HOYLAKE, England — Golf’s youngest social media star stepped to the podium wearing a grin.
It was early afternoon at the Open Championship, and he had just vaulted himself into contention at the year’s final major. But that wasn’t why he was smiling.
He was smiling because he had just been asked a question he’s starting to hear a lot, both in media settings and between the ropes — a question that touched on the reason behind why the crowds that followed him at the Open seemed to double in size from a year, or even a few months, earlier.
What about the video?
As he pondered the question, Min Woo Lee looked out at the small group of reporters assembled — many of them several decades his senior — and appeared to stifle a laugh. He was in fourth at the Open Championship, and he was being asked about Instagram.
Finally, he found an answer.
“Hopefully I don’t get canceled anytime soon.”
There is nothing in professional golf like Min Woo Lee’s social media, which is either a slight or a genuine compliment, depending upon your age and music proclivities.
A scroll paints a portrait of the modern international athlete: course photos, interviews, highlight clips. But it doesn’t take long to discover those bland chunks of content have been seasoned with Lee’s specific flavor of 24-year-old dude, where photos are captioned with thinly veiled innuendos and videos are shot in the cinematic style of Call of Duty.
Lee’s account seems to revel in a sort of youthful exuberance befitting his near-shoulder-length hair and afinity for skin-tight mock necks. In recent months, his videos have featured cameos from the exclusive enclaves of Augusta National, Los Angeles Country Club and Royal Liverpool dubbed over the decidedly not country club-friendly songs No Role Modelz by J. Cole, Go Flex by Post Malone and, most recently, Loading by Central Cee.
The posts are all part of a larger effort Lee has made to rally his following behind a few taglines that are repeated often in his captions. The most popular of the mottos could be heard a handful of times from the crowd as Lee smoked his beloved 2-iron around Hoylake on Thursday and Friday.
“Let him COOK!”
His voice is nothing like what people generally associate with professional golf, and yet the strangest thing has happened: the people love it. In just the last year, Lee has transformed from a little-known Aussie twentysomething with a cartoonish swing into Woozy, an international golf hero with 200,000 followers and a rabidly loyal audience. It’s helped that Lee has played well in that time — nabbing his first career major top-5 at the U.S. Open and an appearance in final pairing on Sunday at the Players Championship — but what’s helped more than anything has been social media, where Lee may well be the first golf cult hero of the TikTok era.
Stranger yet, Lee says his newfound social media fame has helped to form a virtuous cycle of sorts, in which the good vibes in his videos seem to beget even more of them out on the course.
“Yeah, it’s been amazing,” he said. “The last six months have been amazing. Definitely made me play a bit better.”
There’s a lot to like from Lee’s social media offerings, but his videos have earned their own kind of cult following. The synthy, quick-cutting edits are totally foreign to the sport in both style and pace (to say nothing of the hip-hop tracks that typically score them), but that’s also part of the point. In a sport where stars hand the keys to their social media accounts to PR firms and managers, Min Woo is making a conscious effort to build an audience that is completely and authentically his own.
“A lot of other golfers are just golf, golf, golf — I like to have fun,” he said. “I’ve always been pretty active on social media, so it’s quite nice to play well and get a following, too.”
The content creation comes from a pair of fellow twentysomething shooter/editors from PGA Tour Productions who work with Min Woo during practice days to conceptualize and execute ideas. Once the editors are done capturing the video and weaving it together, they present a rough draft to Min Woo for review. There are few rules of what makes a good video, he says, but one overarching mandate: be cool.
“It’s all credit to them. I’m just making a caption and posting it,” he said. “If I don’t like it I tell them. I’m trying to make myself look as good as I can and them trying to help me out, as well. So far, so good. They haven’t thought I was too ugly or anything, so it’s all good.”
The crowds have followed him closely at the Open Championship, though he says they’re nowhere near as loud as the ones that have become commonplace back in the States. Come Saturday afternoon, though, that could change quickly. Min Woo will be among the final pairings on moving day at the Open Championship, where he could inch closer to his first major championship victory — and his first win in a full-field event.
Normally, these circumstances would be enough to overwhelm a player of Woo’s inexperience. (They were enough to overwhelm him at the Players Championship, where a wide-eyed final round 76 resulted in a T6 finish.) But after top 25 finishes in two of his first three major starts, he says he’s started to notice the opposite trend.
“Everywhere there’s a crowd, I’ve been playing pretty good,” he says. “I like the attention and I like to feed off the crowd.”
It would be a hell of a story if Min Woo is able to turn his weekend into a career-defining win. It could also be the final step in reaching full-fledged golf stardom. But as he considered that possibility from the podium on Friday afternoon at the Open, it seemed to give him pause.
“When I get too serious I don’t play well,” he said. “I’ve been playing good golf, so might as well keep smiling.”
The grin appeared once more as he was reunited with his family near the clubhouse. It stayed there for a long time as they chatted, basking in the glow of the dream that still could be.
The phones were away, but rest assured, Woozy was only getting started.