'Full Swing' Might Actually Help (I’m Gonna Say It!) Grow Golf
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There are a handful of phrases that get thrown around on the golf course that send shivers down a seasoned player's spine. Sometimes they’re tolerable. (“That’s the shot that’ll bring ya back!”) Sometimes they’re tired. (“Get in the hole!”) You'll hear them from the guy you’re paired up with. You throw him an amicable smirk. He’s just trying to break the ice!
There are others that transcend the actual golf course. GROW THE GAME. By definition, its mission is simple: Get more people into golf. (That’s good!) It’s been ubiquitous since 2020, but more often than not, it’s offered disingenuously. A cliche fueled by golf’s post-pandemic boom. It’s easy to say and get behind, broadly. Attach it to any effort that yields More Golf In Some Way, collateral damage and context be damned, and assume your seat back on a pedestal.
An example, courtesy of Phil Mickelson, who in one statement about the Saudi-backed LIV Golf league said both of these things to journalist Alan Shipnuck.
"We know they killed [Washington Post reporter Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates."
He didn’t say GROW THE GAME, but it loosely translates in its own way. Phil’s game is the one that pays. The game Netflix’s Full Swing can grow is the kind that starts with a nine iron and a bucket of balls.
Golf’s biggest banality gets a breath of fresh air through Netflix’s eight-part docuseries, streaming now. I think as far as entertainment products go, it’s hard not to believe this will help stimulate the growth golf has been experiencing since 2019. Not just because it exists—and on a platform of this size, no less—but because it’s equally suited for golf-agnostic Drive to Survive graduates and people like me, who’ve loved this game so long I actually used to root for Mickelson.
Filming during a geopolitical battle for golf’s soul is a nice handicap to play off of, too.
Full Swing's narrative stays pretty in line with last season’s most interesting storylines, but what's more impressive is how Full Swing weaves the players’ stories together, foreshadowing future winners along the way to the 150th Open Championship at St. Andrews in Scotland. The Open (or British Open) is not always golf’s most consequential major of the season, but it is the game’s most important from a historical perspective. Usually The Masters carries most of the hype, but Cameron Smith’s hoisting of the Claret Jug at The Old Course had bigger implications this year—as his defection to LIV became official two days after securing a lifetime tee time at The Open. Convenient! It was potentially Tiger Woods’ last Open at the home of golf, and a defector had just beaten Woods’s heir apparent, Rory McIlroy. The drama speaks for itself.
The way Full Swing incorporated golf’s infighting calmed my biggest fear about the show. The series nails the tone and the tension of the 2022 PGA Tour Season, one that was filled with more than enough gunpowder for a heavy hand in the editing room. And yet, the show is able to capture the need-to-know elements of golf’s civil war without belaboring what its core audience spent the better part of 2022 wading through. It’s easy enough to see who the good guys and bad guys are. If anything, Full Swing is generous to LIV, letting the league demonstrate, at the very least, its tackiness—instead of asking Rory McIlroy to talk more shit.
By the mid-way point of the series, I bet the casual viewer will be invested in the goings-on of professional golf. Though the LIV threat simmers beneath all eight episodes, rearing its head periodically throughout the year, the series’ creators clearly have larger interests in the BRAVO-ification of professional golf. (Though I’d watch the hell out of an Andy Cohen-led PGA-LIV reunion.)
Listen to Joel Dahmen talk about losing his mother to cancer, battling the disease himself, and hiring his childhood best friend as his caddie—all through tears—and tell me you don’t want to see this guy win a big one. Get to know the Finau family and join the millions of us golf fans who are dying to see Tony put on a Green Jacket. Tell me you don’t sympathize with Collin Morikawa in the Adidas conference room when he politely declines to wear a suggested coral-floral shirt-and-green-pants look that decidedly ain’t it. (I fist pumped.)
Even better, before dipping its toe in the politics, Full Swing invests in many of the barriers to entry to watching golf—the scoring, the scale of different tournaments, the nuance of the Dell Match Play Championship format, and how players elevate themselves from the Korn Ferry Tour to the PGA Tour. It’s stuff like this that’ll allow new golf spectators to sit back and marvel at The Masters this year with a newfound understanding of just how impressive it is to win like Scottie Scheffler, to endure like Joel Dahmen, or to literally hit a golf ball where you want it to.
It's the same kind of stuff my dad told me from his recliner when I finally started watching golf on TV with him as a kid. The stuff that got me swinging a club in the living room. Which led to that craving to hit a real ball, with a full swing, outside. I started going to the course and never looked back. Two decades into my addiction, I can see Full Swing’s potential as a Dad on the recliner for the Netflix generation.
The only remaining question is whether Full Swing can truly follow in the footsteps of Drive to Survive, and what it did for F1 viewership. According to the New York Times, in the first three years after Drive premiered, ESPN’s ratings nearly doubled, and “the attendance at [October 2021]’s race weekend in Austin was announced as the largest at any Grand Prix in the history of the sport: 400,000 fans over three days, including 140,000 for the race itself.”
What Full Swing has going for it is that for a couple thousand bucks, I can swing (almost) the same clubs as any pro golfer during my Sunday morning rounds. And for anyone inspired to give the game a go, there’s (still!) never been a better time to pick up the game. Sure, ratings and viewership numbers are where the buck stops when emulating your favorite athlete means finding a way to get yourself behind the wheel of a Mercedes W13. But if people tune into Full Swing at the rate they did to Drive, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be seeing a lot of you out there on the golf course this year.
Just don’t yell “Get in the hole,” cool?
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