Most people would be surprised that for Miss America 2015, Kira Dixon, learning to play golf meant living the American dream.
The child of Russian immigrants, Dixon learned to love the game through her father.
“My dad thought that golf was this American right of passage,” Dixon says. “To be a successful business woman in America his daughter needed to play golf.”
In retrospect, Dixon acknowledges that her dad was not wrong.
After being crowned Miss America in 2015, representing the state of New York, Dixon earned her master of arts in specialized journalism from the University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in May 2021. That same year, Dixon joined the Golf Channel as a PGA TOUR reporter. Her weekly responsibilities during a tournament include interviewing top PGA players like Jon Rahm or Justin Thomas, and spending a lot of time on the driving range… though not taking swings herself. Instead, gaining valuable insights through granular details about the players or the course.
Interviewing PGA TOUR players, like Jordan Spieth here, has quickly become second nature to Kira Dixon thanks to her time spent on the national beauty pageant circuit.
“This whole business is based off of information,” Dixon describes. “You’re out there chatting with people: players, coaches, managers, caddies, parents, anything and everything.”
Then, it’s showtime.
Dixon deciphers what she wants to say during her LIVE shot which will be featured on shows like Golf Today and Golf Central.
“A lot of times someone will do something that you’ve never really talked to before or you don’t know very well,” Dixon explains when an underdog makes a chase toward the top during tournament play. “You’re tracking down information on that person. You’re calling people who might know them, getting some great tidbits that you can use in your reports and interviews.”
Dixon’s charming, chatty nature that serves her well during golf broadcasts was first honed on the pageant circuit. After winning the national beauty pageant Miss America, she was invited to play in a number of celebrity pro-ams, which pair up notable figures in the entertainment or athletic arenas with professional golfers as an exciting way to kick-off tournament weekends.
The security director of the BMW Pro-Am on the now Korn Ferry Tour, who was also security director for Miss America, was the first to ask if she’d be willing to play. A nonchalant “sure” from Dixon would change her life.
“I had no idea what that entailed or what that would mean,” Dixon remembers. “Or that I would be on national television with an analyst describing and breaking down my swing which was terrifying. But the Golf Channel interviewed me, and that was that. That started my understanding that golf media was a thing and exposed me to an entirely different career path and world that I never considered in the past.”
Now, Dixon gets to play in pro-am events on a regular basis, especially with some of the top players on the LPGA. A recent experience included playing in the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions.
“It is really fun that I get to leave the microphone for a week and go inside the ropes,” Dixon says. In the past, she has played with LPGA scoreboard leaders like Gaby Lopez, Patty Tavatanakit, Nanna Koerstz Madsen, and Celine Boutier “who were all amazing and lovely.”
“It was really interesting to watch Gaby Lopez especially in her putting routine,” Dixon, now living in San Francisco and a member of Lake Merced Country Club, recalls. “[Lopez] is so deliberate about everything she does. She doesn’t waste a single second. She takes her time but she has a purpose.”
Dixon says it is a privilege to chat with these players for sometimes five hours during the course of a round. Thinking back to her Pro-Am grouping with Lopez and getting an up-close perspective as to how the pros play their game, “every step [Lopez] takes, every breath she takes, every thought she has, you can see that and it’s fascinating.”
When putting, “a lot of amateur golfers, they go up to the ball, they kind of put it down, they look at the line, ‘Oh yeah, that’s good enough,’ then take it back,” Dixon laughs. “Half the time it goes in and half the time it doesn’t. Whatever… on to the next. [Lopez] makes every single one because she does what she does and her process. That’s why she is a professional golfer and I am not. That’s really cool to see up close and in-person.”
Even with the amazing experience coming from playing in pro-ams, Dixon admits her life as a former Miss America and Golf Channel reporter is not all glamorous. As much as she says she loves what she does covering some of the best golfers in the world, she spends a lot of time cooking in her hotel room and trying to get as close to eight hours of sleep per night during tournament weeks. “You need a lot of energy for this,” Dixon emphasizes with a grin.
Though Dixon says she is delighted to have the career that she does thanks to her past pageant days, when asked what being in that small sorority of bejeweled women is like, her synopsis is: “Being Miss America is crazy, amazing, terrifying, incredible, bizarre, fantastic, life-changing, and really hard. It runs the gamut of emotion,” Dixon shares. Still, “it changed my life.”
“Overnight, your life changes and it changes forever,” Dixon explains. “I’m really grateful for the experience. But I was also really excited a few years later when people started recognizing me as ‘Kira with the Golf Channel,’ not ‘Kira Miss America’ because it meant that I had kind of grown up and moved on, which Miss America helped me on the path that I ultimately did get on.”
Like many of us in constant search for the crystal ball that will tell us what our life will look like in five or 10 years, Dixon laughs and shares that her younger self would have never believed what she is doing now or all that has happened so quickly.
“It’s wild, I’ll say that,” Dixon highlights. “It’s a wild time to be Miss America.”
Yet, luckily for Dixon, that tiara and her talent on a tee box has now made her one of the most recognized female golf reporters in the country.
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