Joe Buck is very proud of his years covering golf for Fox, but the blunder of misidentifying Brooks Koepka’s girlfriend still stands out.
Buck joined The JustIn Time Podcast hosted by his former colleague at Fox Justin Kutcher. During the interview, Kutcher apologized for handing Buck an incorrect fact while he was calling the 2006 NLCS, a mistake the renowned play-by-play voice brushed off as being part of the gig. But the recall by Kutcher prompted Buck to bring up an even more infamous mistake.
During the 2017 U.S. Open on Fox, Buck infamously misidentified champion Brooks Koepka’s girlfriend Jena Sims as his ex-girlfriend Becky Edwards. The mistake occurred during a celebratory between Koepka and his now wife after he won the U.S. Open. It was a blunder that went down as Buck’s, but just as with Kutcher and the 2006 NLCS, he was reading the information off a notecard that was handed to him by someone behind-the-scenes.
“That was on a notecard from a guy who helped me countless times during that week of the U.S. Open, making me appear way smarter or way more well-read or way more well-versed on the PGA Tour than I otherwise would have been,” Buck told Kutcher. “And he handed me a card with the wrong name on there and I read the card and then [Brad] Faxon corrected, ‘No, that’s his new girlfriend, Jena Sims.’
“And I felt sick about it. Because we had just taken punch after punch on Fox Golf and it was the last thing we had on the air before we said goodbye and we had been on for five days, it was a lot of work and it was like, ‘Oh my God, I just let everybody down by that stupid embarrassing moment. And you feel like the world’s talking about and really, nobody cares.”
Really, nobody cares. But that didn’t stop the mistake from spreading like wildfire on social media. And had it happened after the first round of the tournament, it may have been forgotten. But like Buck said, the fact that the mistake essentially closed out Fox’s coverage of the U.S. Open, it turned the clip into a lasting memory.
The next day, Buck called into The Dan Patrick Show where he addressed the mistake, and he’s referenced it several times since. But it was ultimately a moment everyone had some fun with and just a minor blip during Fox’s five years covering golf, a run that successfully showed off Buck’s range as a broadcaster.