If there’s a gravitational center of the professional golf galaxy, a spot where all the stars’ cart paths align, it’s a place called Jupiter. Situated on the southeast coast of Florida, Jupiter is where Tiger Woods and Brooks Koepka live, where Michael Jordan and Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross invest in golf courses, and where Jack Nicklaus has an enterprise called the Bear’s Club. From Jessica Korda to Dustin Johnson to Rickie Fowler to Ernie Els, all manner of top golfers have agglomerated into this Atlantic-adjacent realm. So it makes sense that a few years ago, when golf enthusiast and producer Chad Mumm first pitched his vision for a Hard Knocks–style reality show based on professional golfers, Mumm found himself in Jupiter—specifically in Justin Thomas’s family room.
“We were sitting on a couch,” said Thomas, the ninth-ranked player in the world, in a Zoom conversation last month, “just discussing the idea and talking about how cool it could be for golf.” As the two spoke that day, an extra-large trinket held Mumm’s eye. “The Wanamaker Trophy,” Mumm recalled, referring to the prize Thomas earned for winning the 2017 PGA Championship, one of the sport’s major tournaments. “Which was way too big, by the way, to fit on his mantelpiece. Like, I swear, it was hanging over the edge.”
Thomas was the first player Mumm met with in person about the concept and was one of the first to say yes. “He just got it from the beginning,” Mumm said. “He understood what this was.” It would take a few years until “what this was” became the project that it now is: Full Swing, an eight-episode documentary series that premieres on Netflix this week and follows a number of the world’s best golfers—Thomas, Koepka, and Johnson among them—everywhere, from the tops of the leaderboards to the sidelines of the practice ranges to, when we’re lucky, the insides of their heads.
Taped mostly in 2021 and 2022, Full Swing chronicles a PGA Tour season that was more hectic than anyone could have imagined—and not just because of some zany putt on a Sunday. (Though there was that too.) Beneath the greens, something far more seismic was happening: A new competing league called LIV Golf—backed by Saudi Arabian sovereign-fund money—launched, poached players, and caused a legitimate existential schism in men’s golf, all in the span of a few months.
“It’s arguably the most exciting, controversial, and crazy year that the PGA Tour’s ever had,” said Thomas, who opted to remain on the original circuit. “And, you know, Netflix and everybody around the world is going to get a front-row seat to it.” Sometimes, it turns out, you can get a pretty interesting view of things right from the couch.
“I was like, No chance,” said Joel Dahmen, the (currently) 90th-ranked golfer, who often rocks sweet bucket hats and has been known to give the people what they want. (Such as the shirt off his back.) Speaking to The Ringer over Zoom, Dahmen recalled his initial reaction to the idea of being part of the Full Swing extended universe—in other words, to the idea of being watched. “My wife was like, No chance,” he continued. Dahmen had enough going on just trying to make the cut on a typical weekend; he didn’t need cameras around too.
Other players, though, were more immediately receptive. Mumm had “an amazing collaborator” early on, he said, in golfer Rickie Fowler, who already had a production company of his own, called Main Event Productions, and “was really instrumental in helping us understand how to put ourselves in the right place in this world where we could actually capture the real life of it.” Over Zoom, Fowler, who grew up riding motocross bikes before breaking his foot in several places and turning to golf, described his hopes for the finished product. “I think it’ll be really cool and help open some people’s eyes to know what goes on and who guys really are,” he said. “You know, we’re just normal kids or guys that like to play golf. We just happen to be a little bit better at it than most people.” (In a Super Bowl ad for Michelob Ultra, Fowler can be seen sitting down to watch Full Swing with the soccer player Alex Morgan and former NFL quarterback Tony Romo.)
Tony Finau, a 33-year-old Utahn who is one of seven children, has four kids, and has recently been playing the most successful golf of his career, was “one of the first that committed to it,” Finau told The Ringer about Full Swing. Now, this wasn’t the first time he had been followed by production crews: In the late aughts, he and his brother Gipper were on a season of a Golf Channel reality show called Big Break: Disney Golf. (Neither won, but both outlasted contestant Andrew Giuliani.) “I feel like I did a good job of just trying to be as normal as possible,” Finau said of the experience.
Dahmen also finally decided to give it a chance. “We said yes because we were going to dive into it,” Dahmen said with a small smirk. “And I’d say we go headfirst into it.” That’s for sure: Midway through this Full Swing season, there’s an entire episode, called “Imposter Syndrome,” that is largely devoted to Dahmen. It involves stroller shopping, self-deprecation, and a pivotal White Claw. Production crews visit not only Dahmen’s house, but his caddie’s (Geno) too. There are personal tragedies and small triumphs. There are pep talks, and there are tears. Before watching the episode, I was woefully underinformed on Dahmen’s deal; now, I wish to protect the man at all costs, which means that Full Swing has done its job.
Full Swing was made in conjunction with Vox Media Studios, and with Box to Box Films, the creative team that revved up Formula One racing in the United States with the Netflix show Drive to Survive. Box to Box was also behind another recent sports documentary series, the tennis program Break Point, which debuted on Netflix last month. The golf iteration resembles these cousins: with requisite jet-setting drone footage of lush lands spanning from Augusta, Georgia, to Pacific Palisades, California, and beyond. It also boasts meaningful access—not only to key people, but also to the exclusive places where they work and dwell, both inside and outside Jupiter’s orbit.
Viewers sit in on awkward clothes-related meetings at Adidas and are present for antagonistic press conferences about LIV Golf. (Sample question: “If Vladimir Putin had a tournament, would you play?”) Full Swing paints resonant portraits of the pride and exasperation that hang between fathers and sons, whether it’s Thomas bantering with his dad (who, like his dad before him, is a golf club pro); Ian Poulter low-key trying to one-up his haler, heartier, better-coiffed teen son; or Finau’s eldest son wearing green, just like his dad. Love letters from caddies are read aloud. Rory McIlroy stalks around stubbornly. Wayne Gretzky’s daughter Paulina shoots hoops with her husband, Johnson.
One bright-eyed rookie from Chile thrives, then struggles, as his increasingly horrified friends and family look on. (The people who have the real front-row seats to the action are frequently the ones who can scarcely bear to watch; seeing them squirm reminded me at times of the scenes from the documentary Free Solo in which a woman watches her boyfriend hang between life and death by his fingertips.) The show’s premiere episode, titled “Frenemies,” goes inside old photo albums and new private jets to trace the longtime neck-and-neck relationship between Thomas and Jordan Spieth—with an eye for interpersonal detail that would make Elena Ferrante proud. (“I’ve known him for, what, like 16 years now,” Thomas told me about Spieth, a guy infamous for his nonstop course chatter, “and I’ve learned pretty well to tune him out when I really need to, or if I really want to.”)
And sometimes, as with a story line about the 28-year-old English golfer Matt Fitzpatrick, there’s some actual golf. James Gay-Rees, the British producer who, along with Paul Martin, is at the helm of Box to Box Films, said that across all of their productions, “We didn’t want the sport in our series to look like the broadcast version.” Instead, “The idea is that you basically find your characters, and you work out what their stories are.” In the end, “The sport isn’t the narrative itself,” he said. “It is the payoff to that narrative.”
Among the most compelling narratives in Full Swing is one that both does and doesn’t come with a payoff. I was admittedly a little surprised to see that Koepka was one of the players who agreed to participate in the series, because while he’s a guy who has never been afraid to speak his mind, he can also be a bit ornery in the face of media scrutiny. He once tweeted a photo of analyst Brandel Chamblee sporting a Photoshopped clown nose. He complained, in 2020, about players getting mic’d up: “If the announcers would just shut up and listen,” he said, “you could hear every word that we’re talking about.” But wouldn’t you be ornery, too, if you were constantly having to deal with brutal injuries (dislocated kneecap, various torn tendons) and a nemesis like Bryson DeChambeau?
At any rate, Koepka does participate—and how!
There are some incredible, lasting images from “Win or Go Home,” Koepka’s episode, which is the second in the season. Sporting bleached-blond hair and his requisite oversized Nike sweatshirt, he zones out on a furry pink and white swing inside his Jupiter home and thinks about his game as his then fiancée, Jena, chats about their wedding. Later, while wearing a Barstool Sports hoodie that says “TRIGGERED” on the front, he lounges on a sofa in front of a mostly empty trophy case. Once an unstoppable force who won four major tournaments in two years, he is now a man who is down bad—and knows it. As GQ’s Sam Schube reported, the Koepka episode was originally intended to kick off the series, but Netflix executives found it too dreary. Which is how you know it’s the good shit! It also provided some insight into why Koepka decided, in June of last year, to leave the PGA Tour and join LIV in what was reported to be a nine-figure deal.
It isn’t every day that a pro sports usurper arrives fully formed the way LIV did last season, and Full Swing was as caught by surprise as anyone when some of the players they were following—and some that they weren’t—jumped ship for the promise of fewer tournaments and more money. The LIV news, in theory, makes for a heck of a story line; I’d eagerly watch a whole episode alone on the exchanges between journalist Alan Shipnuck, LIV poo-bah Greg “The Shark” Norman, and Phil Mickelson. And who can resist Dustin Johnson putting his motivation in extremely Dustin Johnson terms? (“For me, it was playing less, making more money,” Johnson says in the show. “Pretty simple.”)
In the promo that Full Swing put out ahead of its premiere, PGA versus LIV is teased as being a must-watch battle. “You picked a hell of a year to follow the PGA Tour,” cracks Poulter, who is one of the players that decamped for the new tour. But in practice, the LIV drama doesn’t make for particularly explosive material. This is in part because the lynchpin, Mickelson, didn’t participate in the documentary. (Neither did LIV players like Sergio García, Bryson DeChambeau, or, very sadly, Patrick Reed.) But it’s also because Full Swing doesn’t seem interested in getting much closer than an arm’s length or in holding players to account for their choices. Even an episode in which a producer puts Poulter on the spot about whether he’s going to LIV doesn’t go on to ask many follow-up questions when Poulter ultimately does.
But maybe there just wasn’t much there. For all its sportswashy bluster, LIV’s inaugural season was a little bit … dull? The new league may have lured a few stars away, sure, but once it did, no one in the LIV world seemed certain about what to do to make them sparkle. (Their most recent attempt at marketing was corny as hell.) Conversely, whenever Full Swing gets busy showcasing the sheer normalcy of its athletes, everyone shines.
In one episode, Poulter and another golfer who wound up decamping to LIV, Pat Perez, discuss the social media presence of some of their peers. Fowler’s name comes up. “He never posts!” one of them laments, looking pained. “He doesn’t have to,” the other says. “He has 15 commercials.” They sound as though they’re a couple of insecure, everyday tweens, which is why eavesdropping on them is such a delight.
Stars streak across the sky; comets burn out. Much is revealed, and yet cosmic mysteries linger, which is to say that, no, Tiger Woods did not sit down and bare all in his living room for Full Swing. (Neither did Rafael Nadal for Break Point, though in both cases, their passing presences in the programs have the effect of elevating them to a sort of final boss status. It works!) And then there’s Jupiter, which keeps on spinning like a well-struck golf ball.
When Thomas first moved to Jupiter, one of his most welcoming neighbors was Fowler. “I didn’t know anybody,” Thomas said. “And for the top five, 10 player in the world at the time? To take a rookie player, a younger guy, under his wing and show him the ropes and, you know, play practice rounds with him? It was like, that’s just the kind of guy that he is.” Beyond mere fraternity, Thomas has a clear, and intriguing, reverence for the way Fowler perpetuated a name and likeness for himself before it became quite so customary to do so. “Rickie, I would say, has arguably grown his brand better than anybody in golf,” Thomas told The Ringer, adding that it’s something he’s been “envious of and jealous of” in the past. “It’s unbelievable. I mean, he’s one of the few people that I’ve ever seen that can have, you know, a 55-year-old man dressed as a traffic cone.”
Thomas may not be the type to ever cultivate such a distinctive lewk, but it’s clear that he is one of a number of professional golfers who are increasingly grasping the potentials of their influences, both within the current limits of golf and outside its ropes. “He really understood that for us to tell his story, he knew he had to give us the access and let us in,” Mumm said of Thomas.
In collaborating with producers, Thomas and his fellow players have helped create a TV show that really does have elements of a front-row seat at a golf tournament. There are rambling expanses of time during which all you can do is sit back and bask in the ambience. There are sudden, unforgettable moments in which human psyches crumble or solidify in real time. Reputations, and not just the good ones, are built; preconceived notions are upheld or destroyed.
“You know,” Mumm said, “JT was one of the first players to say yes. And as you see from the show, I mean, it paid off. He won a major in historic fashion, and we were there the whole time to see every piece of it.” Five years after winning his first major, Thomas lifted the Wanamaker again. Congratulations to him, and condolences to his mantlepiece.
