Golf fans were treated this week to a new season of Netflix’s “Full Swing.” Now, the creator of that show is on the verge of launching his own golf-media startup.
On Thursday morning, “Full Swing” executive producer Chad Mumm announced the creation of Pro Shop, a new golf media and commerce venture with former Puck CEO Joe Purzycki and PGA Tour general counsel David Miller. The company, which will officially commence operations on April 1, has raised some $19.25 million in a Series A round from a group of investors including the PGA Tour and PGA of America — with room for $1 million more in investments.
Mumm and Co. plan to position Pro Shop at the intersection of media, entertainment and commerce — though details on how the company plans to execute that vision remain relatively scant. The hope, Mumm said, is to create a new kind of digital media company that’s part editorial arm, part studio arms dealer and part commerce shop.
As part of the company’s first fundraising round, Pro Shop will assume control of the PGA Tour’s Skratch social media channel and its 13 employees, instantly giving the company access to the formerly Tour-owned entity’s close to 650,000 Instagram followers and more than 175,000 followers on X. More important, though, Pro Shop will retain Skratch’s rights to film at Tour-sanctioned events and its access to the Tour’s archival content library.
In the day-to-day, these privileges will provide Pro Shop with considerable access to players and between-the-ropes footage at Tour events, allowing the startup to circumvent the Tour’s litigious approach to policing video content captured by digital media brands. More broadly, these privileges could allow Pro Shop to become the premiere longform content creator and distributor for the PGA Tour, selling scripted and unscripted projects all over Hollywood.
The “entertainment” arm would see Pro Shop operate as the PGA Tour’s personal “arms dealer” — Hollywood lingo for a production company that creates content and sells it to big networks and streamers — a similar relationship to how NFL Films and Skydance work with the NFL. While the “media” arm could see Pro Shop distribute release content direct-to-consumer that doesn’t reach the threshold of distributing to a larger content partner. (Less is known about the company’s “commerce” arm, though in a series of posts on X on Thursday, Mumm described it as a “platform” for “scaled growth” for many of golf’s newer brands.)
Mumm will stay on as executive producer of “Full Swing” under the new partnership, with the popular Netflix docuseries serving as Pro Shop’s flagship offering to the golf entertainment space. The Tour will retain a seat on Pro Shop’s board as part of the new agreement. The company will have 15 or so employees to start, Mumm said, but is hoping to expand to 30 by the end of the first year with offices in New York, Los Angeles and the Tour’s new production facility in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.
“It just felt like there was a big white space to connect those two universes, the PGA Tour to this groundswell of golf participation,” Mumm told The Hollywood Reporter. “And that ultimately is where we see Pro Shop fitting in, is kind of bringing those two things together, sitting between the consumer resurgence in golf and the biggest stage of the professional game… and if we bring those two things together, we think we have a real chance to build a really kind of special kind of media company.”
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