PGA Tour Pros Looked Good But Little Else Did in The Netflix Cup

The streaming service entered the live sports space with affable competitors but clunky announcers and excessive branding.

As live debuts go, it wasn’t exactly the Beatles blasting off over America on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, although it was presented with the same transparent pretense. A tight cast of optically appealing young men assembled to charm a young, impressionable audience, furthering the cause of the parent product to a point where visual seduction turns into viewer interest. A good time had by all. Money in the bank, you might say. An illusion with commercial value.

Sixty years later, original ideas are hard to find, but what made Tuesday's inaugural Netflix Cup such a dud wasn’t a shortage of imagination, but an obvious lack of effort. The same company that has played a huge role in altering the dynamics of home entertainment launched a live broadcast that came off as sloppy and unprepared. Given the presence of four name-brand PGA Tour pros and four F1 drivers handsome enough to moonlight with the Chippendales dance troupe, the concept of exposing half that field as fish out of water sank this project from the outset.

A wheelbarrow race or water-balloon fight might have been more interesting. Anything to put all eight men on equal ground, engaging in competition that wouldn’t have left the guys behind the wheel looking like chumps.

30 perfect seconds with Carlos Sainz, Justin Thomas, Rickie Fowler, and Marshawn Lynch. #TheNetflixCup pic.twitter.com/Qdo8ESitBm

— Netflix (@netflix) November 15, 2023

“It’s not a good thing when everybody starts laughing immediately,” tour pro-turned commentator Joel Dahmen quipped after Carlos Sainz butchered his drive on the 4th tee. When Pierre Gasly shanked an iron from the fairway on the same hole moments later, the Netflix Cup’s flawed format reached farcical extremes. Bad golf isn’t a felony, but it’s not much fun to watch, either.

That amateur factor was accompanied by yet another ill-advised foursome—the coverage team hired by the streaming giant to provide this comedy with additional levity. Dahmen, who starred in an installment of Netflix’s Full Swing docuseries earlier this year, was by far the best of the quartet, but he ran out of things to say midway into the 2½-hour show and began recycling the same canned golfspeak that wasn’t of much use the first time around.

His best line was heard after Gasly’s ghastly encounter with the hosel. “That’s a car crash on a golf course,” Dahmen uttered. There were plenty of fender benders to come.

As for hostess Kay Adams, who did such a fine job in similar duties on Good Morning Football before leaving the NFL Network last year, her performance in this hit-and-guffaw reaffirmed a Mark Twain axiom: Better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. Adams’s lack of golf experience made her a risky choice to begin with; her inability to enlighten viewers with anything clever or informative made her dead weight.

Maybe that’s what Netflix was looking for. An unprecedented venture without an ounce of nutritional relevance.

With former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch and comedian Bert Kreischer providing a steady diet of profanities to the festivities, the role of on-course reporting stooped to needless bathroom humor for all the wrong reasons. If this maiden voyage was designed to include such a crock of shock, the template needs to be blown to smithereens. As an ex-girlfriend might have said way back when, you’re better than that, and Netflix certainly is.

Players raced down the first hole in carts / Courtesy Netflix

Unorganized and unsupervised. Disrespectful to a pair of sports that have allowed Netflix unparalleled access in its quest to compile compelling documentaries. Even the promotional spot for the 2024 edition of Full Swing featured a clip of Rickie Fowler cussing up a storm while detailing his competitive revival. L’il Rickie? Four-letter words? Is that how you sell a behind-the-scenes peek to the masses these days?

If anything rescued this program from the Land of Complete Shambles, it was the Tour pros themselves. For the most part, all four played well. They made the toughest of all games look so bleeping easy, clearly impressing Lynch, who must not have known that you don’t make $10 million annually to hack it around at the game’s premier level, much less an emerald patch of Las Vegas desert.

Justin Thomas and Fowler each holed 15-foot eagle putts to halve the par-5 2nd. Their partners, Sainz and Lando Norris, converted short birdie opportunities at the third, and while one would expect four of the world’s best golfers to do a vast majority of the heavy lifting, they provided this flailing enterprise with a level of excellence that made it somewhere close to half-watchable.

So the Tour got something out of this. As for the F1 dudes, it’s easy to see why they’re so dadgum popular. Their tempestuous relationships with the little white ball aside, they’re young and rich. Two reasons to smile a lot.

It was everything else that didn’t really work, and if Netflix is serious about making this thing credible, it will address those issues with more common sense and a lot less emphasis on using it as a branding tool. And if not? Let’s fill those balloons with a garden hose and start firing away.