FIRST THE SAUDIS came for the PGA Tour’s golfers, and then they came for the influencers.
At Donald Trump’s Doral Course later today, LIV will show off another headline insurgent from the PGA Tour, and to the names of Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka we now add that of Wesley Bryan.
If you don’t know who Wesley Bryan is – don’t worry.
If you know Wesley Bryan as the winner of the 2017 RBC Heritage on Tour – then go outside! You’re watching too much TV.
Bryan is a PGA Tour player who has played at a trio of events this year, but he is better known as a content creator than competitor, with more than a half a million subscribers to his YouTube channel, on which he and his brother play matches and generally gad about completing challenges on golf courses.
Hence Bryan won’t actually be competing on LIV, but he will be teeing it up in a one-off event titled LIV Duels, in which golf influencers play a nine-hole scramble match alongside a LIV player.
This is all part of the latest front in golf’s civil war, as LIV and the PGA Tour target the youth audience, long since having realised their inflated bills will no longer be paid for by erectile dysfunction ads alone.
Bryan was one of several YouTube golfers to become officially aligned with the PGA Tour last year by joining their Creator Council, which is a kind of Content Camelot in which a group of influencers advise the Tour on how to Appeal to The Kids. The Irish equivalent would probably be the co-opting of Buff Egan onto the CCCC.
The chief innovation has been the Creator Classic, in which YouTube golfers play a televised, nine-hole stroke play competition on the eve of a major competition. (Think of it as a kind of GoPro-Am.)
The Tour debuted their Creator Classic ahead of their finale event last year, and its success can be measured by the fact there are two of them in the schedule for this year, the first of which took place at Sawgrass ahead of the Players Championship last month.
If there’s an editorial philosophy underpinning the Creator Classic, it’s that watching swaggering characters be cut down to size on a golf course is worthwhile viewing.
Advertisement
The highlight at Sawgrass was Trent Ryan of Barstool Sports landing his fifth shot onto the signature island green having plonked four balls into the water.
In true disruptor fashion, LIV have found the most disruptive ideas to be ones that already exist, and so this week are staging their own creator classic.
Also competing at LIV is the angular Grant Horvat, who looks like a Quentin Blake illustration who has privately got his teeth bleached, and Fat Perez, so named as he is styled as a burlier, bearded version of former ex-LIV player Pat Perez.
The LIV event will be streamed on Horvat’s YouTube channel, which has more than a million subscribers. Horvat alone has the kind of audience reach the Saudi-backed Tour could only dream of.
It was said of Muhammad Ali that he knew when to allow the mythmakers in, and this is the same idea in principle. Okay, Ali was surrounded and chronicled by writers like Hugh McIlvanney, Norman Mailer, and other literary men who could marry descriptions of brutal eloquence with the ability to contextualise Ali’s importance within the social and political tumult of 1960s America, whereas modern golf has, er, Fat Perez doing some shouting.
But with millions of subscribers between them, the YouTube golfers have cultivated the richest available terrain in the PGA Tour/LIV landgrab.
The rocketing popularity of YouTube golf was in evidence last year, with the transforming of Bryson DeChambeau’s public image. He explained his support at the US Open by talking of Country Club Dads who approached him with the deathless compliment, “Thanks for the content: appreciate what you do online.”
Bryson’s YouTube output follows the template of the other star creators, which is broadly Can We Achieve X Alongside Y With Z Contrivance?
Grant Horvat: Can Bryson Beat Me with Three Clubs?
Bryson: Can I Break 50 with President Donald Trump?
Fat Perez: Can We Finish 36 Pints of Guinness in Nine Holes?
Scottie Scheffler: Can I Win A Golf Major While Getting Arrested During the Tournament?
The influencers’ leaning into these ambitious challenges makes them a little bit like a younger edition of Top Gear, with a different kind of driving and arguably less conservative politics.
It’s also an ecumenical business, with influencers all happy to appear on others’ channels, while plenty of professional players have also taken part, aware of the size of the audience.
The reaction of sportswriters to this development tallies with their natural disposition to any modern development in media: an inward-horror-dressed-as-outward-sneer at being forced to confront our own shortcomings, poor choices, and imminent obsolescence.
But leaving aside this column’s existentialism, you have to be hard-hearted not to acknowledge that the YouTubers have game.
They have needed the charisma to attract a huge audience, and the creativity to segue their concepts into a snappy headline. And at a time of diminishing attention spans, they are also producing what media execs would call long-form content: Fat Perez and pals knocked nearly an hour out of How Many Chicken Nuggets Can We Finish in Nine Holes? (Spoiler alert: 200.)
Pro golf is stalked by fears around its declining, ageing audience, so going directly to the YouTubers’ audience is a canny play, but they would be much better off seeking inspiration over invitation.
The YouTubers are proving that millions of people will spend hours watching people hit golf shots, and their means of doing so is presenting a set of accessible personalities ambitiously targeting a very clearly defined target.
This was once what pro golf did, too. Nowadays, though, most of the players have no interest in ventilating their personalities. “I don’t owe anyone anything,” said charisma’s Collin Morikawa to the media last month, while outside of the majors, what, exactly, is the target for which these guys are striving?
Obviously the players are outside making themselves rich, but no YouTuber would get any eyeballs with the headline Can I Make $200,000 By Shooting Four Rounds of Between 69 and 73?
And outside of the majors, diluted fields and diminished competitions have left us all wondering what, exactly, is the actual value of winning any competition.
Pro golf would be better off studying the YouTubers’ success rather than trying to merely piggyback on it.
But this is the irony of the self-made influencer, who has control over all aspects of their work aside, ultimately, from its influence.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Close
Comments
This is YOUR comments community. Stay civil, stay constructive, stay on topic.
Please familiarise yourself with our comments policy
here
before taking part.
It's Fat Perez' time to shine: Why the PGA Tour and LIV are now battling for YouTube golfers
FIRST THE SAUDIS came for the PGA Tour’s golfers, and then they came for the influencers.
At Donald Trump’s Doral Course later today, LIV will show off another headline insurgent from the PGA Tour, and to the names of Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka we now add that of Wesley Bryan.
If you don’t know who Wesley Bryan is – don’t worry.
If you know Wesley Bryan as the winner of the 2017 RBC Heritage on Tour – then go outside! You’re watching too much TV.
Bryan is a PGA Tour player who has played at a trio of events this year, but he is better known as a content creator than competitor, with more than a half a million subscribers to his YouTube channel, on which he and his brother play matches and generally gad about completing challenges on golf courses.
Hence Bryan won’t actually be competing on LIV, but he will be teeing it up in a one-off event titled LIV Duels, in which golf influencers play a nine-hole scramble match alongside a LIV player.
This is all part of the latest front in golf’s civil war, as LIV and the PGA Tour target the youth audience, long since having realised their inflated bills will no longer be paid for by erectile dysfunction ads alone.
Bryan was one of several YouTube golfers to become officially aligned with the PGA Tour last year by joining their Creator Council, which is a kind of Content Camelot in which a group of influencers advise the Tour on how to Appeal to The Kids. The Irish equivalent would probably be the co-opting of Buff Egan onto the CCCC.
The chief innovation has been the Creator Classic, in which YouTube golfers play a televised, nine-hole stroke play competition on the eve of a major competition. (Think of it as a kind of GoPro-Am.)
The Tour debuted their Creator Classic ahead of their finale event last year, and its success can be measured by the fact there are two of them in the schedule for this year, the first of which took place at Sawgrass ahead of the Players Championship last month.
If there’s an editorial philosophy underpinning the Creator Classic, it’s that watching swaggering characters be cut down to size on a golf course is worthwhile viewing.
The highlight at Sawgrass was Trent Ryan of Barstool Sports landing his fifth shot onto the signature island green having plonked four balls into the water.
In true disruptor fashion, LIV have found the most disruptive ideas to be ones that already exist, and so this week are staging their own creator classic.
Also competing at LIV is the angular Grant Horvat, who looks like a Quentin Blake illustration who has privately got his teeth bleached, and Fat Perez, so named as he is styled as a burlier, bearded version of former ex-LIV player Pat Perez.
The LIV event will be streamed on Horvat’s YouTube channel, which has more than a million subscribers. Horvat alone has the kind of audience reach the Saudi-backed Tour could only dream of.
It was said of Muhammad Ali that he knew when to allow the mythmakers in, and this is the same idea in principle. Okay, Ali was surrounded and chronicled by writers like Hugh McIlvanney, Norman Mailer, and other literary men who could marry descriptions of brutal eloquence with the ability to contextualise Ali’s importance within the social and political tumult of 1960s America, whereas modern golf has, er, Fat Perez doing some shouting.
But with millions of subscribers between them, the YouTube golfers have cultivated the richest available terrain in the PGA Tour/LIV landgrab.
The rocketing popularity of YouTube golf was in evidence last year, with the transforming of Bryson DeChambeau’s public image. He explained his support at the US Open by talking of Country Club Dads who approached him with the deathless compliment, “Thanks for the content: appreciate what you do online.”
Bryson’s YouTube output follows the template of the other star creators, which is broadly Can We Achieve X Alongside Y With Z Contrivance?
Grant Horvat: Can Bryson Beat Me with Three Clubs?
Bryson: Can I Break 50 with President Donald Trump?
Fat Perez: Can We Finish 36 Pints of Guinness in Nine Holes?
Scottie Scheffler: Can I Win A Golf Major While Getting Arrested During the Tournament?
The influencers’ leaning into these ambitious challenges makes them a little bit like a younger edition of Top Gear, with a different kind of driving and arguably less conservative politics.
It’s also an ecumenical business, with influencers all happy to appear on others’ channels, while plenty of professional players have also taken part, aware of the size of the audience.
The reaction of sportswriters to this development tallies with their natural disposition to any modern development in media: an inward-horror-dressed-as-outward-sneer at being forced to confront our own shortcomings, poor choices, and imminent obsolescence.
But leaving aside this column’s existentialism, you have to be hard-hearted not to acknowledge that the YouTubers have game.
They have needed the charisma to attract a huge audience, and the creativity to segue their concepts into a snappy headline. And at a time of diminishing attention spans, they are also producing what media execs would call long-form content: Fat Perez and pals knocked nearly an hour out of How Many Chicken Nuggets Can We Finish in Nine Holes? (Spoiler alert: 200.)
Pro golf is stalked by fears around its declining, ageing audience, so going directly to the YouTubers’ audience is a canny play, but they would be much better off seeking inspiration over invitation.
The YouTubers are proving that millions of people will spend hours watching people hit golf shots, and their means of doing so is presenting a set of accessible personalities ambitiously targeting a very clearly defined target.
This was once what pro golf did, too. Nowadays, though, most of the players have no interest in ventilating their personalities. “I don’t owe anyone anything,” said charisma’s Collin Morikawa to the media last month, while outside of the majors, what, exactly, is the target for which these guys are striving?
Obviously the players are outside making themselves rich, but no YouTuber would get any eyeballs with the headline Can I Make $200,000 By Shooting Four Rounds of Between 69 and 73?
And outside of the majors, diluted fields and diminished competitions have left us all wondering what, exactly, is the actual value of winning any competition.
Pro golf would be better off studying the YouTubers’ success rather than trying to merely piggyback on it.
But this is the irony of the self-made influencer, who has control over all aspects of their work aside, ultimately, from its influence.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
column Golf liv golf PGA Tour