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    'The Loop' podcast

    There is no way Augusta National will let Johnson Wagner do this, but we wish they would

    March 25, 2024
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    Scottie Scheffler might’ve won the Players, but Johnson Wagner walked away the media star of the week. Wagner’s segments on Golf Channel’s “Live From” were TV gold—most notably on Thursday night when Wagner started firing golf balls into the slope of the seventh hole where Rory McIlroy’s water ball landed. The videos were instantly lauded on Golf Twitter, an impossibly tough bunch to win over.

    Wagner has made a successful transition into broadcasting with NBC Sports after dealing with a meniscus injury a few years ago. We’ve loved him on Golf Channel in studio and for his live coverage, but his creativity and self-deprecation exhibited in the videos have his golf-media trajectory quickly on the rise.

    The three-time PGA Tour winner joined our Golf Digest “The Loop” podcast this week to discuss how those videos came to be—and he also shared that he plans to do similar videos from the majors for the remainder of the year. That led us to a natural question: Where would you like to do a similar, Zapruder-style videos from the grounds of Augusta National? J-Wags was quick to come up with a phenomenal answer … he had clearly thought about it before.

    Listen to our podcast with Wagner below (and please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts) to hear about his ideas for the Masters. He’s making his suggestions in jest, clearly cognizant of Augusta National’s more traditional leanings. But hey, we can all dream of Wags down at the drop zone at 12 making TV gold.

    The Scheffler/Wagner joint references didn't end with the Players. We are avid fans of the Metropolitian Golf Association at The Loop, and if you're an avid fan of amateur golf, you might recall the insane run that Wagner went on in 2001—holding the MGA's most prestigious events all at the same time. It was such a big deal that people dubbed it the Wagner Slam (it came right after the Tiger Slam). Wagner calls it the best golf of his career—and so we asked him to compare the Wagner run of 2002 to Scheffler in 2024 (half-kidding, of course).