ATLANTA — I saw the future of golf Wednesday afternoon on the East Lake Golf Club putting green. There, 2019 Open champion Shane Lowry and Ryder Cup hero Tommy Fleetwood lined up their last putts before the Tour Championship begins on Thursday. Just a few feet away from them, a handful of YouTube creators, podcasters and influencers — each with their own camera crew — milled about, reading putts and pacing before their own tee times.
Wednesday marked the fourth installment of the Creator Classic, a PGA Tour-developed, YouTube-sponsored event pitting 12 of the best-known golf creators against one another in a nine-hole made-for-YouTube event, on the exact same course the pros will play in their season-ending tournament this week.
A few steps away from the putting green, three of the stars of the “Good Good Golf” YouTube channel (1.93 million subscribers) walked toward the first tee for their 3:54 p.m. tee time. On the nearby 18th, another professional golfer measured out his last putts of the day. A group of kids standing along a fenceline couldn’t quite figure out whom to watch — the Good Good guys or the pro … a guy by the name of Scottie Scheffler.
If that sounds weird or strange or flat-out wrong to you, well … you’re not the target demographic for this particular brand of golf. But a whole lot of people are, and the PGA Tour is trying its best to reach them.
“These creators all kind of speak to their own audiences with their own production crews and their own voices,” Chris Wandell, the PGA Tour’s Senior Vice President for Media, told Yahoo Sports. “The amount of content that has resulted from this, and each one of these, has been mind-blowing … content that we could never have scripted just organically happens.”
For as long as there’s been golf, the relationship between player and fan has been clear: the player plays in front of the fans, the fan watches the pros. But the rise of cheap video capabilities and easy distribution created a third class: fans who play for other fans. Golf “influencers” and “content creators” — purists may cringe at the terms, but they’re the ones that fit — play some variant of the game in front of literal millions of fans, demythologizing and democratizing a game that’s been defined by its gatekeeping rather than its inclusivity.
Wednesday’s Creator Classic is the fourth installment of the series that began last year at East Lake, a creation born after the Tour recognized just how much Tour-adjacent work that creators were already doing — player interviews, analysis, even tournaments of their own. East Lake makes for a perfect
The Tour Championship provided an unconventional, but ideal opportunity — with only 30 players in the field, the course was largely clear by Wednesday afternoon. (Scheffler, Lowry and Fleetwood notwithstanding.) Fans were already on the course and ready to watch more golf … why not give them something a bit outside the norm?
“It was kind of a test — would the idea resonate with fans? Would it resonate with sponsors? Would it bring new people to a tournament that might not otherwise come on a Wednesday at 4:00?” Wandell said. “We ran it as a test with no solid plans to do it again, and the creators had a great time. Sponsors said, How do I get involved with that? A lot of tournaments called us and said, Can we do this at our tournament?” And so, here we are.
Draw a Venn diagram of golf creators, and all you’d have in the center is the word “golf.” Creators run the gamut from analysts to comedians, precise shotmakers to pranksters. Each style draws in a different subset of fans — fans who might not otherwise get anywhere near a PGA Tour event.
“My fans like to see my friends and I just bantering, talking nonsense,” said Luke Kwon (379,000 subscribers), winner of the 2024 East Lake Creators Classic. “I think we tend to act like how they act. There’s so much comedy that golf sometimes gets pushed to the side.”
Others seek to set an example and open doors for people traditionally excluded from the golf world. “You don’t have to be from the best area, the best circumstances to find a place in this game,” Roger Steele (232,000 Instagram followers) said. “I think that there’s opportunities for everybody. You meet good people, and good people will do good things for you.”
The twelve creators invited to play on Thursday represent a diverse group of interests and demographics. (Well, not age-wise. Most appeared to fit comfortably in the millennial/elder-Gen Z demo. There were no 65-year-old Boomers or precocious Gen Alphas in the mix. Maybe next year.) Some were here for the competition, some for the fashion, some for the laughs. But all brought massive audiences to the table. The live stream on YouTube easily topped 20,000 viewers — perhaps not massive numbers when compared to a seven-figure PGA Tour broadcast, but better than other golf YouTube streams we could name.
“We've tried our best to balance size of audience, diversity of audience and golf skill,” Wandell says. “We would love to host 25 handicaps, but this golf course is so hard. Most of these guys are scratch, and even putting them on a course like this, they’re going to have trouble breaking par.”
The Creator Classic is the live embodiment of an internet truism: where vast viewership numbers gather, money and brands follow. Virtually all of the players in Wednesday’s event have their own sponsorship deals, and many have their own merch lines. Akshay Bhatia, who would tee off in the Tour Championship Thursday, mingled with several creators around the putting green. No Laying Up’s Soly even managed to wrangle Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan as a caddie. Oh, and there was $100,000 on the line for the winner. Not a bad paycheck for nine holes’ work.
It’s always strange to see social media influencers in the wild. They locate, and mug for, the camera after virtually every significant moment. Their voices, their movements, their entire demeanor are exaggerated when the camera’s on them, which works on a phone screen but is juuuuust a bit too much for real life.
And oh, the cameras are everywhere. They’re the reason these 12 are here, after all. Every moment — every drive, every putt, every chip, every expression — is potential fodder for content, so those cameras have to be rolling. Producers will be hard at work starting Wednesday evening, chopping and carving hours of footage into easily digestible social media content.
“We’re trying to build all types of fans, and we want to create products and data and content for fans, no matter how much they want to consume,” Wandell says. “A lot of the new fans may not have cable, or don’t have ESPN Plus. So let’s give them some snackable video content, develop the love of golf.”
As for the golf itself … well, let’s just say the spotters and fore-right paddle holders got more of a workout Wednesday than they’re likely to get the rest of the week. Several players dunked their tee shots on the wicked 15th, and most got a chance to visit East Lake’s lush rough. Most finished their eight holes over par — in some cases, well over par.
But we have all weekend to watch exceptional players at East Lake; this was about watching men and women not all that different from us — better golf games, sure, but otherwise relatable — handling a challenge that most only get to watch on TV.
“My main goal?” said Peter Finch (753,000 subscribers) shortly before teeing off. “To not be crap.” Haven’t we all felt that way, every single round? (For the record, Finch would go on to finish at +6, two strokes out of last place.)
In a very real way, the creators are the viewer’s avatar, and that’s what makes them compelling viewing — it’s not hard to imagine ourselves in that spot, and not hard to wonder how we’d do trying to clear the waters of East Lake. (Answer: probably not well.)
“They’re getting to play the course inside the ropes, and the full broadcast and all the production, but they’re just as excited to see these guys play the course [Thursday] and all through the weekend,” said Chad Mumm, one of the creators of Netflix’s “Full Swing” and president of Pro Shop, a studio that develops original content like the Creator Classic. “It’s just so important for cultivating a healthy future for the fan base of the tour … The internet seems to be in love with what we’re doing, and the engagement’s been really good.”
The Creator Classic ended up being one of the most dramatic finishes of the year on Tour, with four players competing on a single sudden-death playoff hole, in an absolute frog-strangler of a downpour, for $100,000. In the end, Good Good's Brad Dalke took home the title, soaked to the bone as he bro-hugged his way off the course.
Golf is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the creator economy; no other sport combines the diversity of locales with the relatively low cost of entry. One tennis court looks pretty much like another, and racing is far too expensive for a casual creator, to cite two other individual-friendly sports. Baseball, basketball, football — none of those lend themselves to the combination of banter, skill and camera-friendly settings that golf does. This isn’t the golf of Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods, true … but each one of those legends advanced the game far beyond where they found it, too.
There’s room for both creators and players in the game of golf, both metaphorically and literally. As several of the creators left the driving range, working their way through both a thicket of cameras and pros like Justin Thomas, one security guard nudged another and pointed at one of the creators, crowing loudly, “He’s internet famous!”
A few years ago, that would have been a dismissive insult. Now, though, it sounds a whole lot like admiration.
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