If one Creator Classic is good, then isn’t three better?
At least, that’s the PGA Tour’s thinking. On Wednesday morning, the Tour announced its influencer golf tournament series will expand to three events in 2025.
On the morning after the well-received launch of the PGA Tour’s new simulator golf partners, the TGL, the Tour double-dipped into the world of innovative new golf formats by announcing the expansion of the Classic, which aired for the first time to some critical success at the Tour Championship in August 2024. The Players Championship, Truist Championship and Tour Championship will each house Creator Classics featuring more than 20 popular golf influencers in 2025, giving the Tour two influencer-focused events in major cities in the American Southeast (Jacksonville and Atlanta) and one in the northeast (Philadelphia).
Per a release distributed by the Tour, the 2025 iterations of the Creator Classic will be broadcast live on YouTube, ESPN+ and Peacock — and produced in partnership with the content shop Pro Shop, where the Tour maintains a minority ownership stake and board seat.
It’s unclear exactly who will compete in the ’25 iterations of the Creator Classic, but it stands to reason that at least some of the participants will come from the PGA Tour’s new Creator Council, a pro bono board of golf content creators who are consulting the Tour on modernizing its media offerings. The press release mentions that each iteration will have its own “competition format, name and player field.”
Last August’s Creator Classic trial balloon was a success by most objective measures, delivering more than 2.5 million views for the Tour’s YouTube channel and attracting hundreds of thousands of live viewers for its Peacock broadcast. But on a more subjective level, questions remain about bridging the gap between the Tour’s traditional telecasts and the creators’ traditional methods of YouTube creation.
“It missed what made us special,” said Garrett Clark, one of the founders of Good Good Golf who starred in the first iteration of the event.
“The struggle is that blend [of traditional golf broadcast style and YouTube broadcast style],” said Max Putnam, a Good Good creative producer. “We talk about how do you bring more personality to it, but it’s something that we want to keep working on. That’s something I noticed during the Creator Classic as well, I want to see a Cart Cam, I want to hear them talk.”
On a broader level, Wednesday’s announcement marks the latest in a flurry of moves from the PGA Tour to modernize its product in the LIV era. To those ends, the growth opportunities are many and fairly obvious: enhancing the Tour’s TV broadcasts, boosting its YouTube presence, growing its social media presence, and finding opportunities to tap into the vast audience of younger fans who consume golf through the sport’s big creators.
The Tour has signaled the investments to these ends will continue, including with the launch of its brand new production facility in Ponte Vedra Beach at the start of the new year. The Creator Classic is one admittedly flashy investment to those ends.
At the Players Championship in March, we’ll get our first of three chances to see if the audience agrees.
