CBS Sports upgraded their golf broadcasting team on Wednesday by hiring Dottie Pepper. Dottie will give the network that covers the most PGA Tour events its first female voice.
She comes as a replacement for David Feherty, who left CBS and joined NBC Sports.
However, she doesn’t plan on becoming the next Feherty:
“There’s no replacing Feherty,” Pepper said from her home in upstate New York. “Here’s what I told the guys when I went to CBS to meet with them. I am not funny. But I will work really hard. So there you go.”
CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus said Pepper was the network’s first choice.
“Once it became evident that we weren’t going to do our deal with Feherty, Dottie was the first and only analyst we considered for the job,” McManus said. “Everyone we asked about Dottie, including the folks at ESPN, just raved about her work ethic.”
Pepper is known as the most prominent female golf analyst at NBC Sports from 2004 until 2012, when she stepped away because she wanted to reduce her travel schedule. She joined the boards of directors at the PGA for America – the term of which expires next month.
Once she joined CBS, Pepper filled another void — the one related to the lone network not having a single female analyst.
“We didn’t hire Dottie because she’s a woman,” McManus said. “We had been considering for a long time adding a woman to our crew, and this turned out to be perfect.”
Pepper said she likely would be at 20 tournaments. McManus said her role would be as an on-course reporter with occasional time in the booth.
“When I went to ESPN, I had the perfect workload,” Pepper said. “But the whole landscape of TV has changed. More than that, after being away from a ton of live golf, I realized the boardroom is not my space. I love to talk about live golf. It’s the coolest thing to get back to that.”
(via ABC News)
