Golf’s Main Character Moment

LeBron James is spending a chunk of his summer free agency on the fairway. Retired WNBA Diana Taurasi films her sports-talk-and-golf show from courses. Actor Kevin Hart went on Instagram this month to declare that “golf is life and life is golf” and he’s “got the bug real bad.”

None of these people are historically “golf people,” but in today’s world, where golf and popular culture have collided despite the absence of a singular superstar, does it really matter?

‍Will Ferrell’s Netflix golf comedy “The Hawk” premiered last week on the streaming service to a divided reception from critics (30% on review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes), but audiences didn’t get the critical memo. The show, which marks Ferrell’s first-ever scripted series regular role, debuted at No. 1 on Netflix in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Iceland and landed in the top three in several more markets, with a 70% Rotten Tomatoes audience score to match.

"You're seeing golf's popularity rising across every metric — consumption, participation, equipment sales, travel for golf, apparel — despite there not being a singular superstar," said Chad Mumm, an executive producer on Netflix's “Full Swing” and “Happy Gilmore 2,” and co-founder of golf media company Pro Shop, who's been watching the shift up close for the better part of a decade. “That convergence I'd say has happened. I think golf really is at this intersection with pop culture, and it's hard to see how it would slow down.”

‍No Tiger Required

Golf’s popularity has cycled before, but for most of the last century those surges could be tied to an athlete who transcended the sport itself — Bobby Jones, then Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, then Tiger Woods, whose gravity reshaped the sport’s economics for two decades.

While there’s no Tiger-scale figure carrying the sport (though the popularity of figures like Rory McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau is nothing to scoff at), the numbers are moving anyway: rounds played hit an all-time U.S. high last year for the fourth time in five years, the golf equipment market is growing nearly 6% annually, and even municipal golf — long the sport’s least glamorous corner — has expanded 7% since 2006, even as overall course supply has shrunk. Something structural is happening, not just a star-driven spike.

When Mumm and his partners were raising money in 2023 around the idea that golf and mainstream culture were converging, Mumm's stated prediction was that the sport's long-standing stigma — that it's exclusionary, elitist, "for rich people" — would meaningfully dissipate by 2030. "That has fallen away way quicker than I even expected," he said.

Mumm credits social media as a major driver of the golf and pop culture convergence, and not just from golfers.

"If you're a 20-something and all your favorite athletes, the second their sports season ends, the next thing you see on their Instagram page is them playing golf and looking cool — that changes the popularity of the sport in a way that looks very different from how it's grown in the past," Mumm said. The effect builds on itself: once a critical mass of culturally relevant people signal that golf is cool, more follow. "It's opened the door — if you're a musician or an actor or an athlete, it's cool to talk about loving golf. It's cool to get obsessed and put on outfits and go on trips and travel, and I think that will lead to other athletes and superstars and other influential people from around the world jumping [on] the bandwagon."

‍Why Golf Makes Good TV

Scripted and unscripted golf content is the visible layer on top of that shift, and “Full Swing” (the Netflix docuseries built in the F1 “Drive to Survive” mold) is generally treated as the genre’s proof of concept. Golf, it turns out, is unusually well-suited to the format: an individual sport where, as Mumm put it, “the stakes felt much more personal than you’d see in a team sport,” populated by athletes who are, for structural reasons, unusually comfortable in front of an audience. Tour pros do CEO outings, play pro-ams with business leaders and spend real time each week with sponsors, clients and press — “a bit of a different exposure,” as Mumm put it, than most professional athletes get.

The tour format helps too: the same cast travels together every week, generating relationship arcs a producer would otherwise have to engineer. Because scoring is entirely self-contained, there’s no coach or teammate to blame. “There’s no place to run and hide, and it’s all on the individual,” Mumm said. That premise extended into other formats: “Happy Gilmore 2” kept its golf grounded underneath the absurdity, and “The Hawk” applies the same authenticity mandate to a show set on the PGA Tour and Korn Ferry Tour (while taking the opportunity to poke fun at LIV, with Ferrell’s character claiming the league isn’t “real golf”).

‍Turning Culture Into Cash

The commercial picture is still murkier than the cultural one, with Mumm describing it as “still early innings,” to borrow an analogy from baseball. Equipment and retail have benefited most visibly — look at Titleist parent Acushnet's first quarter sales growth ($753 million, up 7.1% year-over-year), driven by product launches across the Titleist, FootJoy and KJUS brands, alongside strength at Dick's Sporting Goods’ Golf Galaxy and PGA Tour Superstore.

The Tour itself is seeing rising engagement from the wider wave of interest, with “a lot of the action” sitting with media, including influencers, YouTube golf channels and companies playing in that space, as new audiences look for ways to go deeper into the sport.

Brands are finding new ways to play in the golf culture space as well, including first-time entrants. Alongside the premiere of “The Hawk,” Netflix partnered with Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Genesis for a pair of campaigns. Both are described as first-of-their-kind partnerships built with Ferrell's creative team rather than bolted on after the fact, evidence that scripted golf content is becoming its own ad-sales category, not just a distribution play for the sport underneath it.

“What I love about these two partnerships is how both brands used the opportunity as permission to take a swing at something new. For Genesis that was comedy, and for Mike's Hard Lemonade that was a bold step into golf,” said Magno Herran, vice president of global brand marketing and partnerships at Netflix.

‍Fad or Forever?

The obvious risk in any of this is overexposure — that comedy and drama treatments of golf eventually curdle into noise. The reception to “The Hawk” is arguably a preview of that ceiling: critics have already decided the format is repeating itself. But the audience reception suggests the wager isn't really about whether any one show is good, but rather about whether golf has become a lifestyle rather than fandom. Fandom is trend-driven and fragile, prone to collapsing if a star fades or a show underwhelms. Lifestyle becomes identity, and identity tends to be durable — the way "wellness" has stayed a defining consumer category even as individual brands within it rotate in and out of fashion — like Lululemon giving ground to Alo and Vuori. "People aren't just planning their trips around golf now," Mumm said. "They're planning their outfits around golf, how they work out around golf — they're making it a lifestyle."

Whether that holds is the multibillion-dollar question for every brand, broadcaster and private equity firm now circling the sport. Critics can keep arguing about the jokes, but audiences already made “The Hawk” a hit, and that’s what the people writing the checks are watching.

“The future of golf now looks a lot more demographically like the demographics of our country,” said Mumm. “The stakes of picking up a club and taking a swing have never been lower for people, and that is causing this really big consumer wave to come into the game.”