While producing Netflix’s golf documentary “Full Swing,” Pro Shop Studios co-founder Mark Olsen discovered that millions of golf fans were consuming hours of creator content on YouTube; and this large, untapped golf audience existed beyond the PGA Tour’s traditional broadcasts.

These audiences weren’t just seeking entertainment—they were craving genuine connection with personalities who felt accessible and real.

Hence, Mark and Pro Shop teamed up with the PGA Tour to launch the “Creator Classic Series” – a tournament that puts golf’s biggest YouTube personalities in legitimate PGA Tour-level competitions. What began as “very much an experiment” at East Lake Golf Club during the Tour Championship has grown into a three-event series, featuring stops at TPC Sawgrass for The Players Championship and Philadelphia Cricket Club, before returning to East Lake for the finale.

Each event features different competitive formats designed to test creators in various ways. The original East Lake event employed traditional stroke play, whereas the Philadelphia Cricket Club introduced team competitions with alternate shot formats that paired golf creators with mainstream YouTube personalities, such as Marques Brownlee and Josh Richards. The upcoming East Lake finale returns to stroke play in what Mark describes as “probably the most serious one” with “tough setups and high-level golf.”

“What the Tour has to give is playing on championship courses during the actual championship rounds, the actual thing, and set up like the pros have, with a broadcast that’s equal to what they’re going to deploy on a Saturday or Sunday during the tournament,” Mark explains. “That’s what’s unique about them that no one else really has.”

Rather than simply seeking the biggest subscriber counts, Pro Shop applies multiple criteria that balance digital influence with competitive integrity. “Number one, we’re looking for golf creators and not necessarily just celebrities,” Mark notes. “The golf creators, that’s what they’re doing on their YouTube channel. That’s why their audience comes to watch them. They’ll watch hours of broadcast content of them playing.” The company also prioritizes creators who demonstrate genuine excitement about the competitive opportunity and can deliver what Mark calls “high-level golf.”

The Psychological Pressure Test

The most revealing aspect of Mark’s experiment occurs when creators confront the reality of championship-level competition. Unlike their carefully curated YouTube content, Creator Classic participants cannot edit out bad shots, awkward moments, or genuine nerves. The cameras roll continuously, crowds watch live, and there are no second takes.

“There is no redoing it,” Mark emphasizes. “When you play the course set up like a PGA Tour event from the back tees, they’re hard. It’s very much like, ‘Wow, sort of respect for the guys that come out here and play this and do the things they see them do.’”

This pressure reveals something telling about creator psychology that extends far beyond golf. Despite having millions of followers and considerable digital influence, these creators still experience genuine performance anxiety when faced with legitimate competitive stakes. The revelation suggests that even the most confident content creators recognize the difference between digital authority and real-world competence under pressure.

Mark describes this phenomenon as creating a “space camp” experience for creators. “We talked about it almost as if it were a space camp. This is an opportunity for these creators to experience what it feels like to be a Tour player for a day or multiple days and kind of live in that moment,” he explains.

The feedback from participants supports this interpretation of the psychological impact. “We’ve had really good feedback,” Mark reports. “People are genuinely appreciative that there were no punches pulled here. You really brought us out. You gave us this sort of access and experience.” 

During events, he observes that creators embrace the competitive environment: “People are sort of like, ‘that was great fun.’ They’re doing selfies. They’re working the crowd.”

Audience Response and Relationship Dynamics

As Mark shares, the Creator Classic experiment also revealed that traditional professional golfers, despite their skill and fame, struggle to develop the same intimate audience connections that creators naturally cultivate.

“Even if you’re the biggest fan of Justin Thomas or Scottie Scheffler, you’re probably not really getting to feel that parasocial relationship with them where you know what they’re thinking,” Mark observes. “But in the creator world, there’s somebody for everyone.”

The experiment suggests audiences respond positively to creator honesty under stress rather than losing faith when their chosen personalities show nerves or struggle with performance.

Fan engagement at live events has been consistently strong, with tournament attendees specifically coming out to watch creators compete. “People really come out to see these folks play and watch them in this scenario,” Mark notes. “The fans really like it, and the tournament organizers like it.”

Rather than focusing primarily on competitive outcomes, creator-focused audiences want to experience the competition through the perspective of their chosen personality. Mark explains this dynamic: “It didn’t matter to his audience whether a participant wasn’t winning. It mattered that they got to watch him react.”

Pro Shop measures success through metrics that extend beyond traditional viewership numbers, focusing on relationship building between creators and traditional sports institutions. “One of the key KPIs is this sort of relationship between the Tour and the creators,” Mark explains. “We hope that this feels like an addition to the world that everybody’s living in and not taking anything away.”

Broadcasting Changes Through Creator Focus

Traditional golf broadcasts focus on shot outcomes and leaderboard progression, immediately cutting from player reaction to ball location to maintain pace and competitive focus. Creator-focused audiences demand something entirely different.

“We have to bet on them to hang on. If whoever tees off, we want to see their reaction to their shot, which is anathema to a PGA broadcast,” Mark explains. “I want to just hang with them while they watch what happened and how they react to it, what they say to the person next to them.”

This represents more than a stylistic preference. The experiment suggests that creator economy audiences aren’t primarily interested in who wins; they’re interested in experiencing the emotional journey of competition through their chosen creator’s perspective.

The production requires intricate collaboration between Pro Shop Studios and the PGA Tour’s broadcast teams. “We essentially executive produce the broadcast. We’re sort of the storytelling conscience of the thing,” Mark explains. “We’re really giving the high-level direction of how we want to approach this, here’s how we want to tell the story, this is how we want to follow people.”

Impact and Scalability

As other sports organizations observe the Creator Classic experiment, questions emerge about scalability across different competitive contexts and creator categories. Mark anticipates natural market consolidation as similar experiments multiply across sports entertainment.

“In five years, I think we’re in a moment right now where there’s a multiplying of somewhat similar events,” he observes. “We’re still in this moment where it’s a very distributed ecosystem. There are goods, and Barstool and LIV are throwing these events now.”

The company is already expanding the experimental model beyond the current format. Pro Shop has plans for a Skins Game revival scheduled for Thanksgiving weekend and is exploring opportunities in college golf, which Mark identifies as having “amazing players” and “more and more creators and personalities” but lacking “amazing TV” coverage.

For traditional sports organizations considering similar creator partnerships, Mark offers direct advice about the changing media environment: “You’re going to have to get with it because this is the way that people are communicating with fan bases. These are the people [audiences] want to watch.”

For the broader creator economy, the Creator Classic experiment suggests that the most enduring creator enterprises may be those that can deliver genuine experiences of challenge and growth, rather than just entertaining content that can be replicated or lose audience attention over time.

“There’s a reason why these folks don’t have millions and millions of followers by mistake,” Mark concludes. “There’s what they do, and it’s additive to people’s experience of the sport itself.”

All images are credited to PGA TOUR.