[IMAGE: Bryson DeChambeau/YouTube]
Welcome to the era of YouTube Golf, folks!
It’s as if a new golf audience in the millions people has sprouted overnight. On-demand any hour of any day, most of the content is average golfers playing average courses for low stakes.
Our August cover star Bryson DeChambeau is the exception. Although several pros are active on social media, no world-class players have leaned into making long-form YouTube content with the same zeal as DeChambeau.
Padraig Harrington films shorter swing tips, and the next biggest channel belongs to The Bryan Bros (Wesley won a lone PGA Tour event in 2017). As of this writing, DeChambeau’s 111 produced videos, which include playing an entire round with Walmart clubs and another where he tries to break 50 with a scramble partner from the red tees, have racked up more than 70 million views.
The Walmart video has racked up 1.8 million views alone, an sees the 2024 US Open champ attempt to break par over six holes using a four-piece junior set that includes a driver, 7-iron, wedge and putter.
Watch as DeChambeau does his best to adjust his entire posture and swing to the cutdown starter kit, and produce some shots that will make you green with envy:
“I want to have a relationship with fans so they can know the true me,” DeChambeau tells us in our April cover shoot. Quick to acknowledge personal growth, the 30-year-old says he now knows himself better, too. “I’m playing to entertain and inspire a new generation, and my mindset has shifted to where I can look into a camera and see those people.”
Like any marketplace, YouTube Golf is competitive, with notable personalities such as Rick Shiels, Paige Spiranac, Grant Horvat, Garrett Clark and Erik Anders Lang regularly collaborating by getting together to play golf and pressing record. The narrative devices get recycled – matches with unusual formats, experiments with equipment, inventive challenges, odd destinations – but the result is almost always increases in views and subscribers for all parties.
Though these folks have carved nice livings, DeChambeau, captain of LIV’s Crushers Golf Club, has all the money any great-grandchildren will ever need. Still, he mixes it up alongside them. If there’s a common thread, it’s that the new Golf YouTubers are all demonstrating how to have fun playing golf.
That’s a lesson that can’t be taught enough.
