How Dottie Pepper became CBS Golf’s unflinching voice of reason

WHEN SOMEONE FIRES A GUN, several things happen in an instant.

The trigger is pulled, which strikes a small explosive charge at the base of the gun’s barrel called a “primer.” The primer ignites, building a current of high-pressure gas behind the bullet, which forces the bullet through the barrel of the gun and out into the world.

This turns out to be the most accurate analogy for an afternoon inside the mind of Dottie Pepper, the brilliant on-course reporter for CBS: She is a sharpshooter. For two decades, she has attended a knife fight with a nine-millimeter, gracing the overwhelmingly male airwaves of men’s golf television with such precision and skill that her status as a trailblazer — as the first woman ever on a Masters telecast, and the first walking reporter ever, male or female, at the Masters — is often forgotten.

To see Dottie in action is to recognize this truth immediately. The path from idea to execution takes a fraction of a second, delivered with startling accuracy and often devastating effect. Her journey around the golf course is similarly unflinching — a path from start to finish without fear or favor, darting around the action with a narrow focus worn into her eyes like the soles of her preferred shoes, Asics.

Most of us only know what happens after the bullet has exited the gun, but the moments before are the most interesting. The potential energy, not the kinetic, is what captures our imagination.

And the most interesting thing about Pepper? It’s not where she goes, but why.

IT’S 10 a.m. on a chilly, grey Saturday morning in Pebble Beach, Calif., where Dottie Pepper is loading.

One by one, the day’s main characters arrive at the practice green just shy of the 1st tee box at Pebble Beach, ready to begin the long walk out along the peninsula as third-round leaders.  

Pepper’s spine straightens as the players appear, and her face shifts into a stare that could cut holes into the side of the Empire State Building.

She is beginning a silent tango that will last the next several minutes, circling the players and caddies closely but not too closely. The goal is to learn something totally new about the players she’ll be following on that afternoon’s CBS Sports PGA Tour broadcast, but the challenge is doing it without actually speaking to them.  

“I never liked to be interrupted,” Pepper says, and she does not need to explain that she means when she was a player for two decades on the LPGA Tour — a stretch that included 17 wins and two majors. “It messed with my mojo.”

Instead, Pepper relies upon the caddies. Relationships are everything in her business, and caddies are helpful friends. In this instance, the information she is hoping to receive is relatively mundane — a tidbit about a swing change or a gear tweak — but she doesn’t act like it. Information is everything to Dottie at 10 a.m. on Saturday, which means this small act of conversational subtlety is unambiguously a big deal. Her eyes are trained, her movements intentional, and her questions short.

Dottie knows something is making the infinitesimally small difference between “good enough to be followed by CBS Sports” and “good enough to be followed by Dottie Pepper” — and she intends to learn it.

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AS IT TURNS OUT, Dottie is seeking out secrets at Pebble Beach … and hiding them.

Her Saturday morning at Pebble Beach did not begin at 10 a.m., when she arrived at the practice green, or at 7, when the CBS crew convened a production call, or even at 6, when her alarm went off.

It began sometime around 3, when she rose in the middle of the night for the latest in a recent, and she hopes temporary, pre-dawn tradition: An ice pump and some Advil.

On Saturday at Pebble Beach, the same day she will be expected to traverse several miles of cliffside hiking for CBS, Dottie Pepper is just six weeks and four days removed from a partial knee replacement.

She received the green light to return to work two weeks earlier, just before the start of her first event of the year, the Farmers Insurance Open. The news was a relief, not the least bit because it meant Dottie would not have to make excuses for missing the start of the CBS Golf season.

She does not like making excuses, even justified ones, and when her surgeon cleared her to return, he told her the only words she wanted to hear.

“Go live your life.”

And that is what Dottie Pepper did, even if it meant nightly rehab sessions followed by early mornings on an exercise bike. Even if it meant most mornings and evenings would be filled with discomfort anyway. And even if it meant a gnarly commute to abide by the requirements of her blood-thinning medication — driving cross-country from upstate New York to the West Coast for CBS’s first batch of events — which she did.

These small acts of sacrifice reflect a much larger theme: There is no bullshit in Dottie Pepper’s world.

Perhaps the mindset originated in Saratoga, New York, where she found her love for golf as a teenager under the tutelage of George Pulver Sr., a legendary local golf pro and course designer. Pepper credits Pulver and her father, Don, a former Detroit Tiger, with providing her a guiding philosophy on sports and life — and it should come as no surprise to learn that the word grit is often at the center of it.

The stories of her competitive fire are legendary. Like when she petitioned the New York State Board of Education to play on the men’s golf team as a high school freshman, and was the team’s best player by her sophomore year.

Or later, when she went a perfect 4-0-0 playing on the 1998 U.S. Solheim Cup team. Dottie proved so gifted at navigating match play’s psychosomatic challenges that her European opponents attached her name to a punching bag. Legend has it they took turns swinging at the bag, as if to fight Pepper’s spirit right out of the team room. (They did not, and Pepper’s American side won.)

Or during a downbeat in her pro career, in ’96, when she ran into the legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight.

“You could play for me,” Knight told her.

“No, coach, I’d be a bricklayer,” Pepper replied.

“Yes, you could,” Knight, not one for hand-holding, shot back. “You’re tough enough.”

In this light, Pepper’s television rise is hardly a surprise. In a business of eccentrics, she is a no-nonsense realist — the rare kind of TV talent who excels at understatement. Her great skill is not an ability to articulate better than anyone else but a willingness to do so fearlessly.

Like at Torrey Pines in late January, during her first start back from knee surgery, when a second-straight week of six-hour PGA Tour rounds led her to deliver an unusual criticism.

“I think we’re starting to need a new word to talk about this pace of play issue, and it’s respect,” she said. “For your fellow competitors, for the fans, for broadcasts, for all of it. It’s just gotta get better.”

Dottie’s words struck a chord. Video of her response quickly went viral, and she spent much of the following week at Pebble getting approached by folks in the golf world sharing their own opinion of her opinion.

When we spoke the following Saturday, Dottie seemed uncomfortable with the buzz surrounding her words, but when I asked if she regretted them, she was blunt.

“I’m not trying to be hard on anybody, and I’m not trying to be a powder puff either,” she said. “I know I’ve done my homework, and it’s a fair assessment.”

Her comments were near-universally praised, but that didn’t diminish the courage needed to deliver them. Live TV is a high-wire act between several highly engaged (and at times oppositional) groups: the network, the players, the Tour, and the fans. A wrong word — or worse, a foot-in-mouth opinion — can have a long tail, especially for the only female analyst covering the men’s game full-time.

“I got great advice once to run your opinions through a filter first, especially if it’s a hot-button topic,” she says. “Think about what the tone is — is it what it should be? Hear it once in your own head, and then deliver it.”

And what if those words come out wrong anyway?

“You want to be self-critical, but not too self-critical,” she says.

She smiles.

“You never want to be afraid to pull the trigger.”

TWO HOURS LATER, the bullets are flying at Pebble Beach.

The CBS broadcast has just opened and — right on time — so have the heavens. Rain is falling from the sky in heavy sheets, dousing an otherwise thrilling afternoon in an arctic blast. The wind is so powerful it’s also deafening, pounding the shoreline like artillery fire.

Dottie is unaffected. She’s standing in the brunt of it — on the point next to the famed par-3 7^th — with her eyes trained straight ahead, ignoring the wind and rain straining against her waterproof suit. She is wearing a “Madonna Mic,” a headset that wraps over one ear but leaves the other free for observation. The microphone/headset straps into a nylon belt wrapped around her waist, which is attached to a transmitter. This allows her to speak to the other broadcasters, CBS producer Sellers Shy, and when the opportunity arises, the rest of America.

When the time comes to speak, the words flow from Dottie in short, steady bursts. Her language is precise, her points are cogent, and she is done nearly as quickly as she started. Her on-air ethos comes from an old friend and mentor, Judy Rankin.

“Say as much as you can in as few words as possible,” she says.

Dottie has some help. She’s in position with a group nicknamed the “Dot Squad,” —  “main man” Wayne, her spotter; David, her graphics help; Dorothy, a pediatric nurse who also serves as a cart driver; and Gus, a twentysomething from Long Island who carries the monitor that lets her see the telecast. (Golf is funny in this way: while broadcasters in other sports rely on TV screens only in case of emergency, golf broadcasters call the vast majority of the action off of them, so much so that CBS has propped up screens on monopods and sent them into the field with Pepper.)

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The Dot Squad speaks a shared language of wrist flicks, head nods and shoulder taps that would make the CIA blush. They wordlessly relay information about players, club selections and distances up the mammoth 6^th fairway to Dottie, who immediately interprets it all into English.

“That is a pitching wedge,” she says, her intonation rising to meet her surprise. “It’s got to be flighted down.”

As the leader, Sepp Straka, steps to his ball on the 7^th tee box, the rain and wind reach a crescendo, and Dottie laughs.

“I’m not so sure the weather wasn’t better for World Cup ski races in his home country of Austria this week,” she tells Jim Nantz, who responds with a chuckle of his own.

“I think we might be warmer in here.”

It isn’t until several hours later that I learn Dottie’s headset broke in this very spot, leaving her unable to hear the broadcast on the other end. She hits a button on her belt to alert Shy that she’s having tech problems, then quickly swaps out the headset for a backup. She’s back in action almost immediately, heading up the 8th fairway without the slightest hint of trouble.

Dottie says she does not like surprises, but chaos like this doesn’t seem to apply.

“I believe my job is much more a listening job than a talking job,” she says. “It’s tying together storylines and conversations. Today, I was listening for three-and-a-half hours, and I probably talked for a total of three minutes.”

It’s funny to hear Dottie speak with such levity considering — or perhaps despite — the profound seriousness she carries to her work. Several of her CBS teammates suggest that is a significant piece of her skill; the work reflects her, but it has never been about her.

“Every day, it’s only golf,” she says, echoing her old boss, ESPN EVP of production Mike McQuade. “Nobody’s gonna die.”

The rain lets up down the back nine, and soon Dottie’s day is over. Within minutes of Nantz’s signoff, she is back in her room wearing dry clothing. Even now, after a long and miserable day, she is buzzing with energy. She’s just walked at least six miles in an onslaught of rain and cold. She’s navigated the contours of a slippery, cliffside golf course on a newly restructured knee. But in front of the fire in her hotel room with her dog Rupert in her lap, Dottie looks like she would happily walk another 18.  

Thankfully — if only for the reporter tasked with following her — tonight will not feature another 18. There’s still too much to do. She will soon start recycling her yardage book, which is filled with green sticky notes on the day’s players and stories, for Sunday’s final round telecast. Some of what filled the book on Saturday will stay, but much will be replaced by a new day of tee times, groupings, and hole locations. As we sit, she plucks out a note about the World Cup ski races in Austria and places it on the table next to her. She keeps every note she has ever written in two places — one digital, one physical — as a kind of personal research database. She will not divulge the size of the file (or file cabinet) after 20 years in golf television, but admits “…it’s large.”

In all, it will take three hours to get ready for tomorrow, and that’s not including work on the knee. Eventually, Saturday will bleed into Sunday, and Sunday into Monday, which will bring a drive to Arizona and a brand-new week of research and rehab and caddie conversations and production meetings and yardage book sticky notes and secret languages.

Pepper’s schedule is lighter now, and that is not an accident. The work is taxing, even when it amounts to three minutes a day, and Dottie is unwilling to compromise on quality. She knows only one way of doing the job, and it is unflinching. She believes, as Bob Jones did, that the real pleasure in golf is not the score but “the execution of shots.”

“It’s about instinct,” Pepper says. “You’ve felt your hands sweat, and you know when you want to throw up. You know what it feels like to hit the shot when it really matters. That’s why I love it.”

She stops after she says that, placing a period at the end of the sentence and the day. The message is clear.

It’s time for Dottie Pepper to reload.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.