Booking a tee time at a popular Melbourne course on a Saturday morning has turned into a sport of its own. Courses that were quiet a decade ago are now busier mid-week than they used to be on weekends. Something shifted, and it didn’t happen slowly.
The forces behind it are well known to anyone who plays: a Netflix documentary that made golf emotional for the first time, a Saudi-backed tour bringing elite events to Australian soil, and a quiet social shift that replaced the Friday night pub with a Saturday morning round. Add a long-awaited sequel to a 30-year-old Adam Sandler film and you have a confluence that golf has never quite seen before.
What Full Swing actually did
Drive to Survive didn’t just document Formula 1. It manufactured fans. Millions of people who had never watched a race started caring about the sport because the series gave them people to follow, stories to invest in, and rivalries that felt personal.
Full Swing has done the same thing for golf.
The Netflix series follows touring pros through a PGA Tour season. The appeal is not the marquee names. It is the players most casual fans had never heard of: staying in Airbnbs, fighting to keep their tour card, with cameras rolling on the good and the bad.
Comedian and TV warm-up host Ben Lomas knows the feeling. He picked up clubs at twelve, fell away from the game as a teenager, played occasionally through his twenties and thirties, but never really came back. Then he watched Full Swing. “I forgot how much I love the game,” he said on the Make Me Good At Golf podcast. “Now I love it more than I think I did when I was twelve.”
The episode about Matt Fitzpatrick is a case study in why the series works. Fitzpatrick is not a household name for most casual sports fans. But watch the episode (the backstory with his brother Alex, the grind, the near-misses) and you start following him on social media. You care how he plays at the majors. That is what Full Swing does. It creates attachment where there was none.
The COVID factor compounded it. During lockdowns, golf was one of the few sports Australians could actually play outdoors. A lot of people discovered the game, or came back to it, during a period when most other options were closed. Many of them never stopped.
LIV Golf and the Adelaide factor
The debate over LIV Golf and its relationship with the PGA Tour is loud and it is ongoing. But whatever position you hold, LIV has delivered something concrete for Australian golf fans: world-class professional golf on Australian soil.
The LIV Adelaide event has brought top-ranked players to South Australia and created a pro-am experience that simply would not have existed otherwise. The Make Me Good At Golf hosts played the Adelaide pro-am. One of them ended up in a WhatsApp group with Bryson DeChambeau after the event. Being one degree of separation from players of that calibre is a different experience to watching them on a delayed telecast at 2am.
The criticism of LIV has always included the charge that it is too US-focused in its appeal. The Adelaide event counters that directly. Whether it becomes a fixture will matter a great deal for how the sport grows here over the next decade.
Golf is the new catch-up
Something quieter is happening alongside the professional game’s rise. Golf has replaced the pub as the default way people in their thirties and forties actually spend time with friends.
Ben Lomas put it plainly on the podcast. An old mate he had spoken to on the phone for years but rarely seen in person: this year alone they had already spent more time together than in a typical full year. All of it on the course. “Instead of going to a pub or a nightclub, it’s ‘let’s catch up for a round.’”
That is a four-hour commitment that is harder to cancel than a coffee. You walk, you talk, you give each other a hard time for a topped seven iron, and you finish somewhere between five and eight drinks lighter than a night out. For a generation that grew up in pubs and clubs and is firmly past all that, golf fills the gap in a way that not much else does.
Lomas has taken it further. Working a demanding TV schedule (warm-up for The Project, Ninja Warrior, Deal or No Deal), he cannot always get 18 holes in. So he bought an ebike with club storage, cleared it with the greens-keeper at his home course, and now rides out at 5:30am to play holes 5, 6, 7 and 8 as the sun comes up before heading to set. He plays three more holes on the way home. Twice a week. “It makes me so happy,” he said. That is not the behaviour of someone casually following a trend.
The cultural signals
When Australia’s comedy world starts organising its own golf tournaments, you are looking at something real.
The Comedians Cup at Yarraburn Golf Club in Melbourne has attracted a field that tells its own story about who is playing golf now. Hannah Gadsby, as it turns out, was a gun junior golfer. Kitty Flanagan loves the game. Ben Lomas, Kyle Donnelly, and a handful of international acts are all in the field. Ten years ago, a comedian golf day was a corporate novelty. Now there are enough players in the comedy community to fill a competitive tournament.
Happy Gilmore 2 was the latest cultural moment. The original Adam Sandler film is one of the rare pieces of golf pop culture that crossed over into mainstream audiences completely. The sequel arrived on Netflix in mid-2025, at exactly the moment the sport was already running hot, and it introduced another wave of casual fans who turn up at a Drummond Golf on a Sunday morning and ask where to start.
The handicap system has lowered the entry barrier too. Services like Future Golf have made getting an official handicap straightforward enough that lapsed players like Lomas are handing in scorecards within months of returning to the game. He has played three rounds (93, 96, 96) and come in at a 20.4. His target is single figures. That goal, specific and achievable, is part of what keeps people coming back.
Golf has had booms before. This one feels different because it is coming from multiple directions at once. Streaming documentaries, international tours with local ambitions, a social shift away from pubs, and a film franchise that turns casual fans into players. They are all pulling in the same direction.
Hear the full conversation on Make Me Good At Golf: Ben Lomas on his golfing journey, the Full Swing effect, LIV Adelaide, the ebike course commute, and the Comedians Cup lineup.
Make Me Good At Golf is part of the BC Network. Find more episodes on the Make Me Good At Golf show page.