Can a YouTuber get the PGA Tour out of its own way?

There’s legitimate bristling to be had on the inclusion of Brad Dalke in this week’s Rocket Classic. Dalke is one helluva golfer, but he is firstly a YouTube Golfer. That term isn’t nearly as disparaging as it may have once been, but he was invited as a sponsor’s exemption for that reason far more than any other. It’s okay to say it out loud. 

It’s also particularly okay to acknowledge it after what went down Thursday afternoon. Dalke had a very bad day at Detroit Golf Club. 

The former U.S. Am runner-up hit a handful of bad shots, earned a few bad breaks, made just a single birdie and saw his name near the bottom of the leaderboard: 81, 11 over. Most importantly, though, he did it all in front of a special set of roving cameras that were tracking his every shot. 

There was no promotional announcement that Dalke’s entire first round would be broken down, shot by shot, by the man himself. It may not have even been clear to his playing partners, Marco Penge and Luke Clanton. All they needed to do was look at his waist and see a lavalier microphone pack affixed to his belt. Standard YouTube stuff. Non-standard PGA Tour stuff. 

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What Dalke was wearing is beside the point, though. The result of this camera work and that mic (which isn’t even that necessary) is that the Tour made room for experimentation here with one of the leading faces of an increasingly popular digital golf platform. 

It fits a trend the Tour has been dabbling in for months now. It’s absolutely dipping its toes into YouTube’s warm waters. Earlier this week, it was Dalke, Ryan Ruffels — another pro golfer slash YouTube Golfer — and Tour winner Jake Knapp playing a 9-hole match at Detroit Golf Club. That video was posted to The Lads YouTube channel (where Ruffels does most of his work) but collaborated with by the Tour. A day later, Dalke’s entire range session was mic’d up and posted to the Tour’s YT channel — in 4K no less — this time collaborating with Dalke’s personal channel. 

Rest assured, all these videos and collaborations are negotiated ahead of time, and often to an exhausting degree. (You, the fan at home, do not want to explore the rights and regulations for capturing content on-site at PGA Tour events.) But they are nevertheless proof of the pattern. The Tour wants to keep exploring the YouTube space. There’s just one more step it needs to take: using its stars, too!

YouTubers have been breaking down their rounds, shot by shot, for years now. It’s a very engaging form of content that moves quickly and, when done well, is deeply informative. (We all want to know more about how they do what they do!) It’s nothing for Dalke to deliver the content goods on a Thursday afternoon — he’s done it countless times before. So why is it too much to ask Rickie Fowler to do the same thing? 

I’m not going to look past the obvious: Dalke knew he’d be doing the post-round breakdown the minute he woke up Thursday morning, or even the instant he arrived on campus this week. But the simple agreement for about 20 minutes of their time after signing a scorecard is all we’re talking about. You get Dalke breaking down bad luck. You get him regretting not stepping off a shot when the wind switched. You get him exploring shots that felt good and ended up confusing. Same for shots that felt bad and worked out just fine. And yes, you get him cussing at himself when the bogey-train keeps chugging along. 

The return on investment, if that’s what we’d like to call it, shows up in the comments. People applauded his vulnerability. They clamored for more of “this kind of content.” They said “F the haters.” And if you scroll a bit further, there those haters were — always a smaller bunch shamelessly focused on being the louder bunch. 

The haters asked why the Tour was giving YouTube time to a non-Tour member. They called him a bum. They asked why he was in the field in the first place. To anyone but a YouTuber, this could feel like stumbling into Pandora’s box of bad vibes. But it should all be a sign to the Tour’s marketing team: in the middle of those poles should be the Tour’s truth. This content is good. More of it would be better. Do it with golfers who have earned their way into fields.

If we have learned anything lately, the Tour is focused more than ever on trying things its fans have called for. Look no further than the broadcaster-free broadcast that debuted Thursday as well. The golf league has the cameras, it has the operators, it has the microphones and the platform and clearly the producers to slave over an edit and get it published the next morning. All it needs now is to nudge its players in the right direction. 

As I write this, the endearing Tony Finau — who has struggled more this season than any part of his Tour career — is kicking off his second round. He’s won this event before. He’s grinding for every FedEx Cup point. His two-under opening round puts him squarely on the cutline. He will almost certainly shoot somewhere between 66 and 73, which means at some point on the back nine, he will be thinking all those difficult thoughts about another opportunity that got away. Or, rather, about how he hit the shots when he had to hit them. 

And because he’ll finish either a few shots better or a few shots worse than the cut, he will almost certainly not be asked to speak with the media. He’ll have all of Friday evening to wind down before returning for the third round or bouncing on to next week’s event in North Carolina. But before all that, if he agreed to break down his second round grinding to make a cut, the result would tell us something, in beat-by-beat detail, like we so rarely get:

What was that like out there?