At some point or another, every adult gets morbidly curious about what \u201cthe kids are into these days\u201d. What slang, what music, what drugs. When it comes to the rapidly changing landscape of golf, that question is as complicated as ever. For many of us aging into our 30s and 40s, the stars we grew up worshipping \u2013 such as Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson \u2013 are now largely irrelevant and\/or disgraced, and the mediums we worshipped them through \u2013 Sports Illustrated, \u201cSportsCenter\u201d, et al. \u2013 are evaporating faster than rainwater in the Sahara. Yet somehow, golf is just as popular as ever.<\/p>\n
What is driving that interest in kids, teenagers and young adults if not professional star power? As retired PGA-Tour-pro-turned-high-school-golf-coach Hunter Mahan explained on the Fore Play podcast this week, it\u2019s not elite skill that has captured the attention of younger golfers, but relatability, specifically on YouTube.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re (his students) the ones who showed me Good Good and Grant Horvat,\u201d Mahan explains. \u201cThey\u2019ll sit and watch that. I\u2019m like \u2018You\u2019d rather watch, not average golfers, but OK golfers play a round of golf versus highlights of Tiger Woods?\u2019 I\u2019m like \u2018Why?\u2019 and they\u2019re like, \u2018I don\u2019t know, I just watch them.\u2019 Like what are we doing guys? Come on. Let\u2019s set the bar a little higher.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those comments make Mahan sound like a capital-O Old, but he did go on to say he believes that \u201cYouTube golf and that culture of guys\u201d is actually growing the game of golf. In today\u2019s day and age where everyone, including floundering corporations on the verge of bankruptcy [*cough* LIV *cough*], claim to be expanding golf\u2019s reach, YouTube golf is one of the few mediums that can genuinely back it up.<\/p>\n
Thus, it\u2019s no secret that YouTube golf has become popular with millions of golfers across the world. What is surprising, at least as Mahan explains it, is that golf\u2019s younger demographic has waning interest in the likes of Tiger Woods. For golfers roughly my age (37 years old), this is unthinkable. Wood wasn\u2019t just the best golfer on the planet. He was golf. Like Michael Jordan in the 1990s, his presence, persona and brand were inextricable from the sport itself. Raise your hand if you remember that Woods had his own line of Gatorade at one point? That\u2019s how big Woods was to a certain generation of golfers, just not this generation of golfers. That may be difficult for some of us Olds to hear, and even harder to understand, but as long as the kids are watching some form golf, we can\u2019t complain\u2026 too much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At some point or another, every adult gets morbidly curious about what \u201cthe kids are into these days\u201d.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":862389,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[4225,64,63,432054,755,138747,432055,316636,432056,85,9244],"class_list":["post-862388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-article","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fore-play-podcast","tag-golf","tag-golf-digest","tag-good-good","tag-grant-horvat","tag-hunter-mahan","tag-sports","tag-tiger-woods"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/862389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}