'Full Swing': The new golf documentary times it well with the PGA Tour 2022-23

A still from the Netflix golf documentary 'Full Swing'.

One of the players featured in Netflix’s new documentary Full Swing comments that the filmmakers could not have picked a better season to follow professional golf (PGA Tour). The year 2022 was an inflection point in the world of golf, when the “game has never been more controversial”, which, therefore, places the series at the right place, at the right time.

Full Swing does for golf what Drive to Survive does for Formula One racing and Break Point did for tennis. The eight-episode series that dropped on February 15 follows some of the world’s best golfers around the Tour, giving an insight into their careers, personal lives and challenges while playing in an intensely competitive and mercurial sport. Made by the team behind Drive to Survive, the timing of Full Swing could not have been better.

Last year, a rival golf tour, The LIV Golf series, created friction in the well-laid out world of the PGA Tour, the world’s premier organisation for touring professionals. The LIV series, backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, offered lucrative deals to golf professionals to play in their league, much to the chagrin of the PGA Tour, which promptly banned and suspended the migrating golfers. Leading players like Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Cameron Smith, Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed, many of them in the middle or later stages of their careers, jumped ship, switching to the LIV Series at the cost of the PGA Tour’s legacy.

From an eight-tournament series in 2022, LIV will have 14 tournaments in 2023 worth $405 million. LIV is based on a three-day 54-hole stroke-play format with a prize money of $25 million for each leg of the series, more than the PGA Tour. Johnson, who won the inaugural LIV Golf championship last October, earned $18m in prize money besides the $125m he got for joining the tour.

“For me, it was playing less, making more money — pretty simple,” says the 38-year-old Johnson in Full Swing. “If someone offered anyone a job, doing the same thing they’re already doing, but less time at the office and they’re going to pay them more, I’m pretty sure you’re going to take it. And something’s wrong with you if you didn’t.”

That remains the central question throughout Full Swing, as the filmmakers (and sports writers in press conferences) constantly seek answers from golfers to whether they have been offered contracts for the Saudi-backed series and if they are likely to move. The dilemma for players is whether to risk their existing careers for greater riches, given also Saudi Arabia’s poor human-rights record, policies against same sex relationships and, in particular, their role in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. While the LIV subject lingers through the series, it does not dig deep into it.

Each episode, about 40 minutes long, focusses on one or two players. The camera follows the players everywhere, into dressing rooms, homes, in the car and even to a party. Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth feature in the episode “Frenemies”, friends turned rivals. Scottie Scheffler and Koepka are in “Win or Go Home”, the former cruising to the top of the game while the latter, world No. 1 in 2018, struggling to make simple putts.

“Golf is like… when you have it, you feel you will never lose it and when you don’t have it, it’s like you will never get it back,” says Koepka in the show.

Two of the most entertaining episodes feature two middle-of-the-road players, 47-year-old Ian Poulter in “Money or Legacy” and Joel Dahmen in the “Imposter Syndrome”.

Poulter, who calls himself a wannabe golfer and wears colourful trousers, speaks with a British sense of irony. He skirts around the LIV question while indicating why, at this stage of his career, it would make sense for him to join it. Dahmen, who likes taking his shirt off on the course — against PGA Tour rules — is a self-deprecating “goofball” who says that “a lot of times, I just play golf and if it works out, it works out kind of thing”.

Rory McIlroy, possibly the second most-influential golfer in the world currently after Tiger Woods, does not admit whether the LIV Series has benefitted golf in general when asked by a reporter. But McIlroy, one of LIV’s biggest critics, was part of a players’ meeting that included Woods, which came up with some proposed changes to the PGA Tour in the ongoing billion-dollar arms race.

For example, at the Phoenix Open this month, the prize money pool was $20 million, as opposed to $8.2 million last year. It’s one of 10 PGA Tour events that have bounties of at least $15 million, big pay-outs in an attempt to counter-balance LIV’s mighty offerings. Woods was reportedly offered $700 million-800 million to join the LIV Tour, which he has declined.

All of these developments makes the timing of Full Swing providential. “For us, we had a group of characters who were all on the PGA Tour when we started the show,” producer Paul Martin told BBC Sport. “By the time we finished the show, it was like a 50-50 split. The show that we thought we were making, we had to pivot and suddenly we’re making a show about a world where there was a civil war going on.”

Full Swing slacks a bit in pace at times, when some of the characters are not as interesting. But it’s not a show just for followers of golf — this is a story about sportspeople, the decisions they have to make for their careers and families, about the pressures of travel and competitions, the fickle nature of golf, of friendships and rivalries.

“For a lot of people, he (Woods) is golf,” says McIlroy in the final episode, “Everything Has Led to This”, in which the Irishman is the central character. “He is always the first (to congratulate). Always. Tiger. He’ll text you before the last putt drops. Always the first. He’s unreal.”

With his career on the decline, Woods can be seen participating in tournaments, welcomed like a rock star, treated like a god, a shadow of his former self. But the biggest intrigue in Full Swing is if and when Woods talks to camera.