A Review of Full Swing Season 4 on Netflix
Are professional golfers actually this boring, or has Netflix sanitized everything?
Review Strategy
My strategy for reviewing Season 4 of Full Swing was simple: watch it once without taking notes, then watch again with the critical portion of my brain engaged — the part I try to drown out with Miller Lite on the course. The problem is, I couldn’t stay awake the first time through. I initially blamed a lingering cold and some reader-recommended Bardstown Bourbon, but the closer I got to the second viewing, the more I realized I was absolutely dreading it.
The season is structured around the 2025 Ryder Cup, with a cast that includes Chris Gotterup, Maverick McNealy, JJ Spaun, Ben Griffin, Cameron Young, Tommy Fleetwood, and Keegan Bradley — not exactly a murderer’s row, but enough storylines to work with.
Learnings
Here are the most interesting things I learned about each of them:
- Ben Griffin likes sprinkles on his ice cream
- Maverick McNealy flies a plane, but doesn’t trust himself to grill a steak.
- JJ Spaun used to skateboard, hiding his golf clothes in his backpack so the skaters wouldn’t ridicule him.
- Cameron Young is Teen Wolf.
- Chris Gotterup isn’t sure where his Scottish Open trophy is, and he maybe still lives at home.
- Tommy Fleetwood lives in Dubai and has a similarly aged stepson who seems more like a best friend.
That’s not a knock on any of them. It’s the show. That’s the level of access we’re getting.
The Backbone of the Season
The backbone of the season is Keegan Bradley’s Ryder Cup captaincy. Netflix gives him a long runway to explain the pressure, the crushing decisions, the weight of it all. And sure, it seems like a tough job, but it plays less like a documentary and more like a campaign ad.
If the goal was to make me feel empathy for the American team, it had the opposite effect. The 2025 Ryder Cup is still fresh enough that watching the selection process get the dramatic treatment felt insulting. The whole time I kept thinking: these guys are about to get the shit kicked out of them, and I’m supposed to feel for how hard it was just to make the team.
The off-course access is supposed to be the hook, but it all feels staged. Not scripted, exactly, but curated. Like everyone had a few weeks to decide who they wanted to be when the cameras showed up.
There’s a moment where Luke Donald’s daughter points out that it’s only the second time he’s cooked for the family all year, the first time being the day before. It’s a harmless moment, but it tells you everything you need to know about the show.
If they came to interview me, I’d be in a rented mansion handing out cash bonuses to my many servants, grilling ribeye for all to eat.
The bigger issue with Full Swing is that I’m not sure who this show is for. Is it for diehard golf fans, or is it meant to bring new viewers to the game? If it’s the latter, I have a hard time believing a non-golf fan is going to form an emotional connection with Ben Griffin just because he tearfully recollects the not-so-long-ago days when he couldn’t afford to go out to eat.
That just doesn’t seem relatable.
This isn’t a shot at Griffin. His story is fascinating. He walked away from the game, worked as a mortgage lender, landed corporate sponsorship, and made a Ryder Cup team. That’s a full episode right there. Instead, Netflix decided to boil that entire story down to Griffin saying that the CEO of Lord Abbett called him up and said, “Dude, you’re too good to be a loan officer.”
Talk about squandering an opportunity for some compelling television.
On the bright side, it gives me hope that someone from Netflix will call me saying, “Dude, you’re too good to be writing a newsletter that readers regularly report as spam. Come write Season 5.”
What would I do differently?
More journeymen.
When setting up Griffin’s story, Amanda Balionis mentions that a mediocre season can cost players $40-60k…
Final Take
That’s the show right there. Follow a handful of those guys. The ones barely hanging on. The ones wondering if it’s time to quit.
Pair the journeymen with the private-jet players. There’s real tension there. Real stakes. That version of the Tour — where one guy is fighting to keep his card while another is flying private to Dubai — is a hell of a lot more interesting than this sanitized version where everyone speaks in sponsor-approved soundbites.
That’s why Joel Dahmen worked so well in their earlier seasons. He seemed real. So why didn’t they go out and find more of him?
All that being said, Netflix’s cameras do a great job capturing the golf courses. Whereas network broadcasts tend to flatten everything, Netflix shows the contours.
But if the most compelling part of your character-driven sports documentary is the grass, you’ve probably missed something along the way.
