This post has been updated.
When 27-year-old Brooks Koepka walked off the 18th green at Erin Hills on Sunday as the U.S. Open champion, Fox’s broadcast showed his girlfriend greeting him with a celebratory kiss.
“His girlfriend, Becky Edwards, an all-American soccer player at Florida State,” Fox commentator Joe Buck said.
Whoops. Edwards was a two-time NSCAA first-team all-American soccer player for the Seminoles, but she’s no longer Koepka’s girlfriend, and she wasn’t the woman who kissed him on Sunday. Thankfully, Buck’s broadcasting partner, Brad Faxon, was more up to date on Koepka’s love life and corrected the mistake moments later.
“Joe, that’s actually his new girlfriend,” Faxon said as Koepka, who was a three-time all-American at Florida State, walked toward the clubhouse. “That’s Jena Sims. They were all staying together this week.”
Sims is an actress and former Miss Teen Georgia USA 2007 whose Wikipedia page was updated Sunday evening to also describe her as Koepka’s “new” girlfriend.
Advertisement
On Monday, Buck joined “The Dan Patrick Show” and was immediately asked, “How’s morale?”
“Morale’s good,” Buck replied. “Happy that a long week of golf is in the books, and obviously, with your boy Brooks, now we all know who he’s dating, especially me. That’s exciting. I wasn’t up on that information. I got handed a card by a buddy who was phenomenal all week, and it had old info on it. We got it right before we got off the air, but that’s not the world we live in. These days, you have to do the apology tour for getting the week-old girlfriend wrong, so, sorry world.”
Patrick then replayed the audio of Buck’s goof and asked the longtime announcer what was going through his mind when Faxon corrected him.
“I’ve done way worse than this, that’s the funny thing,” Buck said. “But it was before the age of Twitter and kind of clickbait stuff, when I asked [Arizona Diamondbacks infielder] Tony Womack at the end of a division series game [in 2001] when he was hugging a woman down on the field and I was interviewing him from the booth, who, truth be told, I couldn’t really see. But we had just been talking about how he lost his dad on Father’s Day that year. He’s hugging this woman and I said, ‘Hey Tony, I can’t imagine how that feels, who’re you hugging down there, is that your mom?’ The needle came off the record and he goes, ‘No, that’s my wife!’ You talk about feeling bad. This is the week-old girlfriend, I think the world will continue to spin, but when I just confused somebody’s wife for the guy’s mother, I actually sent her flowers and went down and apologized. He was great about it and so was she, but that to me was way worse than anything that happened yesterday.
Advertisement
Buck, who said he thought Fox’s broadcast team showed it could “do golf and do it well, despite the whole WAGs segment at the end,” suggested that he would eventually reach out to Koepka about the mix-up.
“The only person I feel bad for in the whole situation is his ex-girlfriend,” Buck said. “I don’t know her name, I don’t know the name of the current girlfriend — the week-old girlfriend — and I probably won’t know going forward, but good for him.”
Wow. Brooks Koepka wins the US Open and changes girlfriends between the final hole and the clubhouse. That's impressive.
— Mike Clay (@MikeClayNFL) June 19, 2017Wow, FOX mixing up Koepka's girlfriend and ex girlfriend is the highlight of the tournament. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
— Lucas Forstrom (@LucasForstrom) June 19, 2017ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLumw9JonJqqnK56rbHAnWawqF9nfXKDjmltaGloZLewsYybrJyjXZiurbjSZpmrp5%2BgwG63zp6npJmjYrSqvsufqaKdnpl6o8WMoaCsZZWtwG66wKacZpmkYsJuv4yop56mXw%3D%3D