Netflix's 'Full Swing' captures the most explosive year in golf's history (2024)

In late 2021, television producers Paul Martin and Chad Mumm travelled to a tournament in the Bahamas to chat with former world number one golfer Brooks Koepka. Martin, along with James Gay-Rees, runs the production company Box to Box Films, a major player in the suddenly bustling business of sports documentaries and the company behind the Netflix seriesDrive to Survive –the megahit set in the world of Formula 1 racing that attracted a new generation of F1 fans. On their way to meet with Koepka, the producers held in their minds an ambitious new challenge: finding Formula 1–style excitement in the relaxed-fit world of professional golf.

For filmmakers looking for drama, Koepka might have seemed like the right place to start, if also a rather challenging subject. After a furious stretch in which he racked up four majors in a little over two years, Koepka’s career had ground to a brutal halt: injury had reduced him to being only intermittently competitive. He didn’t much enjoy talking about it.

Indeed, in the Bahamas, he was initially reluctant to wade into his frustrations. But then, as the conversation was winding down, Martin said, Koepka opened up. “He started to talk about this vulnerability – where he really was, and how he was waking up in the middle of the night,” Martin told me. The producers felt like they had glimpsed a side of Koepka that audiences had never seen. Here, they had something they could work with: an aspect of the steely Koepka that his day job forced him to keep hidden.

This month, Koepka’s private struggles, along with a surprising peek into the lives of some dozen other golfers, will begin streaming on Netflix, on a show calledFull Swing. The series is meant to appeal to both dedicated golf fans (eager for new details about their favourite players) and to golf sceptics (who, a few years ago, probably didn’t know anything about Formula 1, either). When I met the show’s producers as they were finishing their edits on the series, the footage they screened for me had its share of conventional sports-doc action – big shots, big money, big personalities – but there was also plenty of the compelling and relatable human drama that makes for great TV.

Like, say, Brooks Koepka, hoodied up and dyed blond at home in his Death Star Florida mansion, not looking much like the world-beating titan that golf fans have known him to be. He seemed, in fact, miserable – unable in one scene to talk to his fiancée about their wedding plans without glazing over and obsessing about his broken swing. In another moment, he glumly rolled practice putts across a hotel carpet while debating his future. “We see Brooks really struggling to come to terms with the fact that he’s, frankly, not playing as well as he was two, three years ago, and doesn’t quite know how to get a grip on stuff,” Martin told me.

For the producers, the drama of Koepka trying to hold it together happened to play out against an even more unexpected convulsion in the sport: the emergence of LIV Golf, an insurgent new rival to the PGA Tour. The breakaway league is bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which was prepared to spend billions of dollars in the hopes of establishing an alternative to golf’s governing body – and boosting Saudi Arabia’s standing in world affairs. LIV began siphoning players – including real-deal major winners like Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson – away from the PGA Tour, via enormous paydays that included guaranteed contracts, reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Overnight, the sport was cleaved in two. LIV intended to modernise golf – shorter tournaments, drastically larger purses, music blaring from the tee box. But those changes were overshadowed by its Saudi backing. Pro golf was suddenly the subject of headlines – strange, amusing, occasionally disturbing: Mickelson, for instance, described his new Saudi benefactors to the golf writer Alan Shipnuck as “scary motherfuckers.”

Each week, a few big Tour players announced that they’d signed on with the competition. As outlandish as LIV could seem, though, the stakes were real: the rival league’s unfathomable pool of money (and the class of talent it bought) threatened to upset the PGA Tour’s monopoly on professional golf. The two leagues, as Shipnuck put it to me, were engaged in “the battle for the soul of golf.”

On the ground, that fight created some complications for the show’s producers. “We would turn up at events and stories that we thought we’d be telling would disappear, because this player’s gone,” Martin told me. One of those players was Brooks Koepka, who announced in June that he was signing up with LIV. Along with lots of other golf fans, I assumed that Koepka had made a cynical calculation driven by money. And while it’s of course possible that he did exactly that (Koepka declined to speak to me for this story), the documentary footage I saw at the very least complicated that narrative. I didn’t see an apex predator on the hunt for trophies or a has-been looking for one last payday. I saw a man confronting sporting mortality. It was easier, somehow, to understand his decision to abandon the grind ofPGA Tour golf.

The show had come to the world of golf looking to tell a story about the human side of the game. What it got was a sport in the throes of an existential crisis. The show may well do for golf whatDrive to Survive did for Formula 1, minting a new generation of fans, turning anonymous stars into global brands, and elevating the sport’s profile. But it might also serve as something arguably even more interesting: a real-time recording of a sport blowing up.

Late last August, as the PGA Tour was winding down its season at the Tour Championship in suburban Atlanta, I found theFull Swing crew on the second floor of the plummy clubhouse at East Lake Golf Club. There, the filmmakers had fashioned the women’s locker room into their makeshift production office for the week. This represented something of an upgrade. “We’re usually in a trailer,” one crew member told me.

The task before the producers ofFull Swing in this debut season was to carve eight discrete episodes out of golf’s nearly year-long schedule, using footage captured at a quarter of the season’s tournaments and featuring at least a dozen separate characters. “These are difficult shows to make,” Martin told me last autumn. “They’re really complex. There’s a lot of logistics, and the edits are heavy, heavy lifts.”

Each week, three or four teams of three or four people would fly to a tournament and scramble around the course in search of one or more of their cast members. Sometimes they’d film with a golfer in his rental house or car; other times, they’d simply cruise around in a golf cart looking for something – anything – happening. One drizzly afternoon in Atlanta, an enterprising camerawoman spent 15 minutes talking her way into the trailer occupied by the rules officials, just so a camera could be there if a rain delay was called (which it wasn’t).

The person most responsible for the show’s look and feel – for the way it will hopefully communicate its insidery sensibility – is Chad Mumm, one of the show’s executive producers and perhaps the biggest golf fan involved in the production. Mumm runs Vox Media Studios, a production company attached to the digital media brand of the same name. Mumm had a clear idea of what the show needed to be – or, at least, on the trappings it needed to avoid. “It has to feel not like the golf you see on TV,” Mumm told me. He citedDrive to Survive’s heightened vérité style as one influence – but also the director Paul Greengrass’s shaky action films. All told, a little moreFriday Night Lights thanRudy.

The pacing, editing and tone, meanwhile, were geared toward capturing a feeling that even the casual weekend golfer knows well. “There is a level of pressure that these guys put on themselves, and in the biggest moments it is crushing as a viewer to even experience it, and live through it, and imagine yourself in that person’s shoes,” Mumm said.

Perhaps surprisingly, though, much of the show wouldn’t focus on golf itself – which is, after all, already available on television every weekend. Producers estimated that actual tournament golf would comprise about a third of the show. The bulk of the action would be composed of the in-between moments. Aimless tee-box chatter doesn’t make the cut on Sunday afternoon broadcasts, but it’s unmatched when it comes to establishing the rhythms of life for a pro golfer. Mumm told me that the producers would often ask the golfers to simply share the ordinary, off-the-course goings-on of their days. The golfers were fine with this. “It’s not like it was anything intrusive,” Tour pro Max Homa told me. “It just was, we’d be eating, and you could see a camera kind of pointing at you as you ate and talked and whatnot.” Martin explained that the goal here was simple: to humanise these exceptional athletes. “These shows really are about normalising these worlds and making them relatable,” he said. “Making people understand that, whether you are Joe Schmo at home or you are Brooks Koepka, when you’re going through a tough time, you have the same reaction and the same experiences.”

The goal was to offset those humanising humdrum moments with ones unique to the world of professional golf. One clip that Mumm showed me – sure to light up golf Twitter when it airs – captures the stars Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth on a private jet. They pass the time by playing a card game: guessing the card drawn from a deck. As if to underscore both the competitive intensity inherent to pro golfers, along with the spoils derived from enduring such intensity, they are shown betting a thousand dollars on each draw.

It was not always obvious that golf demanded a glossy, documentary-style treatment. Mumm had long watchedHard Knocks, the HBO series that embeds in an NFL training camp each year, and he thought that a similar warts-and-all project could work in his favourite sport. But initially, he had a tough time making the case.

He’d begun working up a plan for the show in 2019, and, with a contact at the PGA Tour, spent a year enlisting talent before pitching the series around Hollywood. Nobody bit. Gabe Spitzer, an executive on Netflix’s documentaries team, told me that his early reservations were largely about the show’s then-limited scope: the sport’s majors – its four most famous events, governed separately – were not involved. “We said, ‘Look, we’re intrigued,’” Spitzer said, “‘but see if you can get the majors on board, and come back to us if you do.’”

So Mumm set about enlisting the majors: the Masters, the Open Championship, the US Open, and the PGA Championship. What he soon discovered surprised him. Golf’s insularity had for a long time worked in its favour: blue-chip advertisers cared about the wealth of the sport’s audience, not its size. But in a world of social media and streaming television, the sport had fallen behind – and the people in charge knew it. For all the pomp and tradition of the Masters, Mumm explained, the tight-lipped folks who put on that tournament are “getting more progressive about how they tell the story. They know that the tournament can’t just be for old people; they need younger audiences.” (Amusingly, Mumm told me, he’s heard that the Netflix engineering team considers the Masters streaming app the best on the market – after Netflix’s own.)

At the same time, the stuffy world of pro golf was beginning to loosen up, and the prospect of appearing on a television show held new appeal to the players. Journeyman pros like Joel Dahmen and Max Homa were building fanbases by acting less like birdie machines and more like human beings. “As I’ve progressed in my years out here on the PGA Tour, I’ve grown up a lot, but I also decided I play my best golf when I’m really enjoying it, and I’m having a good time, and I’m being myself,” Dahmen told me. “It wasn’t, like, a set plan of ‘I’m going to tweet more’, or ‘I’m going to do more fun things’. It was just like, well, if I continue to play good golf, and I’m having fun doing it, it’s okay to show the world that.”

When it comes to professional golf, “tweeting more” counts as a somewhat revolutionary act. Chris Wandell, the PGA Tour executive who worked with Mumm on the pitch, explained that in this universe, an all-access documentary was new. “The first time this idea was put in front of our management team,” he told me, “they were like, ‘Wait a second, what if they swear?’” (Neither the PGA Tour nor the cast members have approval over what appears in the show.)

That Dahmen, with one Tour victory to his name, is among the sport’s most prominent social media successes is a reminder that the ceiling on stardom in golf, where players are independent contractors and must market themselves, is rather low compared to other professional leagues. Justin Thomas, a two-time major winner, explained the dynamic succinctly when I caught him at East Lake: “Even if you’re a top player, unless you’re, like, Tiger, no one truly knows who you are.”

These big, swirling questions – about fame, money and image making – were cast into starker relief by the arrival of LIV. With theircameras following defectors like Koepka, Dustin Johnson and Ian Poulter, the producers felt they were able to capture the emotional depth of the conflict in a way that surprised Mumm. “The existential crisis for the game is real,” he said. Golfers spent all year whispering about which of their peers were taking the LIV money. “It’s more personal than maybe you would think.”

Unquestionably, the game’s crisis was a godsend for producers looking for drama, Martin explained. “Listen, if I was being cynical, I would say it was a dream for the series, because it gave real stakes and real dilemma to some of these characters,” he said. “It’s been kind of story dynamite for us.”

A week afterthe tournament in Atlanta, Martin and James Gay-Rees ambled into theFull Swing office in New York and soon fell into conversation about the show’s Rory McIlroy storyline. McIlroy, who is perhaps the game’s foremost non-Tiger star, spent last season using that stature to trash LIV at every opportunity.

The team had been whittling their mountain of footage, and a pair of producers were specially focused on refining the show’s presentation of McIlroy. Noting the golfer’s Northern Irish heritage, one of them wondered aloud whether they might work the Troubles into the show’s narrative. “Coming from a world in which choices have consequences and lines are sort of being drawn in the sand,” he put it, perhaps McIlroy’s biography could be linked to his fierce advocacy for the Tour.

Gay-Rees was deferential. “If you want to have a crack at it and if you think it can be laid in subtly and tastefully, and it feels like it’s legitimate, organic – fine. If it feels tricky, then don’t worry about it.” Martin was blunter: “I mean, the subtext of PGA versus LIV is IRA versus…” The table laughed. “It’s a stretch.”

Exactly what the battle between the PGA and LIViscomparable to remains tough to tell. As the show neared its air date, the two sides were still trading lawsuits sure to require years of deliberation. Whether LIV players would be able to compete in majors remained an open question – one to be taken up, perhaps, on a second season ofFull Swing. (Mumm is also excited about the idea of diving into a schism of a different kind: this year’s Ryder Cup, which pits a team of Americans against one of Europeans.)

In New York, season one was locking into place. On the day I visited the offices, Mumm shared that Netflix suits who had previewed it requested that the show not open – as was then the plan – with a forlorn Brooks Koepka, who seemed simply too sad to kick off the series.

But moments of happy surprise abounded. Mumm showed me a portion of the golfer Matt Fitzpatrick’s storyline, which represented one of the lucky accidents that any show needs if it wants to stand out in the streaming glut.

Fitzpatrick is a British golfer whose nerdy vibe does not suggest alpha competitor. But then, in June, Fitzpatrick won the US Open in a way that not even Mumm, Martin, and Gay-Rees would have dreamed of scripting. Holding a one-shot lead heading into the final hole at the Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, one of the most storied sites in US Open history, he sailed his tee shot into a fairway bunker. And then, he daringly took aim at the hole and striped a nine iron out of the sand and onto the green. He putted twice and took the trophy.

I watched it all play out in the editing room in agonising slow motion. Fitzpatrick’s miss off the tee. His family watching from behind the ropes, chattering nervously. His walk to the green soundtracked, triumphant, by a bleating Bon Iver song. I’d seen the shot live on TV months earlier and in countless replays. I knew exactly what was going to happen. It still ruled. “Everyone’s like, ‘We know how it ends,’” Mumm told me in the room. “I’ve watched that 50 times and it still gets me every time.”

That the footage seemed yanked from a sports movie was sort of the point. “People always try to tell the sports version of these stories, and we are always like, no, no, no,” Paul Martin told me. “Obviously, you have to be faithful to the sport, but you’re telling the movie version of these stories. It’s not enough that Matthew Fitzpatrick turned up and won the US Open. It’s really: how do we establish Matthew as a character so that in our show, when he gets to that 18th hole, when he hits it in the bunker, and then he hits that shot onto the green, our audience…” He trailed off. “It needs to feel likeRocky.”

Of course, getting the footage to build the full Fitzpatrick story meant training cameras on him long before his moment of glory. The crew began following Fitzpatrick in March, at the Players Championship in Florida. “To have Netflix there was kind of weird, because you just don’t want any distractions or anything,” he told me. “But it was almost good to have the distractions of thinking about that, rather than thinking about the golf the next day.”

And so, when they asked to embed with him again before the US Open, he was game. Even if he was still a long shot. So much so that cameras captured the moment when a tournament security guard asked if he was a player or a caddy. When we spoke, he was wry and understated about the whole thing. “I would assume,” Fitzpatrick told me of his time being filmed, “they got a lot of good content.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of British GQ with the title “Now Streaming on Netflix: Golf’s Existential Crisis”