I can’t help but wonder if 30 years from now, golf fans, critics and experts will all look back on 2025 as one of the most influential seasons in the game’s history.
Has golf ever been more popular than it is now?
I’ve been following the game since 1999 – hardly a full perspective given the game’s influence over the last century – but I can’t remember a moment when golf was so much a part of the cultural zeitgeist. It seems everybody’s talking about – and playing – golf.
Nearly 60 years removed from the original Summer of Love – a counterculture movement based in San Francisco in 1967 – I’m seeing so many signs that this is golf’s version. Today’s golf’s hippies fueling the counterculture movement are a younger generation of new players pushing back against golf’s stuffy past toward a more inclusive future. They’re playing music, drinking in carts, embracing technology and generally ignoring rules regarding scoring in favor of simply having a good time.
The National Golf Foundation is reporting that women and minorities are playing now more than ever, too, indicating that the game four decades from now won’t still just be old white dudes.
These new players are flooding public courses. It’s hard finding tee times on summer weekends from Thursday (which is the new Friday post-pandemic) through Sunday. So far in 2025, GolfNow, the world’s largest online tee time provider (which is also aligned with GolfPass), has broken monthly records for total rounds booked in March, May and June as well as individual key dates that include New Year’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Juneteenth and Independence Day. Golf Datatech’s numbers are a bit less optimistic, indicating rounds are down 0.6 from a record-breaking 2024, but it’s easy to blame that on brutally hot and stormy weather from Louisiana following a diagonal line all the way up to New York. When the weather permits, though, golf is closer to the top of people’s minds than ever.
And when golfers aren’t playing, they’re watching golf. CBS Sports reported last week that 2025 was its most-watched golf season since 2018, averaging 2.969 million viewers for golf broadcasts, up 17 percent from last year.
Whether you loved it or hated it, Happy Gilmore 2 set a Netflix record for an opening weekend debut, attracting 46.7 million views in its first three days, and Golf.com reported it could move into the top 10 Netflix movies of all time with continued success.
It seems streaming services can’t get enough of the game. Beyond Happy’s successful return, Owen Wilson’s enjoyable golf series, Stick, on Apple TV+ is being renewed for a second season and Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon will team up to create another new fictional golf comedy series on Netflix.
We’re also in the midst of a second Golden Age of golf course architecture, roughly a century after the first. In 50 years from now, could the big four design firms and its leading men – Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf, Gil Hanse, David McLay Kidd and Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw – be this generation’s Donald Ross, Alister MacKenzie, A.W. Tillinghast and Seth Raynor & C.B. Macdonald? It’s trending that way. Doak’s Old Petty in Scotland, DMK’s Scarecrow at Gamble Sands in central Washington, Bill Bergin’s The Keep at McLemore Resort in the Georgia mountains and Jay Blasi’s reimagined Poppy Ridge in northern California could hold their own with any annual crop of the best new public/resort courses of the past 25 years.
Don’t sleep on the impact of the short-course movement, either, with new additions like Cliffhangers at Missouri’s Big Cedar Lodge, which went viral earlier this summer.
Considering that the real meat of the PGA Tour season kicked off with Rory McIlroy’s compelling grand-slam-clinching Masters in April – arguably the most emotional major championship of all time – and continued with J.J. Spaun’s improbable walkoff bomb at the U.S. Open at Oakmont, along with Scottie Scheffler’s emergence as the game’s next dominant player post-Tiger at the PGA Championship and The Open, the 2025 major championship season was memorable in so many ways. For the moment, I’m willing to overlook the ongoing LIV Golf-PGA Tour divide because most golf fans only really miss Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Jon Rahm. The show Tommy Fleetwood, Justin Rose, Spaun and Scheffler put on at the FedEx Cup’s first playoff event at the FedEx St. Jude Classic in Memphis last weekend was compelling enough for me without those guys.
Between Full Swing on Netflix, social media and the launch of TGL in January, we’ve never had so many opportunities to get to know our sweet-swinging heroes so up close and personal. I feel like I know everything there is to know about these guys. All of this access brings the connection between fans and players tighter.
The question is, with potentially epic showdowns looming between Rory vs. Scottie in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, the Walker Cup at Cypress Point and the Americans vs. the Europeans in the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, could things get even better from here?
What are your impressions about the current state of the game? Will golf’s summer of love continue well into the future or is a reality check coming?
