WWE meets Shell's Wonderful World of Golf

On Wednesday August 28^th, 2024, just 24 hours before thirty of the best players in the world were set to tee it up for ungodly sums of money, another group of moderately well-known sticks put their skills to the test on East Lake’s back nine live for the Tour’s cameras. The contest featured a rotund former accountant with a flowing mane, a former Big 12 college standout, a PGA Tour winner, and two contestants known almost as much for their looks and personalities as their golf games.

As of this writing, the PGA Tour’s “Creator Classic” has drawn almost two million views. And that number does not include the eyeballs surely to come in the ensuing weeks when the competitor-produced videos from the exhibition are set to appear on their individual YouTube pages. The contest and indeed the content, sent us the strongest message about an inevitable future to which golf seems to be hurdling. A future where the “bifurcation of the game” is not between those using rolled back balls and juiced ones, but between stratospherically wealthy touring professionals and content creating “amateurs” whose unique branding and marketable personalities have become a refuge for obsessives of the game who have been spurned by the corporate bean counters at broadcast companies (looking at you Sam Flood) and the seemingly endless greed of top touring professionals in the world.

Enter “YouTube Golf.” Even as a fan of the genre, I’ll candidly admit the phrase sounds strange to say out loud to a playing partner. Regardless, YouTube’s democratization of content publishing has functioned like an interstate loop around the traditional gatekeepers in media. That bypass has functioned no differently in golf as in other sectors such as traditional news outlets. In recent years, golf content creation brands such as Good Good, Bob Does Sports, and Grant Horvat (who coincidentally enough started as a Good Good personality) have exploded in popularity, each garnering over 800,000 subscribers. For each of these brands to have a new video up per week that will, over the course of several months, reach into millions of homes and phone screens, is quite normal. Considering all this, it’s not at all shocking that the PGA Tour has begun its (always) slow foray into building relationships with these online personalities.

The Tour first touched its toe in the YouTube Golf waters in Charleston South Carolina earlier this summer, when it hosted a closed qualifier for the Myrtle Beach Classic. There, a gaggle of former professionals and some YouTube personalities competed for a highly coveted spot in the Tour’s newly established opposite field event. The Tour must’ve felt that its qualifier gambit was a success, because several months later, some of those same personalities were teeing off on Andrew Green’s refreshed back nine at East Lake. The Creator Classic had a weird format (8 holes of stroke play followed by a top four one-hole playoff), and arguably the competition was unfairly lobsided (Wes Bryan, a competitor in the event, is a former PGA Tour winner) but its very existence demonstrated, at least to me, a future in golf that seems inevitable. That future may not look like the Creator Classic, but it will likely feature its stars.

Since the fracturing of the game’s most recognized tour and the emergence of LIV, fans of the sport, many who returned to it after long breaks or picked it up for the first time during COVID, are leasing their attention to players/brands that will likely never qualify to play in a PGA Tour event, win a U.S. Amateur match, or finish in the top three of the LIV qualifying tournament. Around the world, viewers are providing more eyeballs in the aggregate to YouTube golfers than they are just about any other professionally televised golf event in the world, save the four majors.

So, what is drawing people to these accounts, and where does the content creation game go from here? I have a theory, hairbrained as it may sound. I believe we’re quickly arriving at a future where YouTube golfers are as big or bigger stars than the players on either of the largest three tours in the world. One where Garrett Clark and Roger Steele become more recognizable personalities than Jordan Spieth and Scottie Scheffler. A future where most golf content is more a mashup of WWE meets Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf than it is 72-hole stroke play events over four days.

Even those who openly loathe YouTube golf will likely agree to some extent with the argument that many of today’s traditional Tour/LIV stars have demonstrated extraordinary levels of greed and histrionics in recent years. That greed and main character syndrome has enacted a price, and it comes in the form of lost interest.

People who love this game and have for decades, are more prone than ever to express public exasperation at golf’s fracture and exhaustion at its slowness to adapt to the changing conditions. YouTube golf is not slow to adapt, in fact its very existence may reasonably be considered an adaptation. Further, it is not bound by a minimum number of holes, maximum number of clubs, playing format, or traditional formalities. Much of its content could likely be traced to the question, “What if we did (insert hilarious or interesting golf idea)?”

This question has led to wildly popular content. We’ve seen Bryson DeChambeau attempt to break 50 scrambling with a former President of the United States. Erik Anders Lang played a match against two unwitting sticks, partnering with a hoodie wearing, undercover Rich Beem. Another common theme is the scramble against Tour players. Even No Laying Up, who typically shies away from classifying themselves in the YouTube golf mold, has an extraordinarily successful video in which Neil Schuster and Jordan Spieth battled Chris “Soly” Solomon and Justin Thomas in an alternate shot match at Kapalua. This may in fact still be NLU’s most watched video of all time (an impressive feat considering the breadth and quality of content they produce).

For the older fan, some of this content may not feel all that unfamiliar. Over several decades, Shell Oil Company produced and broadcasted a series of incredible golf matches. They sometimes pitted aging stars against rising newcomers in 18 holes of stroke play and others, three players all battling for low man. But Shell’s product was bulky and expensive, and two decades ago the company pulled the plug on those high costs (the last match was played by Fred Couples against Michael Campbell in New Zealand). Today, YouTube golfers are producing content with as much visual coverage of their matches as that of Shell’s old broadcasts, but at a fraction of the cost. What’s more, with the transparency of YouTube’s viewership numbers (sorry LIV fans), we know these accounts are generating real return on their product.

The world is changing rapidly and what people consume is changing too, wildly so. Twenty-two years ago, when Mike Tyson battled Lennox Lewis in the last title fight of his career, can you imagine learning that Iron Mike would one day be fighting a person who was five years old when that Memphis bout took place. Wilder still, the fight between the 56-year-old Tyson and 27-year-old Jake Paul, will be broadcast on a platform called “Netflix”, that wouldn’t send out its first mail rental DVD for a half decade after Lewis-Tyson.

I can’t predict the future, if I could I’d be a lot wealthier. But I believe the golf world is speeding toward a destiny where outside of the four men’s majors, YouTube golf is the belle of the content ball in the sport. Where our future consumption of the game will look more like WWE meets Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf than PGA Tour Live or a CBS weekend broadcast of the back nine at Colonial.

Before completing this piece, I went to YouTube to search for broadcasts of Shell’s past matches, to refresh my memory of the feel of the show. Ironically, the first video that popped up on my search was the 1963 match at Pebble Beach between Sam Snead and Jack Nicklaus. On its new online home, the 61-year-old contest between legends has attracted 4.7 million viewers (so far). In this age, even the legacy brands cannot help but seize YouTube’s opportunities to bring more viewers to their style of golf. 

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