time with him at a Ronald McDonald House function and he turns into a teddy bear. He is sympathetic. He is genuine and he comes across that way,” Shy said.
The goal, Wagner said, is to eventually be a hole announcer, joining Nantz, Immelman, Nobilo and now Knost in the super tower where they tell the tournament story. With Knost’s move from being an on-course reporter, Wagner landed that job, being the third voice with Pepper and Mark Immelman on the ground.
“I don’t think I have the prerequisite career to be a lead analyst for a network like a Trevor Immelman right now, even though Kevin Kisner [with NBC Sports] is certainly changing what it takes to be in that seat,” Wagner said.
“I think the highest role I could get would be to be a hole announcer. So that’s my ultimate goal at some point, is to, like Colt, walk for a couple years and get into the booth at some point.”
There are plans to let Wagner do some recreations for CBS because of their popularity on Golf Channel but the bulk of his work will be following a designated group on the weekends.
Wagner debuts with CBS at Torrey Pines this week, the first of four straight weeks for the network. After a six-week break, Wagner is scheduled to work 19 weeks through the heart of the CBS schedule.
Three days a week, Wagner’s “Wagyu Filet Show” with his longtime friend and former Virginia Tech teammate Brendon de Jonge will air at 11 a.m. EST on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio, an outgrowth of what began as a one-hour show on Monday evenings. De Jonge, meanwhile, has become a regular on Golf Channel, following Wagner’s path into the media side of the game.
Together, they are what they are – two old friends who know golf and aren’t afraid to call each other out about whatever the subject may be.
“We just love to give each other a hard time,” Wagner said.
Wagner, who has leaned on former tour players Curt Byrum and Mark Wilson for advice on making the move into media, is still guided by a conversation he had with Golf Channel producer Harris Chang the first time he did pregame studio work for the network.
“He’s like, ‘Man, we went out for dinner last night, we had a beer, we were talking golf, and it was such a fun conversation.’ He's like, ‘That's who you need to be on television. You don’t need to try to be Brandel [Chamblee]. You don’t need to try to be some robotic analyst. We want you for who you are,’ ” Wagner said.
The next chapter in being Johnson Wagner begins this week at Torrey Pines.
