I was beyond excited to watch the Full Swing Netflix series about the PGA Tour and all four of the men’s golf Majors, and it mostly delivered. This article will contain some spoilers so stop reading if you wish to avoid them!
Of course I was excited to see the PGA Tour behind the scenes for myself, but I was more excited for my friends, family and non-golfers to watch it. I imagined that they’d love the golfers, think the sport is pretty cool and maybe even start following it like I did with F1.
I became obsessed with F1: Drive to Survive and now consider myself a ‘proper’ F1 fan, who watches the races, qualifying, listens to F1 podcasts, reads about F1 and follows F1 drivers, teams and accounts on social media. The series grew the sport to levels and new fanbases it previously couldn’t reach, and I’m hoping that Full Swing can do the same.
If it’s even half as successful as Drive to Survive, it will surely be a huge thing for the game.
I’ve watched all eight episodes of Full Swing (multiple times) and it has to be said that Vox Media and Box to Box studios have done an incredible job. They followed the PGA Tour and its players, and even a LIV Golf event, throughout the 2022 calendar year and it must have been extremely difficult to know which players to feature, which tournaments to feature and just how to organize all of their extensive footage.
Despite having seen all the F1 episodes, for some reason I was actually surprised by just how similar Full Swing and Drive to Survive are. In the same way that they focus on specific drivers and races in Drive to Survive, they focus on specific golfers and tournaments in Full Swing in an almost identical way.
Full Swing is much less controversial than I had hoped, though, with not too many revelations about the Saudi-backed start-up or any new details that we didn’t already know. “You chose a hell of a year to follow the PGA Tour,” Ian Poulter said in the trailer, which I thought teased some really juicy segments, but I was left slightly disappointed on that front.
(Image credit: Netflix)
It certainly gives Ian Poulter and Dustin Johnson in particular the forum to explain their decisions – spoiler alert, it’s money – but the real beauty of this show is the characters. Joel Dahmen, Tony Finau and Matt Fitzpatrick are the highlights for me, and once you start to get deep into their stories and follow them a bit you’ll forget about all the juicy LIV stuff. Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of LIV stuff, but hardcore…
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