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What would an Average Joe shoot at the U.S. Open? At Augusta National? Or at any course prepped to PGA Tour-level specifications? It’s a fun scenario to ponder yet nearly impossible to get an accurate read of how a mid-level recreational player would fare on the same course where Tour players tee it up.

Until this week.

On Wednesday, ahead of the first round of the Players Championship, the PGA Tour staged the second iteration of the Creator Classic, an eight-hole showdown featuring some of the game’s most-followed social media stars. The 10 participants included representatives from YouTube and podcast stalwarts Bob Does Sports, Barstool and No Laying Up, and encompassed a wide swath of abilities, from winner Grant Horvat’s reported +2 handicap to Barstool’s Trent Ryan, whose reported handicap is 17.

As the field’s Everyman participant, Ryan became a sort of stand-in for the rest of us, and his performance revealed plenty about what an “average” player could expect to shoot on a Stadium Course setup prepped for the pros.

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For starters, Ryan did not hit a single fairway. Relatable! His driving distance was endearingly average, maxing out at 214 yards on his second hole, No. 11, where he still found a giant bunker off the tee. He didn’t make any pars, either. The closest he came was his bogey on No. 12, his third hole, when he cozied a 30-foot par putt to gimme length.

Ryan missed left, he missed right, he botched shots from the rough and blew chips. He three-putted several times. By the time he approached the iconic par-3 17th hole, the island green, Ryan’s card looked like this: triple, double, bogey, quad, triple, triple, quintuple.

Then, he hit not one, not two, not three, but four straight shots into the water. But he didn’t stop. And, to the gallery’s great delight, his fifth shot found the green at last. He two-putted for an octuple-bogey 11.

“Usually, you aren’t very happy with an 11, but people were rooting me on, so it was fun,” Ryan told the Tour after his round.

Ryan’s final tally for eight holes: a 29-over 61 — 23 shots higher than the next closest Creators ahead of him on the leaderboard and 28 shots behind Horvat’s winning score. If we use Ryan’s first eight holes to extrapolate a potential 18-hole score, we get a number in the 130-140 range. That’s high — but TPC Sawgrass is unique in its difficulty. There’s trouble galore, and water on 17 of 18 holes — a brutal test for most good players, let alone an average one.

Ryan’s round was inspirational in some ways, though. It was proof that, yes, golf is hard. But good on Ryan for publicly trying and showing us just how good the best players really are.

His efforts on 17 were also a showcase for just how meaningful the game’s small triumphs can be. Finding the green after four straight water balls, Tin Cup-style? That’s a feeling like no other.

The Creators will get two more cracks at Tour setups this year, at Philadelphia Cricket Club and East Lake. Here’s hoping Ryan will be back in the lineup.

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The post What’s in Roger Steele’s bag at the 2025 Creator Classic? appeared first on Golf.

The post What’s in Roger Steele’s bag at the 2025 Creator Classic? appeared first on Golf.

The golf content creator space has exploded over the last several years and perhaps few creators are as recognizable to the average golf fan as Roger Steele.

Steele is one of ten creators playing in the second Creator Classic Wednesday afternoon at TPC Sawgrass, host of this week’s Players Championship. He also took part in the inaugural Creator Classic last year at East Lake before the Tour Championship.

But Steele has been prominent for the average golf fan before that, notably as an ambassador for Callaway Golf, and more recently as the in-arena emcee at the Sofi Center, home of the TGL.

Before Steele tees it up at the second Creator Classic, take a look at the Callaway golf club setup he’ll use to tackle TPC Sawgrass, one of the most dangerous courses on the PGA Tour.

Roger Steele’s WITB

What driver does Roger Steele play?

Callaway Eyle Triple Diamond 9.0˚, Project X HZRDUS Black 75TX (45.25″ EOG, D3)

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Callaway Elyte Triple Diamond Custom Driver

Tour-Proven Performance       The Elyte Triple Diamond model is designed for players who desire a smaller footprint, lower spin and launch, and a neutral to fade bias shape off the tee. Featuring a gloss carbon crown and a clean topline, this model has interchangeable front-back weights to allow players to choose between more stability (heavy weight back) or lower spin (heavy weight forward). The Future of Composites The Elyte Triple Diamond driver features an all-new Thermoforged Carbon crown. This aerospace grade carbon fiber enables fast head speeds while optimizing launch and spin.   Ai Advancements for Optimal Distance, Control, and Launch Our most advanced Ai face to date, the new Ai10x Face delivers 10x more control points than the Ai Smart Face™. Designed to produce exceptionally fast ball speeds, tight dispersion, and optimized launch across the face.

$549.99 $499.99 from Fairway Jockey

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Project X HZRDUS Gen 5 Black Wood Shaft

Just when you thought HZRDUS Black couldn’t get any better, it did. One of the most successful low launch/spin shaft models of the past decade continues to innovate with the addition of our new 4D Optimized Carbon weave. Strategically utilized in the midsection, the part of the golf shaft that undergoes the most stress, and angled for improved torsional resistance, HZRDUS Gen 5 Black powered by 4D Optimized Carbon is designed to enhance performance and maximize energy transfer like never before.

$225.00 from Fairway Jockey

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What 3-wood does Roger Steele play?

Callaway Elyte Triple Diamond 15˚, LA Golf A Series 80/5 (43″ EOG, D3)

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Callaway Elyte Triple Diamond Custom Fairway Wood

FEATURES & BENEFITS Penetrating Flight With Low Spin       The compact shape and deeper face of the Triple Diamond fairway wood allow players to shape shots with ease and control. A forward weight screw promotes a lower spin rate and a more piercing ball flight for added workability.       All New Tungsten Speed Wave for consistently fast ball speeds Featured on the 3-7 wood, the new Tungsten Speed Wave is a 35g weight that positions mass low and forward to promote fast ball speeds. This new, innovative design is engineered specifically to enhance misses low on the face. Ai 10x Face for Optimal Launch and Tight Downrange Dispersion     Our most advanced Ai face to date, the new Ai10x Face delivers 10x more control points than the Ai Smart Face. Designed with our C300 Face cup to produce exceptionally fast ball speeds, tight dispersion, and optimized launch across the face. 

$419.99 $349.99 from Fairway Jockey

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*Steele will substitute his UW, Driving Iron or 3-iron depending on the course, conditions and setup.

Utility Wood*: Callaway Apex UW 19˚, LA Golf A Series 85/5

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Driving Iron*: Callaway X Forged UT 19˚, KBS Tour Proto Hybrid 105X

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What irons does Roger Steele play?

Callaway Apex Ti Fusion (3)*, Callaway Apex CB (4-PW), KBS V10 130

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Callaway Apex Ti Fusion Custom Irons

Apex Ti Fusion Irons are expertly crafted like no other iron in golf. This player performance iron is precisely engineered with a titanium face and a forged hollow- body construction. We’ve leveraged our most advanced materials to provide performance enthusiasts with exceptional power, feel, and consistency. Superior Materials, Unmatched Performance Titanium is an advanced material that provides unmatched iron performance. Our industry-leading brazed titanium construction capitalizes on the power of a titanium face combined with the exceptional forged feel of steel. No other iron combines these performance materials into one iron like we have in Apex Ti Fusion. Revolutionary Speed Leveraging the superiority of titanium, we’ve provided a face with unbelievable ball speed characteristics. Titanium, the same material used in driver faces, is incredibly efficient and produces a larger sweet spot in an iron than steel. Unimaginable Feel Apex Ti Fusion utilizes a combination of advanced materials to achieve an unimaginable feel. The titanium face allows for more deflection and interaction with our patented urethane microspheres. This interaction coupled with a forged, steel body provides a unique feel that is typically only found in single-piece forged irons. Incredibly Consistent Ball Speed, Spin, and Dispersion The titanium Ai Smart Face yields incredibly consistent ball speed, spin, and dispersion. The result is the performance of a 2-piece iron with consistency like a muscleback. Premium DLC Finish Ti Fusion boasts a new, ultra-premium Diamond-Like Coating (DLC) finish. DLC is more durable than PVD and produces a unique and striking aesthetic.

$300.00 from Fairway Jockey

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Callaway Apex CB Custom Irons

The new Apex CB ’24 Irons are designed for the most discerning tour pros and elite ball-strikers. This tour-cavity back is designed with an all-new forged construction for a pure feel, precise shot-making, and workability. THE ULTIMATE TOUR IRON. The new Apex CB ’24 Irons are designed for the most discerning tour pros and elite ball-strikers. This tour-cavity back is designed with an all-new forged construction for a pure feel, precise shot-making, and workability. PURE FORGED PERFORMANCE The Apex CB Irons are forged in a 5-step process from 1025 carbon steel, creating the buttery-soft feel discerning players crave. The body and face are forged as one-piece while MIM weights placed strategically in the heel and toe create a perfectly balanced design for enhanced workability and control. PROGRESSIVE CG DESIGN FOR ADDED CONTROL A progressive CG throughout the set improves trajectory control. The long irons feature a lower CG that promotes towering shots that land soft into greens while the short irons utilize a higher CG for a lower trajectory to promote more spin for added control. DYNAMIC SOLE DESIGN FOR ENHANCED TURF INTERACTION The new Apex CB Irons feature a Dynamic Sole Design with a pre-worn leading edge to cut through the turf more efficiently and trailing edge relief to ensure a clean exit. The result is an iron sole that maintains speed through the turf and promotes consistent contact on all shots.

$215.00 from Fairway Jockey

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Which wedges does Roger Steele play?

Callaway Opus Chrome (50S, 56S, 60C), KBS Tour 130X

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Callaway Opus Custom Wedge

Welcome Opus – Callaway’s very best in wedge design, taking wedge play around the world to an entirely new level. By utilizing an all-new Spin Gen Face Technology™, three elements of spin come together to provide short game action and control like never before. We’ve spent hours poring over every detail of shape and design with the very best players in the world, so you can have a wedge that sits confidently behind the ball, poised to hit any shot your game may require. Spin Gen Face Technology™ for Tour Level Spin Spin Gen Face Technology provides spin and control in your wedges by combining 3 key elements on the face; an all-new tighter pitch which puts more grooves on the face, offset groove-in-groove for spin when opening the face, and a new aggressive face blast providing spin and bite on partial shots. These three elements work in conjunction to provide a crisp, tour level spin. Tour Certified Shaping  Opus wedges are the most Tour-tested, Tour-validated shapes in Callaway history. A higher toe peak, radius in the leading edge, and easier hosel transitions make Opus our best wedge shape ever. Grind Options to Fit Your Game Your technique travels with you, so finding the right grind for your swing is paramount in wedge play. With Opus, we have a complete lineup of sole shapes from narrow to wide, available in our popular S grind, forgiving W, versatile C, and Tour-favorite T grind. 

$179.99 $149.99 from Fairway Jockey

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Which putter does Roger Steele play?

Odyssey Ai-One 2-Ball CH w/ LA Golf P Series 130 OR Odyssey Ai-One S2S Jailbird

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Which golf balls does Robert Steele play?

Callaway Chrome Tour X

Callaway Chrome Tour X Golf Balls

Chrome Tour X is the new gold standard in Tour Balls. From core to cover, every detail in the new Chrome Tour X has been optimized for the best players seeking speed and the ultimate in control. HYPER FAST SOFT CORE New Hyper Fast Soft Core is designed to produce maximum ball speed for long distance. SEAMLESS TOUR AERO New Seamless Tour Aero delivers a consistent penetrating ball flight on every shot. HIGH-PERFORMANCE TOUR URETHANE SOFT COVER New High-Performance Tour Urethane Soft Cover consistently delivers maximum greenside control.  

$54.99 $44.99 from Fairway Jockey

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What grips does Roger Steele play?

Golf Pride MCC Align

Want to overhaul your bag for 2025? Find a club-fitting location near you at True Spec Golf.

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The post PGA Tour to launch 3 Creator Classics in 2025 appeared first on Golf.

The post PGA Tour to launch 3 Creator Classics in 2025 appeared first on Golf.

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.

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The post What we learned from the striking ‘Creator Classic’ viewership data appeared first on Golf.

The post What we learned from the striking ‘Creator Classic’ viewership data appeared first on Golf.

When the PGA Tour announced the creation of its first influencer golf tournament, the “Creator Classic,” they left one major question unanswered.

Why?

Not that it was ever a bad idea to create a made-for-the-internet event aimed at engaging younger golf fans. In fact, quite the opposite. Golf wonks have been calling for the Tour to invest in shifting its ancient viewership demographic for decades, and those calls have only grown in the years following the sport’s pandemic boom. The Tour’s recent TV ratings plunge only seemed to amplify calls to engage with a new viewing audience, especially as LIV built and touted a television business around younger fans.

In other words, the problem was that the Tour’s motives didn’t quite seem believable. After all, a central criticism of the Tour’s entertainment business for years is that it has too often focused on making money first, and thinking about the bigger picture second. (That’s the thinking that led the Tour into TV rights deals that net tremendous sums for players but regularly draw the ire of commercial-fatigued fans and stretched-thin networks.) An event like the Creator Classic brought tremendous audience growth potential, but served little to no outsized business benefit for the PGA Tour, which couldn’t sell nearly the same volume of advertising as for a typical pro golf event. Was the Tour willing to front the (admittedly low) production and talent costs purely as an engagement experiment?

Now, a month later, it seems we have an answer. On Friday morning, shortly before the Presidents Cup alternate shot matches began, the Tour released viewership data from the Classic detailing big gains with the young, streaming-first viewers it was attempting to court. According to the Tour, the event drove more than 2 million total views, landing as the No. 2 trending show on YouTube for its first 24 hours and delivering 118,000 concurrent viewers at the event’s peak. The event was also the Tour’s most-viewed, like, commented and shared YouTube video in 2024, and contributed to the largest day of subscriber growth on the channel in the account’s history.

The numbers give us a broader picture of the gains scooped by the nine-hole, 16-player event that courted some of the golf internet’s biggest stars and aired on the Wednesday before the Tour Championship. They also afford some insight into the event’s first, unanswered question: why the PGA Tour would bother hosting talent it does not own for an event it cannot really monetize?

The answer, at least according to the PGA Tour, is that the event provided a mutual handshake between the Tour’s digital properties and golf’s digital creators. Each side stood to gain from the legitimacy and audience offered by the other, which was good enough to coax both sides into an agreement.

While numbers won’t change much about the Tour’s TV business, they tell a good story for the Tour. YouTube subscribers and followers won’t be enough to stem the tide of steadily falling TV ratings, but they provide the Tour with the first glimpse of access into a newer, younger viewership base. And while the solution to the Tour’s woes won’t be quite as simple as 52 Creator Classics a year (for that, they’d need to convince their players to hand over some of the TV revenue pie), it’s encouraging to see the organization showing itself amenable to new ideas.

At worst, it’s a well-earned positive news cycle. At best, it might be our first glimpse of something more.

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The post What we learned from the striking ‘Creator Classic’ viewership data appeared first on Golf.