Netflix is changing the way fans watch sports

Watch this: I’m going to make you care about golf.

If you aren't already a golf fan, I know what you’re thinking. Golf is boring. It’s stuffy. It’s a bunch of bland dudes slapping a tiny, white ball around a big, wide-open space. Who cares?

You believe all that about golf — and, granted, much of it is true — because the only way you’ve seen golf is at a far distant remove. Outside the ropes, so to speak. But golf is a sport of sublime tension, of life-altering weekends and wrenching heartbreak, in which 30-year reputations can crumble in an instant and one tiny tap of that little, white ball can make a career … or end it.

Golf is the backdrop of “Full Swing,” the newest Netflix sports doc from the folks who brought you “Drive to Survive,” but it’s not the documentary’s subject. No, the subject is that narrow line between success and irrelevance, the tiny margin between greatness and immortality, the one stroke that makes the difference between victory and agony.

“All it takes is one week,” Justin Thomas says in the series’ debut episode, “and your life changes.”

The thrill of sports lies in the tension between what’s about to happen and what could happen. It’s why we watch, to see whether the field-goal kicker doinks one off the upright, whether the pitcher can run one more fastball past the waiting batter, whether the putt will roll true or lip out. The tension is why we don’t just want to know the final score; we need to know how the game arrived at that point, how the winner came through and the loser fell short.

We live in a golden age of behind-the-scenes documentaries now, with behind-the-scenes opportunities unlike any we’ve seen before. HBO perfected the art of the walkup documentary, first with “Hard Knocks,” following a given NFL team through training camp, and then with its “24/7” series, which traced the days of boxers — and, on occasion, hockey teams or NASCAR drivers — in the weeks, days and hours leading up to a major fight. It was a promotional gambit, of course, but it also gave viewers a rooting interest and a narrative hook beyond names and numbers.

In recent years, however, embedded sports documentaries have unclipped themselves entirely from the demands of the calendar. Amazon’s “All or Nothing” series has traced soccer, rugby, college football and NFL teams through a full season of highs and lows. And now comes “Full Swing,” the latest full-body, all-in dive into a niche sport.

Here’s where you’ll start caring about golf. Stream even the first episodes of “Full Swing,” and you’ll find yourself immediately immersed in a world of magnificent flyover shots — St. Andrews in Scotland and Augusta National in particular are breathtaking — and players battling their inner demons, their internal competitive streaks, their external pressures and each other. That’s the purest essence of sports. For all that we know about Tiger Woods, we never got this close a look at his life, his struggles and his triumphs.

With the exception of Rory McIlroy, the players spotlighted in “Full Swing” aren’t larger-than-life icons. Woods looms only in the background, the way Rafael Nadal does in "Break Point," the way Lewis Hamilton did in the early episodes of "Drive to Survive." But they’re more relatable that way, whether it’s Thomas sparring with his best friend, Jordan Spieth, Ian Poulter and Tony Finau dealing with being a father in very different ways, Collin Morikawa trying to keep up with his own early success or Brooks Koepka reckoning with a precipitous fall off the mountaintop … oh, and there’s the small matter of the LIV Golf-PGA Tour split, too.

“You picked a hell of a year to follow the PGA Tour,” Poulter says, grinning at the camera, and he’s right.

The eight-episode season, which debuts Wednesday, traces the arc of the 2022 golf season, from major winners to existential threats, both on and off the course. It’s pitched at the most casual fan possible — helpful asides explain concepts such as “par” and “the cut,” for example — but the access, both inside the walls of private clubs and inside the homes of private golfers, is stellar.

Unlike “Hard Knocks,” though, this isn’t a prelude to a season; it's a wrap-up of one. If you’re a fan, you'll be trading away a bit of spoilery knowledge for some insight into what led up to the moment. You might remember, for instance, that (spoiler) Justin Thomas won the PGA Championship last year, but you might not know exactly how that happened, and you definitely weren’t there to watch the heartbreak and the exultation on the faces of the players’ loved ones as it unfolded.

Granted, “Full Swing,” like its sister Netflix docs, isn’t a completely unfiltered look at how these sports play out. The editors have the ability to turn any player into a clueless dullard or savvy truth-teller just by selecting the right sound bite or camera angle. Some judicious mixing of offhand comments and implicating expressions, and presto: instant drama. (It’s why Max Verstappen has distanced himself from “Drive to Survive” despite its mammoth popularity.)

The presence of the cameras shapes the narrative. When Brooks Koepka and his then-fiance Jena Sims engage in “banter” in the second episode, it borders on reality TV-show parody. Although Spieth, Thomas, McIlroy and others have helped drag golf out of its dorks-in-ugly-pants era, they’re still more awkward on camera than on the course.

Still, you don’t tune in to a documentary such as this to see scripted displays of emotion; you want to see how these players react in the moment. “Full Swing” and its companions thus function as a parallel narrative to a given season, a way to enhance the sports viewing experience — or even replace it entirely.

If you fall in love with the sport and decide to jump in on the latest real-world season — and many have, as skyrocketing ratings for F1 attest — you can, and that brings the “characters” to life in a way no reality show could. You can watch couples hook up on “Love Island” or compete in grimy, baroque challenges on “Survivor,” but you can’t then follow what their lives are like shopping for groceries or getting married or whatever. But after watching “Full Swing,” you’ll be able to watch, say, Finau at the Masters — and you’ll know that he had to wrangle four kids all over the grounds at Augusta to get to that first tee.

Here’s what’s even more interesting about “Full Swing” and other “Drive to Survive”-era documentaries: You don’t have to care about the actual day-to-day procession of the sport at all anymore, before or after viewing. For instance, you don’t have to know a single thing about Koepka and his four major wins — captured during a brief period when he was, unquestionably, the best golfer on the planet — to understand how badly he’s trying to get back to the top and how far he has to go. A quick visit to Koepka’s trophy room shows the huge empty spaces he has left for future major wins … and the fact that he places so much emphasis on those absences, rather than the four trophies’ presence, speaks volumes about his state of mind. The dramatic irony between what he says and what he does is vintage reality TV.

As our attention spans splinter and our viewing options expand, it’s only fitting that we’d reach a point where you can follow a sport without ever watching a single match, tournament or game. Who’d have imagined that golf, the most staid and tradition-bound of sports, would be helping usher in an entirely new way of sports viewing?

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Contact Jay Busbee at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or on Twitter at @jaybusbee.