Netflix’s third season of Full Swing landed in your algorithm on Tuesday, and let’s start with a clear conflict of interest: I’m in the show! So take everything that comes below with a grain of salt. And when the guy with the green shirt comes on screen, don’t worry — he’ll be gone in like, four seconds.
If you haven’t watched the show yet, this article is still for you; consider it an incomplete primer. Still, I’m referencing a bunch of specific details, so if you prefer to do your viewing spoiler-free, feel free to come back to this one later. There are a bunch of little reasons to watch this season of Full Swing — but here are 10 to get you started.
1. Ludvig Åberg making coffee
In some ways this is the heart of this show right? To see some human side to these golfing cyborgs? After all, we know what it’s like to watch Ludvig Aberg hit a golf ball. (It’s very cool and impressive.) We know what it’s like to watch him win a tournament. (Also very cool and impressive.) We know that look; he’s in his golf uniform, in his golf mindset, hitting shots under pressure, going through the ritualistic car wash after, celebrations and interviews, all within the confines of a TV broadcast.
But what’s it like when he’s trying to froth milk with a new coffee machine in his new North Florida residence?
2. Neal Shipley pondering a late-night order — at Augusta National
Aberg takes the role of leading man during the opening episode, but amateur Neal Shipley is an unexpected delight. He’ll make you laugh and he’ll make you feel and he’ll take you inside a round with Tiger Woods, but first he’ll take you inside a different corner of Augusta National than we’ve ever seen: the Crow’s Nest, where the amateurs stay tournament week (though often just for a night), and where we learn that dinner is served until 10 p.m. The fact that Shipley is coming from dinner doesn’t seem like a disqualifier as he mulls a second session.
3. Shane Lowry, big brother
Shane Lowry’s friendship with Rory McIlroy takes center stage in Episode 2 (alongside a likable Canadian duo) and while McIlroy is his typical insightful superstar self, it’s actually Lowry who commands the episode. An emotional high point lands when he’s asked whether he’s protective of McIlroy and a thoughtful twinkle enters his eye right away.
“No one’s ever asked me that,” he says. “Now that you say it, I probably would do.”
It’s impossible to say where Lowry’s mind goes in that moment. Whether he’s remembering leaping to the front of the pack to defend McIlroy during the Ryder Cup dust-up in Rome, whether it’s just knowing the superstar away from the spotlight, whether it’s to an older memory from Ireland growing up. But when Lowry speaks again, he references the “unnecessary criticism” McIlroy gets from the media, from other players, from fans. “Stuff like that can weigh heavily on people,” he says. It’s a nod to a partnership that runs far deeper than the Zurich Classic.
4. Bryson DeChambeau’s follow request
It’s true that before this interaction I did not follow Bryson DeChambeau on Instagram. What’s sort of sad is that after this interaction, I followed DeChambeau but he did not follow me back. Sigh.
Anyway, I’m including these screenshots not just for my own humiliation but also for self-promotion. Something cool happened: Because DeChambeau didn’t sit for a Netflix-specific interview (not clear to me if this is because of LIV’s media rights or his personal preference), they looked elsewhere for footage to tell his story, including behind-the-scenes footage from our episode of Warming Up, which you can find here:
5. An unexpected (non-)crime
Full Swing is a worthwhile watch for the simple reason that it makes you reflect on something that seemed impossible at the time. Even thinking back on it now, knowing it happened, it still seems impossible. Scottie Scheffler got arrested? On his way to a morning tee time?! The dominant World No. 1, notably polite and non-controversial? That guy? Scheffler’s arrest was the wildest moment of the 2024 golf season, and this is a chance to hear directly from Scheffler, to watch previously unseen footage of the arrest and to relive a ridiculously unlikely sequence of events.
6. Bryson vs. Rory
The best gameplay of the season came at the U.S. Open, where [I don’t think this counts as a spoiler] DeChambeau and McIlroy tangled all the way to the finish line. This is where the show’s decision-makers let the back-and-forth really breathe, and the dramatic conclusion is better for it. For big-time golf fans, this may be the peak of Season 3: getting new angles and perspectives on the year’s most dramatic stretch of golf. Most rewarding, if you’re the guy that won. Most devastating if you’re the other guy.
7. Gary Woodland’s trip to the doctor
The best episode of the season is No. 6, which showcases Gary Woodland‘s return to the PGA Tour amidst an ongoing battle against a brain tumor. It feels weird to put this in a list like this like it’s something to “look forward to” but this is a powerful story of a man and his family dealing with something far more real than a sporting result. And when Woodland goes in hoping for good news — woof. You’re right there alongside him.
8. Reality setting in for Justin Rose
Going through this exercise, I’m realizing that the moments of stillness, those intimate in-between moments of thought or reflection, the moments right after the action, that is the good stuff. Enter Justin Rose, who has never had the natural cool of some of his peers, but these days makes up for that with an earnest, dogged pursuit of another trophy. He makes an inspired run at the Open at Troon, from his qualifier all the way through a gritty final round. In the moments after, with another guy about to receive the trophy, you can see how bittersweet that run feels in real time.
9. Celebrating life in the face of tragedy
Part of the fun of team competitions — the Ryder and Presidents Cups — is the away-from-the-course stuff. The camaraderie and the pageantry. Players and their families dress up, the go to galas, they hang in team rooms and they bond in a way that most tournaments don’t allow. These are largely light-hearted affairs and chances to let their hair down. So it hits especially hard when, at a luncheon for team wives and girlfriends, two women have the most poignant exchange of the entire season as Michelle Money, wife of International Team captain Mike Weir, asks Maria Ochoa, wife of assistant captain Camilo Villegas, about the loss of her daughter, Mia.
The Presidents Cup falls the same week as what would have been Mia’s sixth birthday; the Villegas family lost their daughter in 2020, shortly before she would have turned 2. The show plays several videos from Mia’s time in the children’s hospital, which is more than enough to break your heart. And so there’s something special, something real and inspirational, about this moment between two moms, and of Maria doing her best to do her best.
10. Keegan Bradley’s satisfaction
I’ll let Keegan Bradley sum this one up himself, the full-circle moment that started with getting left off a losing Ryder Cup team in the fall of 2023 and came back around with, well, you either know or you should watch to find out. There’s a line that he drops at the end of the season that has already garnered headlines and teaser-trailer treatment. I’m a bigger fan of this one:
“You don’t always get to have that moment of, ‘This was all worth it.”
That’s why the show is worth a watch: so you can see the work that goes into those moments, hoping for that payoff. They’re either worth it or they’re fuel for the next moment that could be.
