Rumours of golf’s death were greatly exaggerated. That said, it was a bit worrying for a while.
Once Tiger’s peak had passed, the sport once again faced the contention that it was a stuffy, exclusive, corporate pursuit for the professional and business classes. That reputation was well earned – dull dress codes and dreary societies at most golf clubs were enough to turn any young kid away from the sport.
Golf had to become looser and less hostile to people who just wanted to enjoy hitting balls in the sun, rather than submit to its airless culture. And, after decades of governing bodies humming and hawing, it took a generation of YouTubers barely four years to turn the entire game on its head.
‘YouTube golf’, as it is now called, is essentially a combination of golf and vlogging – the original sport, as it always has been, combined with YouTube’s original content genre of being yourself on camera.
Prior to YouTube golf, viewers were invited only to watch professionals play golf shots in dead silence – nice, sometimes. But most of golf is spent either walking to or looking for your ball, and that gave YouTube creators the space and time to bring personality to the game and effectively save golf from becoming a purely geriatric endeavour.
A working sample of the top 50 golf YouTube accounts adds up to around 32.1 million subscribers, most of whom arrived during and after the pandemic. Not coincidentally, golf’s global player base has increased by about 25% since 2020, growing to around 140 million annual participants.
That so many have flocked to the sport is in no small part due to the different flavours of content on offer. Beyond YouTube golf talisman Rick Shiels (3m subscribers) and two-time major winner Bryson DeChambeau (2.7m subscribers), anomalies are found everywhere.
Golf Sidekick (government name: Matt Greene) is a golf strategy YouTuber who focuses on mindfulness, enjoyment of the game and various arrangements of coloured sunblock.
Taco Golf (government name: Tae-Wook Koh) combines peaceful and cinematic solo rounds and range sessions with buddy-comedy golf tournaments with friends. Meanwhile, Professional Golf Advisor is the sport’s answer to Top Gear, built entirely on tenuous friendships and scripted calamity.
The changes brought in by the YouTube golf revolution could never have been born in the professional sport of golf – if you had suggested pinning a lapel mic to Davis Love III in 1997, you may never have been allowed to work in the sport again.
Change hasn’t come without resistance, but the sheer weight of numbers tuning into golf on YouTube has quashed any old-school murmurings. The professional game is now becoming more and more vlog-like with each passing year.
Players are mic’d up more than ever to give viewers more access to the human beings who play the sport, culminating in Chasing Sunday, a piece of golf film entirely predicated around hot mics and tucked-away cameras.
Conversations with caddies and negative reactions to shots are broadcast live rather than muted by panicked producers seeking to preserve myths around golf being played only by the most gentle of men.
Some players love it, and the rest are getting used to change. Legacy golf brands that have relied on decades of marketing tied to tradition and mythology are also having to mix things up, ensuring their golfers are happy to collaborate with content creators to maximise their exposure.
After all, those legacy brands are now competing with companies aimed squarely at YouTube golf’s audience, with many YouTubers starting their own apparel and equipment lines to monetise fame that in many cases exceeds the average PGA Tour professional’s.
Out of nowhere, golf has become the envy of other sports that can only hope and pray for similar revolutions. But YouTube golf is not a content format that can be copied. Instead, it’s a reminder that sport becomes more interesting when viewers can get closer to the participants.
F1 drivers (aside from Fernando Alonso) are often too busy to give running commentaries on the race, but the broadcast of team radio has transformed the viewing experience and laid bare the emotional toil of a dangerous, stressful sport.
Team radio has often formed the backbone of Drive to Survive storytelling, and the intimacy it provides has made stars out of midfield and backmarker drivers, as well as team principals.
On the other side of the coin, sports made for vlog-like commentary have been leaving easy pickings on the tree.
Cricket and baseball have been mic’ing up their fielders for years, but have failed to understand that staging 30-second interviews rarely provides much insight into the world of a professional player. Players may be resistant to having the world hear the things they say to themselves, but with so much time spent standing in a field doing very little, there has to be something given to an audience that wants a stronger connection with its heroes.
Cricket, in particular, is ripe for change. Most of the sport is spent either waiting to bat, waiting to field, or waiting for the ball to come to you. A cricketer is required to concentrate for roughly 5% of the total playing time, with the remaining 95% left available for the world to get to know them better.
Change like that will frighten people, and it should. Sports like cricket and golf have spent decades teaching athletes to hide their thoughts and feelings from the public, all while wondering why young audiences find them less interesting than YouTubers who built entire careers by letting their emotions loose on camera.
Speaking on his experience taking part in the PGA Tour’s mic’d-up documentary Chasing Sunday, professional golfer Chris Gotterup spoke of his happiness that fans now get to see the “grind” rather than the glamour and mythology that used to surround golfers.
“I just think the real life of us packing it up right after [a tournament] and getting on the road and getting to the next one, it’s stuff you don’t get to see in everyday coverage. Usually it’s just guys playing their best, and putts going in from here and there. Not the true grind that it is.”
Gotterup has always known he is human. But now that everyone else knows too, Gotterup and everyone else are better off for it.