Netflix Is Combining Its Two Sports Loves, and the PGA Tour Will Happily Draft Off It

‘The Netflix Cup’ won’t reinvent prime-time golf, but John Hawkins says that’s O.K. in the never-ending drive for promotion.

To many of us who have enough trouble driving our own cars, the sport of auto racing is a nonstarter—kind of like golf is to gearheads. Any game without a ball should be approached with caution, but it’s the dangerous, adrenalized task of competing at 180 mph that seems to draw the attention of young adults, which is why an F1 Grand Prix has become a much cooler athletic endeavor than one with a 15-minute wait on the seventh tee.

It’s all about marketing appeal. Reaching an untapped audience, broadening the boundaries of interest by presenting a product as both scary and sexy. And speedy. Races are fast. Golf is slow. Netflix has created a behind-the-scenes series on each in recent years, aiming those docudramas at people who wouldn’t care otherwise and, with positive media-research feedback as its ally, will attempt to combine the two in its first live event next month in Las Vegas.

Oil and water. Chocolate and peanut butter. Drivers and drivers. It doesn’t have to make sense. Just a little noise.

Justin Thomas (left) and Rickie Fowler are two PGA Tour stars you'd expect to see in a made-for-Netflix exhibition / Imago

Four of the PGA Tour’s most recognizable players will pair up with F1 motorists for eight holes of best-ball match play. The victors in each foursome will advance to the ninth for what is basically a sudden-death playoff, although we won’t need extra holes to determine the real winner here. After years of indifference while other media outlets hitched a ride on golf’s golden bandwagon, Netflix has emerged as a breakout star in 2023, its inaugural Full Swing production humanizing household names and lesser-knowns alike while intriguing viewers who aren’t sure which end of the club to hold.

For the millions of words used over the years to impart the importance of growing the game, we’ve learned that it applies most often to the premise of commercial gain. Netflix is no different, but in this case, a golf outsider has used its massive reach to make something happen, something very real. The Tour can promote its various resources ad nauseam, jamming those FedEx Cup ads down our throats and running the Players Championship spots six months before the tournament is held.

They don’t resonate. They don’t mean anything. Not to everyday golf fans.

Netflix has impact because it’s new to the cause and powerful to the public. Golf occupies just a tiny part of its programming menu, but its willingness to hop into what’s left of the Silly Season and stage an event of complete insignificance—without an original bell or whistle in the format—indicates how eager the streaming service is to play ball. This is just a photo op with eight handsome young men, all of them millionaires many times over, and that’s exactly what gives this hit-and-giggle some juice.

The Tour needs Netflix a lot more than Netflix needs the Tour. This is like when some wealthy stud bachelor flies back to his hometown, stops at a McDonald’s on his way to mom’s house and falls in love with the girl working the drive-thru window. Given the tumult so apparent in Camp Ponte Vedra since LIV Golf took flight 16 months ago, it’s easy to see how the Tour’s new friend could play a key role in the game’s long-term future. Not as a financial partner or carrier of tournaments on a regular basis, but as a valued asset whose credibility can generate accessibility fans can only dream about now.

My 23-year-old daughter knows more about F1 than anyone in her neighborhood, only because she has watched the Drive to Survive series on Netflix since its 2019 inception. No streaming business is going to find fiscal health in making a bunch of shows that target a narrow, sophisticated audience. Golf already wears the proverbial niche tag when it comes to America’s viewing habits, so Full Swing was built for the masses—a body of work that spent more time explaining the basics than blowing the lid off some hot feud or threat of a rival league.

With that in mind, the four Tour guys participating in Las Vegas are exactly whom you’d expect to see at such an affair. There’s Rickie Fowler, who couldn’t shake off his immense popularity even during the throes of a three-year slump. There’s Max Homa, the good-natured gent who wouldn’t get angry if you kicked him in the groin and stole his wallet, and Justin Thomas, whose cagey sense of humor actually made last December’s version of The Match worth watching.

Collin Morikawa doesn’t have the chops or comedic hops to remind anyone of Boo Weekley, but he’s young, owns two major titles and won’t hurt anyone’s feelings. As for the F1 dudes, they’re all from Europe. You’ll have to ask my daughter about them.

And so The Netflix Cup, as it has been christened, is nothing more than a promotional vehicle to fuel its twin docudramas, a chance for the company to blow its bugle and help publicize the Grand Prix race in Sin City that weekend. If it looks like The Match and smells like The Match, that doesn’t mean it stinks, although making your live debut at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday evening in November is like performing card tricks at a convalescent home. Even if your audience is impressed, you’d have absolutely no way of knowing.

Then again, what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Especially when it comes to auto racing.