The PGA Tour should steal a genius idea from YouTube. Here’s why

Much was made of the inauguration The classic creatortournament championship game at East Lake Wednesday. It was made big because, well, the PGA Tour promoted it. The World’s Largest Golf Product Said, Hey, check out what we can do with these other golf products!

It was rightfully seen as a way to increase the tournament’s digital reach, bringing a strong and notable golf viewership to YouTube in a prime week on the tournament schedule. It served as a hype track to better understand the pro game: If the best player at Good Good can scratch that one down, I wonder what it might look like when Scottie Scheffler plays those holes a day later?

For the people at the helm of the PGA Tour’s digital world, the use of content creators had to be seen as a success PRESENCE to elevate their product. But what if they just use content creators IDEAS? This is free, Chad Mamm: Watch Me Shoot 67 at Pebble Beach, by Max Homa.

Tour players work long hours, especially during tournament weeks. When they shoot a 67 in the first round, they hug it out with their caddy, sign their card, talk to their agent and sneak off to talk to the media. First comes the television, which amounts to about 10 minutes of chat time with the Golf Channel or Sky Sports. Then often comes PGA Tour Radio, maybe two to three questions. After that it’s time for cheaters like me – the writers out there – to ask them questions (hopefully not asked yet) and report the news of the day with the thoughts they shared. After bumping into writers like me, a player might step off to do some social media with the Tour’s communications team and/or sign 10 minutes of autographs.

In total, it’s about 30 to 40 minutes after a good round before a player can think about lunch, practice their putting or return to the range for a decompression session – an increasingly popular part of the route these day. Asking 20 minutes more of their time would cause the toughest of looks, and the Tour understands that. (So ​​does the media!) Professionals who clock in at 8am often wake up at 5 and don’t rest until 4pm So instead of asking for an extra 20 minutes, let’s repurpose the 20 minutes they spend “washing of cars” for a different use: a video summary of every single shot, from start to finish, in a shot-by-shot pile of information. If produced correctly – as often as twice a season for each of the top 50 players – with a smart moderator and a fast production team, it’s the kind of content that will feed all the mouths of the media… and will also circulate YouTube the same way it does for Good Good, the Bryan Bros., Foreplay, Erik Anders Lang, etc.

The current version of Players Talking Over Shots we get is a quick interview with Amanda Balionis or Kira Dixon that serves a perfectly sufficient television purpose. They work quickly through a number of the best players’ shots during an important round. We get the range, the club selection and a quick line about how nice it was to add a circle to their scorecard and – get excited, people – keep the momentum of a good round going. But in the immediacy of TV, these bursts of context are inherently limited. The show goes on! They will only last for a few minutes and we often only get the good stuff. Often times bad things are more interesting, not the 8-iron in three feet.

We want to hear the pros count the shots they could have eliminated from their scorecard, like Trent Ryan does for Foreplay when he can’t seem to break 90. ​​We want to hear them talk about the window through the trees that they were trying to enter, the same way Erik Anders Lang could at Pinehurst. We want to hear the pros tell us I can’t make par with my driver right now, so I had to hit 3-wood, so I had 240 on the green, which forces me to lay up. I don’t like that as a reason, but it is. We’re looking for that raw honesty, and it doesn’t always come in front of six reporters with their mug mics. But take a tip from The “Green Room” of the DP world tour — forcing professionals into a small room with just them and their thoughts, and you might be surprised in what comes from it.

As it turns out, listening to the pros break down professional sports is pretty interesting. That’s why we put microphones in front of them every day. That is why they have an additional preference for broadcast work. That’s why LeBron James created one of the most fascinating basketball podcasts this year and why the Manningcast is a very entertaining spin-off to Monday Night Football. Because when Kirk Cousins ​​runs a game-winning touchdown, Joe Buck will show you the play-by-play, but Peyton and Eli (and in the example below, Matt Ryan) will show you what’s amazing about it. They will show you a legitimate strategy, an aspect of golf that is often left to the generic: hit the fairway, hit the green, make the putt.

Looking at home, we can tell former Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman is wide open. But only Edelman and Tom Brady can really tell us why he was blunt and added context that has been lost to Jim Nantz and the rest of us. (They did this recently. On YouTube. Four hundred and fifty thousand people have watched in just five days.)

If Creator Classic taught us anything, it’s that YouTube views mean something. Two million people have watched the Tour production in the last two weeks. But also, 250,000 people watched Erik Anders Lang try to break 90 at Pinehurst. Even more people followed the Bryan Bros. trying to shoot level from the back at Erin Hills. An incredibly loyal 75,000 tuned in to watch Max Homa breaks Chris Solomon of No Laying Up shot 70 in the rain at Bandon Dunes. Now imagine if that audience could watch Max Homa smashing Max Homa golf in classic Max Homa fashion. Throw in his caddy, Joe Greiner, as color commentator, and you have two golfing geniuses — two great sayings — informing us why that 67 was good, good, great or even disappointing.

The good news is that the PGA Tour has the structures in place to make this happen. In almost every tournament, there are television cameras on every hole, and during every round of the tournament there are featured groups that attract the attention of each of those cameras. Shots that hit those sets don’t just disappear into the ether when they air on ESPN+. The Tour already operates a players-only portal where pros can view footage of camera shots at each event. They are called Speed ​​Rounds and help with players who want a different perspective of the shots they played in the competition. They are available to the public at Masters, produced with the help of AI video editing software. Now we just need someone to convince the PGA Tour to share the wealth. Throw some players in a nice, comfy chair, dub their audio over a Speed ​​Round video, and we could be watching some YouTube gold.

The version closest to this already exists on Bryson Dechambeau’s YouTube channel. Detached from the PGA Tour’s media rights contracts, DeChambeau roams free in LIV land, creating whatever he wants. (Now, there’s a reason it works again on the LIV and not on the PGA Tour – because the majors and NILs of tour players are valued in the billions over a 10-year period. Something similar could, in theory, exist for the LIV But a market has not developed fruitful enough to make the league reconsider DeChambeau’s YouTube privileges.)

DeChambeau’s channel is filled with many typical YouTube golf conquests. His trips to break 50 with guests Sergio Garcia, Paige Spiranac and Donald Trump are the most prescient examples. They are fun, of course. You watch until the end because you want to see if they achieve this feat. But the best parts of tour golf are largely absent. Sprinkled in the background on his feed are some very special rounds of the tournament: his 58 at the LIV Greenbrier a year ago, titled “This is what Shooting 58 looks like on a Pro Tour,” and his final round at the US Open this year. It’s aptly titled “I Won Another Major Championship.”

The latest main video it was uploaded the next day DeChambeau defeated Rory McIlroy at Pinehurst and has absorbed 1.3 million views in three months. It may not pass the copyright test of fair use, but it was simply deleted from the television footage already produced by NBC. All this without any insight from DeChambeau.

Imagine how much better we’d understand that victory of his if he spent 60 seconds explaining the birdie he made on the 13th hole, and then 60 seconds on that absurd approach he played from the junkyard on the 14th. Or his lie to the left fairway on the 18th. I can see it now in my memory, but I’m not really sure what he thought of it. We will learn a lot from this kind of content.

The biggest problem would be DeChambeau keeping him under 20 minutes.