Chad Mumm can’t help but laugh.
Mumm is the Chief Creative Officer of Vox Studios and Executive Producer of Full Swing, the eight-episode documentary series that will hit Netflix on Feb. 15. It’s the same production squad – Box to Box – that’s behind the Formula 1 program Drive to Survive, which is now in its fifth season showcasing behind the scenes with some of the biggest drivers in the world and has sparked a generational shift of interest into the racing series.
While it’s too early to say if lightning will strike again with respect to golf and a growing audience, it won’t be for lack of great stories to tell.
At this point, even the casual sports fan is aware of the turbulent time in men’s professional golf through the last 12 months as the power struggle between the PGA Tour and the bottomless pockets of the Saudi-government backed LIV Golf hit a boiling point through the balance of 2022.
The cameras were rolling the whole time. Hence Mumm’s happy face these days.
“If we went to Netflix and said, ‘here’s what we think would happen (last) year’ they would have been like, ‘let’s make it more realistic,’” Mumm told Sportsnet. “You couldn’t have written it. You couldn’t have written this script.”
While the drama that unfolded in professional golf is one part of the storytelling thread in the series, viewers will get an inside look at the personality and inner circles of some of the biggest names in the sport like Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, reigning PGA Tour Player of the Year Scottie Scheffler, Tony Finau and LIV rebels Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson.
In a surprise twist, world No.1 Rory McIlroy ended up joining the show’s cast later in the year. McIlroy said he originally wanted to see how the first season worked out before joining, but a conversation with Mumm in the summertime on McIlroy’s perspective and voice as the power struggle unfolded, turned him on to joining.
“When he joined the show, he joined the show. And from that moment on he was all in,” Mumm said of McIlroy. “We got more access from him in that month or so than we got from anyone else almost. He only knows how to do things one way — which is all the way.”
Mumm’s been pitching the PGA Tour on a version of this behind-the-scenes documentary series since 2010 and he finally took a deal across the finish line in early 2019. By that year’s Masters tournament he was pitching player agents on the concept.
The show’s final output does not take place in chronological order, so there are a few jumps around the Tour’s schedule (from a Canadian-content perspective, Mumm admitted they didn’t spend as much time as they would have liked at the RBC Canadian Open — which took place the same week as the first LIV Tour event — but they did come up on the weekend to shoot some extra stuff with Finau). Instead, the program focuses on the emotions of the top players and the decisions they make, along with some everyman-type stories like that of Joel Dahmen.
Dahmen, Mumm said, will give general sports fans someone new to root for with how refreshing his “vulnerability, humour and openness” is. Finau’s story, meanwhile, will resonate with plenty of viewers — golfers and non-golfers alike — given its emotion and power.
If Mumm had to pick, however, he said Matt Fitzpatrick — who won the U.S. Open last year for his first major title and is ranked 10th in the world — was his MVP.
“He gave us incredible access and had such an incredible moment … the last shot on 18 (at the U.S. Open) is like, the shot of the year, and to see how much access we had to him and to build up to that moment you can’t not root for him. He was all of our favourites,” Mumm said.
All the winners at the biggest events of the year (including Fitzpatrick at the U.S. Open, Thomas at the PGA Championship, and McIlroy at the season-ending FedExCup) added to the drama and intrigue of the year-that-was, but between all that, there was that giant schism that broke pro golf apart in a way not seen in professional sport before.
“There’s been the threat of it — like the ‘Super League’ and the Premier League — but this actually happened,” Mumm said. “And in the middle of the season.”
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Mumm won a Daytime Emmy in 2020 and said he’s always been a fan of immersive doc-style filmmaking. He cited the Bourne Identity franchise and Michael Clayton as some of his Hollywood favourites. With Michael Clayton, the film took a world that most people don’t know — high finance and litigation — and somehow brought the lawyer-type jargon to a story for people to easily follow. His creative team has tried to teach the audience just enough about how golf works but more-so embed viewers into the world of the players.
“From the (musical) score to the use of long-lenses… it makes you feel like you’re hearing conversations that maybe you’re not supposed to hear just to suck you into that world,” Mumm said.
While the PGA Tour has been doing promotion of the series, it didn’t have any editorial say or sign-off on the content shown. Mumm admitted there were some “tense conversations” about what was going to be filmed and stories they were going to follow (the PGA Tour has suspended all those who joined LIV) but Mumm leaned into the players telling their stories and now it’s up to the viewers to form their own opinions.
“People were worried about so-and-so leaving (for LIV) and there were all these rumours,” Mumm said with a smile, “and we just kept rolling through the whole time and thinking, ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’”
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