NOW STREAMING ON NETFLIX; GOLF'S EXIT ENTIAL CRISIS

When it greenlit its new golf series, Netflix was hoping to build something like the next Drive to Survive-then a controversial new Saudi league took aim at the PGA Tour and the fight for the soul of the game commenced. It's a good thing cameras were rolling.

- SAM SCHUBE

IN LATE 2021, the television producers Paul Martin and Chad Mumm travelled to a tournament in the Bahamas to chat with the former world number one golfer Brooks Koepka. Martin, along with James Gay-Rees, runs the production company Box to Box Films, a major player in the suddenly bustling business of sports documentaries and the company behind the Netflix series Drive to Survive—the mega hit set in the world of Formula 1 racing that sparked the sport’s boom in the States. On their way to meet with Koepka, the producers held in their minds an ambitious new challenge: finding Formula 1–style excitement in the relaxed-fit world of professional golf.

For film-makers looking for drama, Koepka might have seemed like the right place to start, if also a rather challenging subject. After a furious stretch in which he racked up four majors in a little over two years, Koepka had ground to a brutal halt; injury had reduced him to being only intermittently competitive. He didn’t much enjoy talking about it.

Indeed, in the Bahamas, he was initially reluctant to wade into his frustrations. But then, as the conversation was winding down, Martin said, Koepka opened up. “He started to talk about this vulnerability— where he really was, and how he was waking up in the middle of the night,” Martin told me. The producers felt like they had glimpsed a side of Koepka that audiences had never seen. Here, they had something they could work with: an aspect of the steely Koepka that his day job forced him to keep hidden.