Who features on season two of Full Swing? How does the Ryder Cup fiasco get covered? What about PGA Tour vs LIV Golf? All you need to know ahead of the new series, available on Netflix from Wednesday; Sky customers can access Netflix via Sky Q, Sky Glass and Sky Stream
Wednesday 6 March 2024 06:02, UK
Trying to make overall sense of an increasingly chaotic, fractured professional golf scene is an unenviable task. The sport is more divided than ever, more money-obsessed than ever and seemingly more desperate than ever to find salvation in individual personalities.
The days of several dozen former country club kids meandering the USA to play golf for nice but unspectacular sums are long gone. The modern PGA Tour is the domain of mega-millionaire celebrities, and the continued pull of Saudi billions only makes things murkier.
Also, Joel Dahmen is struggling with his newfound fame and poor play. Oh, and, 2023 was a Ryder Cup year, too.
If the paragraph above seems like a non-sequitur, it is nevertheless a summary of season two of Netflix's golf docuseries, Full Swing. A lot happened in professional golf in 2023 - too much, ultimately, for producers Vox Media Studios and Box To Box Films to collate into a singular narrative arc.
Even more so than its 2022 debut, the new season unfolds like a handful of separate and only occasionally loosely-connected segments.
Keen observers of the world of golf last year will probably remember it as the year the battle between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf got serious and weird, with an out-of-the-blue statement of tentative cooperation in June that, as of this writing, remains unresolved.
They will also note it was the year the Ryder Cup went to Rome, where some tense moments dressed up the latest thorough drubbing of Team USA by Team Europe. These two stories bracket Full Swing's latest eight-episode slate.
The PGA Tour vs LIV Golf affair takes up the first two chapters, with Rory McIlroy at the centre, first as the voice of the PGA Tour and then as a disillusioned and sidelined observer to the chaos. The full final three episodes cover the 2023 Ryder Cup and its attendant build-up, fanfare and in-event controversy.
Both of these docs-within-the-doc have their intriguing and revealing moments, but the most interesting parts of the new season happen in the middle three episodes, when the show trains its focus more onto individual players.
We get to know emerging phenom Tom Kim, and add the travails of little brother Alex in contrast to 2022 US Open winner Matt Fitzpatrick's flourishing career.
One revelation, that the younger Fitzpatrick is dating top amateur golfer Rachel Kuehn, makes one wonder if Full Swing's third season will add female golfers to the mix. In my opinion, it definitely should.
Back for more time in front of the camera, Joel Dahmen's story reaches new emotional and existential depths. A heart-to-heart conversation between him and his caddie best friend Geno Bonnalie in the third episode provides easily the most heartfelt emotional moment in the show's run to date.
It lays bare the real human drama that comes with playing professional golf, while Dahmen's struggles are not unique to the niche world of elite golf - and that makes us want to root for him. It is little wonder that his appearance on the first Full Swing season won him so many fans. He will earn even more now.
The fact that he is so captivating a figure despite being one of the least accomplished golfers profiled in the show runs directly against the insistent top-down narrative that only the most famous golfers are worth getting to know.
The PGA Tour's marketing mavens may think fans want their stars to be untouchable, but it is vulnerability that bonds us to the golfers we follow.
McIlroy, though, both in interviews and candid footage, is engaging, witty and honest as well as driven: something close to a regular guy who just happens to be a generationally great golfer. His screen time is to the show's great benefit.
As in the first season, frustrating format decisions hold back the new Full Swing instalment from being better as a whole. Once again, the show eschews chronological storytelling, instead zigzagging between the majors and other events that end up defining the seasons of its chosen subjects.
For example, we arc back to action from the PGA Championship in each of the first five episodes. It is disorienting and repeatedly undermines the typically propulsive feeling of a normal PGA Tour season, especially a drama-filled one like 2023.
To this critic, introducing the season's dramatis personae in the opening episodes and then tracking their progress sequentially would have both taught casual fans about the escalating pressures of a year on tour, plus laid the foundation of a bingeworthy gradual raising of the stakes as things rush towards the Ryder Cup.
There would have been a sense that all of the profiled players' struggles and triumphs were building towards some grand conclusion, rather than occurring in several gilded silos.
Said Ryder Cup takes over the last three episodes of Full Swing Season 2, first following Zach Johnson, Justin Thomas and Keegan Bradley as Johnson mulls his six captain's picks.
The juxtaposition of a family-dinner scene from The Open Championship where Johnson jokes around with multiple eventual picks, while Bradley hangs out alone in his grey hotel room says a great deal about how Team USA was ultimately formulated.
Ultimately, the second season of Full Swing is a fun watch, full of impressively deep player and event access. Its formal and stylistic foibles remain, but taking them as part of cost of entry should not take too much away from what is an entertaining look back at the last year in pro golf.
All eight episodes are available on Netflix from Wednesday March 6. Sky customers can access Netflix via Sky Q, Sky Glass and Sky Stream. Stream the PGA Tour and more with a NOW Sports Month Membership - just £21 a month for 12 months. No contract, cancel anytime.
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