Viral Golf Tournament: Insights into Golf Fandom

The past 12 months had a little of everything — a career Grand Slam, Ryder Cup chaos and so much more. With 2026 on the horizon, our writers look back at the most memorable moments from 2025 and explain why they mattered.

No. 15 — The zero-torque putter movement | No. 14 — ‘Happy Gilmore 2’ takes golf world by storm | No. 13 — Joaquin Niemann’s big 2025 (and crucial 2026) | No. 12 — J.J. Spaun slays Oakmont

Stories of 2025, No. 11: The Internet Invitational

There’s no way around it: If you’d like to understand the year in golf, you’re going to have to familiarize yourself with the questionable alarm clock habits of a failed professional golfer.

The journey from a year filled with possibility to an oversleeping controversy that defined golf’s current entanglement with the internet begins with Lu Ko Kitin, former PGA Tour pro and current YouTube golf star.

Kwon is one of many main characters in arguably the story of the year in golf: YouTube. And, in undoubtedly the story of the year on YouTube — the Internet Invitational — Kwon played an even more important role: the heel.

When Kwon lay down his head to rest the night before the start of the Internet Invitational, the Good Good Golf star had no way of knowing that he would spend the better part of his November facing the wrath of the comment sections. He had no way of knowing what awaited in corners of the internet near and far even after he’d been DQ’d from the Internet Invitational’s opening session for oversleeping. And, it is safe to say, if Kwon had known the response he’d face when the video was eventually released, he would not have followed up his morning snooze by generally disparaging his 20-handicap playing partner, popular Barstool Sports personality PFT Commenter.

Every good story needs a villain, and evidently, so does every good made-for-the-internet, half-reality-TV-show, half-influencer golf tournament. In failing to make his tee time for the opening session of the Internet Invitational, Kwon was the spark that lit the internet wildfire that became the Internet Invitational.

And without the smash-hit success of the Internet Invitational? Well, I’d argue we’d all be a little bit dumber about the tectonic shifts occurring in the golf world in 2025. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind.

The idea surfaced organically. Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy looked around the golf creatorsphere (influencerverse? internetdom?) and recognized a trend: Dozens of YouTube golf influencers had achieved individual success for their talents, but they had no place to congregate. Much like the pre-tour days of professional golf, internet golf was a collection of individuals, and those individuals might prove more collectively valuable than the sum of their parts.

Portnoy assembled a sponsor (Dunkin’), a host course (Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri), and a dream guest list (everyone from Bob Does Sports to Good Good). Before long, he’d found enough money to create a compelling offer: A weeklong mega-series bringing together the biggest influencers in the sport.

But receiving a “yes” from his guest list required a deft hand. For one thing, the very fabric of the golf influencerverse was built upon the idea of self-determination. The whole point of becoming a YouTube superstar was that it didn’t require the help of an established media brand like Barstool. For another, $1 million wasn’t chump change — but it also wasn’t exactly life-changing money to offer a group whose businesses regularly rake in similar sums on their own. In 2025, one Portnoy target (Good Good) drew a fundraising round 45 times as large as Portnoy’s winner’s prize.

Portnoy knew that money and followers weren’t enough to win over the YouTube Golf stars he wanted, so he promised something more: attention. By playing in the Internet Invitational, competitors could dominate the golf spotlight during a dead time in the calendar. They could benefit from their competitors’ fame, and their collective appearance could amount to something that felt substantive … even if the quality of golf did not.

What followed over the next six episodes and 16 hours of heavily edited content is no less than the roadmap to the modern golf internet — a glimpse into the ways that golf on TV has morphed from tournaments and trophies to entertainment and attention. It also is a glimpse into what happens when you bring four dozen of the biggest and most entertaining voices in pro golf together under one roof: Nobody in the sport is capable of looking away.

In the end, the mind-bending journey of 48 golf-content creators battling for a million bucks delivered 25.2 million views on YouTube, tens of millions of impressions across social media and earned the undivided attention of the greater golf world for more than a week. The final episode, which included the final on-camera appearance of Cody “Beef” Franke (who tragically died shortly after filming), is so gripping it doesn’t bear spoiling, even six weeks later.

But more than any individual success — and more than any final episode heartache or heartwarming — the Internet Invitational told us something about the ways golf changed in 2025. No longer are TV deals and tours the only avenues to must-watch golf competition. No longer are pro golfers the only stars capable of drawing the sport’s attention. And no longer is the world of content creation a side act to the big show. Above all, the Internet Invitational proved that the real strength of golf television is in its capacity to give us emotion without manufactured drama — and reminded us that golf with no drama whatsoever isn’t really golf at all.

As professional golf enters another offseason of upheaval, the major tours would be wise to remember the rules that brought YouTube’s astonishing success in 2025: the new playbook for maximizing audience, amplifying drama and believing sincerely that more is more.

And, if all that is too complicated, maybe pro golf can take a simpler lesson — one that Luke Kwon learned the hard way:

It’s good to have heroes, but it’s better to have heels.