At some point or another, every adult gets morbidly curious about what “the kids are into these days.” What slang, what music, what drugs. When it comes to the rapidly changing landscape of golf, that question is as complicated as ever. For many of us aging into our 30s and 40s, the stars we grew up worshipping—such as Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson—are now largely irrelevant and/or disgraced, and the mediums we worshipped them through—’Sports Illustrated,’ ‘SportsCenter,’ et al.—are evaporating faster than rainwater in the Sahara. Yet somehow, golf is just as popular as ever.
What is driving that interest in kids, teenagers and young adults if not professional star power? As retired PGA-Tour-pro-turned-high-school-golf-coach Hunter Mahan explained on the Fore Play podcast this week, it’s not elite skill that has captured the attention of younger golfers, but relatability, specifically on YouTube.
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“They’re [his players] the ones who showed me Good Good and Grant Horvat,” Mahan explains. “They’ll sit and watch that. I’m like ‘You’d rather watch, not average golfers, but OK golfers play a round of golf versus highlights of Tiger Woods?’ I’m like ‘why?’ and they’re like ‘I don’t know, I just watch them.’ Like what are we doing guys? Come on. Let’s set the bar a little higher.”
Those comments make Mahan sound like a capital-O Old, but he did go on to say he believes that “YouTube golf and that culture of guys” is actually growing the game of golf. In today’s day and age where everyone, including floundering corporations on the verge of bankruptcy [*cough* LIV *cough*], claim to be expanding golf’s reach, YouTube golf is one of the few mediums that can genuinely back it up.
Thus, it’s no secret that YouTube golf has become popular with millions of golfers across the world. What is surprising, at least as Mahan explains it, is that golf’s younger demographic has waning interest in the likes of Tiger Woods. For golfers roughly my age (37 years old), this is unthinkable. Wood wasn’t just the best golfer on the planet. He WAS golf. Like Michael Jordan in the 1990s, his presence, persona and brand were inextricable from the sport itself. Raise your hand if you remember that Woods had his own line of Gatorade at one point? That’s how big Woods was to a certain generation of golfers, just not this generation of golfers. That may be difficult for some of us Olds to hear, and even harder to understand, but as long as the kids are watching some form golf, we can’t complain … too much.
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