Last week, I was enjoying a quick afternoon scroll through my generation’s favorite vice — short-form vertical video — when I saw something surprising.
A filmed clip at a recent PGA Tour Champions event with pro (and former Ryder Cup captain) Zach Johnson.
In the video, Johnson – the golfer who won a green jacket and more than $55 million in his career – is asked a question of premeditated inanity.
“Zach,” asks the host. “If you’re hungry and you go to the gas station, what’s the snack line to go to?”
If your brain is like dopamine addict, you can probably already imagine the interviewer. The “creator” responsible for this series of content is something of an Internet archetype: a normal-looking man in his mid-twenties holding a tiny microphone and hoping to catch celebrity rumors, repeatable and playable.
And if your brain is like dopamine, you probably already know how it works. If the video behaves, it will generate the physiological equivalent of a sugar high – a pinprick of dopamine that can be measured in likes, shares and comments. If the video is indeed success, the goal is something else entirely: not dopamine, but shock – ideally the thumb-stopping ‘OMG LMAO’ variety.
In this particular video, Johnson gives the creator a gift. When the question comes up, Johnson doesn’t politely say that he loves Snickers bars. He engages in an awkward and terse exchange in which he eventually declares that he won’t buy anything from the gas station.
The reply ended abruptly, and Johnson left for the rest of his day without further thought. But on Instagram and TikTok, it started all over again, endlessly circling the embarrassment of Johnson’s encounter like the contents of a Slurpee machine.
If I were to participate in my generation second-Favorite vice, I’ll make you a bet on this interaction. I bet Johnson is try be bored I can imagine that he is looking for the most effective way between hearing the question and disappearing. Unfortunately, like The Barbara Streisand trial on a little-known photo of a Malibu beach, Johnson’s efforts to strangle the problem only make it bigger.
The first comment is coming soon. And then the next one. And then the next one. Soon the video achieves its own kind of “virality”, and soon many golf aggregators they start again under a similarly archetypal caption, morally unassailable.
“Thoughts?”
Within hours, a few dozen of golf’s angriest fans destroyed Johnson’s entire career and personality.
As the judgments are made, a comment summarizes the interaction in clear terms.
“I don’t even think he’s human.”
***
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This, my friends, is how sausage is made on the Internet in 2026. It’s not pretty. And it is no for the faint of heart.
It is also a perfect synopsis of the cultural environment that gave way to the YouTube Golf explosion.
On YouTube, golf stars don’t share Johnson’s instinct for boredom. Quite the opposite. They’re attention-maxers, camera-moggers — the types of guys and girls who wouldn’t know how to pull off a viral moment if they tried. When they ask a question they don’t want to answer on camera, this group falls into a bit of extended comedy. If it doesn’t work, they try hard to be boring, since cancellation is the worst thing anyone can do on the Internet – worse than bad. And yes what you do it doesn’t work, they don’t hide from the camera. They sit in front of him, print the record, and publish a video titled: Because that controversy was totally BS
This group, the YouTubers, knows as much about algorithms and writing titles as it does about hitting a particularly clean 5 iron in a breeze at a high green. Sure, some of them traded golf success for affability and media savvy, but that didn’t exactly hurt the bottom line.
Again, quite the opposite. YouTube golf is still growing, although it has suffered a setback since then Good goodthe recent Callaway TV advertising saga. Stars are still stars. Sponsorships are still flowing. The view count is still high. And the money is… yes, still green.
The point here is not that golf has changed; that’s it entertainment it has changed. Our brain craves dopamine. Our screens deliver. And the Internet’s biggest stars are the people who deliver it best. No form of media is impervious to these changes, not even golf.
The surest sign of our changing media climate came Monday afternoon, when the granddaddy of all golf social media experiments, The Internet Invitational, returned for its second year.
In 2025, the Internet Invitational was a sensation – a multi-part, more than 12-hour odyssey trying to name the best golf Internet creator from a crowded field of candidates. The event, hosted by Barstool Sports in conjunction with Bob plays sportsIt was a golf competition wrapped in a reality TV show — a multi-arc series complete with a lovable hero, a hated villain, and no shortage of drama in between. In the end, the tournament paid well for a golf competition o a reality show, giving $1 million divided between the three members of the winning team.
In 2026, the Internet Invitational is orders of magnitude larger. The first episode is 5 hours and 4 minutes long – almost the same length The Odyssey … if you should watch Christopher Nolan’s epic marathon twice. The second edition of the Internet Invitational also has 64 players, up 16 from the 48-player iteration in 2025, and pays $4 million. And this does not include a special bonus prize: A $500,000 sponsorship in a hole that will pay a cool half a million to the first ace-haver during the competition.
But the real indicator of success for this year’s Internet Invitational exists in a much more meaningful place than a bank account. At the time of publication, and less than 12 hours after the first episode went livethe first chapter of the 2026 Internet Invitational has over 1.1 million views, over 34,000 likes and over 2,000 comments. It is, as the kids say, viral.
More than any metric of his brain chemistry, though, the Internet Invitational has something that most tournament golfers can only dream of: It has entertainers. The Internet Invitational field doesn’t need prodding to name their favorite gas station snack, nor do they need encouragement to provide a pithy sound for the camera. These are personalities by definition, and sometimes (as in Luke Kwon’s misfortune with his awakening in 2025) to their own detriment.
The result is one of the most endless watchable golf competition pieces ever created, although I much prefer your Sunday afternoon golf competition narrated by Jim Nantz and dotted with glorious humps floating through Pacific Life commercials. The competition doesn’t keep your heart racing like Sunday at the Masters (or, for that matter, Sunday at the 3M), and it certainly doesn’t have the same aspirational quality that makes watching Scottie Scheffler hit a 7 iron feel like someone is massaging your hippocampus. But he has something Scheffler doesn’t: relatability.
I know traditionalists are tired of hearing from yuppies like me about the impending — or maybe already here… or maybe long past — YouTube revolution. I know I believe that “golf” never needed the “YouTube” modifier before. I know you believe yours golf you will live long after ChatGPT learned to create a zillion artificial replicas of mine golf, because no form of artificial intelligence can ever accurately recreate the feeling of witnessing true athletic brilliance. (Hell, after some of the stuff I’ve seen on the internet, an AI army of doe-eyed twenty-somethings with broccoli haircuts and 5 handicaps sounds pretty good.) But I also know that arguments against new types of golf are a bit like arguments against new flavors of ice cream – you may not like it, but you don’t like it that way, but you don’t like it, but you don’t like it. disturb you!
In this case, especially, traditionalists have nothing to worry about. The Internet Invitational is no more imminent to pro golf than a passing asteroid, and no more likely to take pro golf money than LIV 2.0. The truth, as the CEO of the PGA Tour, Brian Rolapp, has said on several occasions, is that these two entities are fundamentally and ontologically different. The PGA Tour is where people go to see great success; YouTube golf is where you go to see great entertainment. Sometimes entertainers offer convincing success, and vice versa, but this is not a sign of the apocalypse. It is a sign that the world has changed.
Our changing world is why the Internet Invitational matters. Not because professional golf will become YouTube, or because professional golfers will become YouTubers (although Bryson DeChambeau certainly seems to give ole’ college). But because this result is inevitable.
As time progresses and the barrier to entry lowers, the number of people able to entertain us through sports will only increase. And even if the number of spots in professional sports remains completely unchanged, there will be days when people would rather watch YouTube.
If golf entertainment is on the rise, there are worse places for it to happen than at the Internet Invitational – a tournament where viewing is easy, production quality is immaculate, and commercial breaks don’t cost us golf shots. The tournament won’t change the course of anyone’s playing career, but it will change the course of someone’s life — whether by virtue of a huge check or a microwaved dose of Internet celebrity.
However, a few more characters in golf might not be a bad thing. Personality, after all, is the key skeleton of the legacy. Ali might not be more technical than Sugar Ray, but he is better known. In the end, a similar logic applies to today’s sports media ecosystem, even if we’re loathe to admit it.
At the Internet Invitational, the stars are not pros. But for a few days in a strange corner of the internet, they could be something even better: Human.
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