The PGA Tour wants to make standalone sports documentaries great again after years of identikit docudramas. Chasing Sunday is a fantastic start to that campaign.

It’s been a little while since something like Chasing Sunday got made. 

The PGA Tour’s pet documentary project, released on YouTube last month in co-operation with NFL Films, is a standalone 58-minute sports film distilled from 180 hours of video and audio captured at The Players’ Championship. 

It mics up four golfers and their caddies across four days of play, producing a ‘no filter’ documentary that mostly consists of intimate player-caddie conversations, beautiful cinematography, and golf. 

Chasing Sunday is just as remarkable for what it lacks. It almost never uses music for dramatic effect. There are no staged confessionals with players, caddies or talking heads. Viewers are not invited to meet players’ families, go behind the scenes, or learn their deepest, darkest fears. 

Instead, viewers get to watch and listen to PGA Tour professionals play golf in the rawest possible fashion – there is no PR around when a player can’t escape a bunker. The subjects struggle with themselves, with their sport and with the elements. Several scenes are whisper quiet.

Above all, Chasing Sunday trusts that the viewer wants to watch it; that they are mature enough to pay attention to what they’re watching; and that they already know that golf is a beautiful thing. 

“There’s not a lot of camera movement and that presentation is intentional. We didn’t want cameras in the face of players, a lot of handheld shots, movement and things like that,” says Michael Riceman, SVP of content production at the PGA Tour. “That might lead to quicker cutting and that type of style. We wanted something much more graceful, shots from further away, with audio so rich that you almost feel like you’re eavesdropping.”

So far, 1.1 million people on YouTube have watched the film, with 726 people leaving uniformly positive comments about that philosophy. Most of them beg the PGA Tour to make more content just like it, with one saying this is exactly “what golf sickos want”.

“We wanted something much more graceful, shots from further away, with audio so rich that you almost feel like you’re eavesdropping”

For Riceman, it might feel something like vindication. He and his colleagues had wanted to make something very similar years ago, only for the pitch to be knocked back. 

Chris Wandell, SVP of Media at the Tour, said he and Riceman had gotten “a long way down the path” on pitching a Chasing Sunday-esque film to third parties before two things derailed their pitch: Covid and Formula 1: Drive to Survive.

In combination, those two things changed almost everything about sports documentaries in the space of a year. After Drive to Survive was released in 2019 and the pandemic gave the world enough time to watch it, the series’ runaway success changed why and how sports documentaries were made, but also who they were made for. 

Once aimed at committed sports fans, sports documentaries post-DTS had become a must-have marketing and engagement tool for sports and their athletes, rather than something to serve existing fans. As of 2021, a behind-the-scenes docudrama was deemed absolutely necessary for every sport on the planet, regardless of whether it suited the format and regardless of whether the product was at all interesting. 

Any sport not jumping on the fan acquisition bandwagon was afraid their lunch would be eaten by another, resulting in a bloated sports docudrama market.

Since Drive to Survive we’ve had Break Point (the tennis one), Tour de France: Unchained (the cycling one), Sprint (the athletics one), Quarterback (the NFL one) and Receiver (the other NFL one). We’ve also had Full Speed (a NASCAR one that nobody watched) and Six Nations: Full Contact (a rugby one that nobody watched). There was also MotoGP Unlimited on Amazon Prime, which I’m guessing you didn’t know existed.

With all of this going on, Wandell and Riceman had little option but to augment their 2018 pitch and develop something more in line with contemporary tastes. As it happens, Full Swing (the golf one) did the format better than most. 

Top professional golfers – especially those of a certain generation – can sometimes be a little bit full of themselves. Turning cameras on them during golf’s biggest ever argument over money was divine luck for Full Swing’s first-season ratings, albeit not for the PGA Tour more broadly.

But the urge to produce something like Chasing Sunday never went away, and Wandell says the arrival of Brian Rolapp as CEO – brought in from the NFL last year – reignited the spark.

“One of the first things Brian Rolapp said to us when he came in was: ‘You’ve gotta talk to the NFL Films guys. We should make a show just like Hard Knocks’,” Wandell said. “We said ‘that’s interesting… we tried something like this, but it’d be great to have a conversation’.”

Instead of hawking their ‘Hard Knocks of Golf’ idea around for a second time, the PGA Tour decided to punt on making it happen themselves. It was no doubt a costly decision – NFL Films are not cheap – but Wandell explains that they wanted to enter negotiations with broadcasters and streamers on the strongest possible footing.

“We were committed to producing a pilot. We had some conversations towards the end of last year and earlier this year about distribution for this show, and it takes a lot of budget coordination and getting the right companies aligned to go and pitch this show. We really didn’t want to wait.”

Wandell continued: “We wanted to get something out there to prove some things. We wanted to prove that players of note would wear microphones, and the audio would be compelling. We wanted to prove that we and our partner could turn this thing around in 48 hours, which we did. And then lastly, we just wanted to see the audience reaction to the format – we had no control over that, but we wanted to put it out there and see what happened.”

The PGA Tour has now proved all of that, but has also shown that sports documentaries may be taking a turn down a different avenue after seven long years of eight-episode binge-watches.

The Drive to Survive blueprint is still successful when done right, but viewers are starting to show fatigue. 

Netflix’s biannual ‘What We Watched’ data dump puts Full Swing third among contemporary sports docs in hours watched since 2023, behind F1’s Drive to Survive and marginally back from the NFL’s Quarterback series. It has been a massive success for the Tour, but the docuseries’ audience almost halved from Season 1 to Season 2, going from 53 million hours watched to 28.5 million for Season 2, dropping again to 22 million for Season 3.

It’s a similar story for other docuseries – even Drive to Survive is seeing significant season-on-season declines – and while the decline of the docudrama is gradual, it is starting to leaving space for other sports documentary formats to exist.

This is a welcome development for athletes, too, who are also tiring of the invasive nature of behind-the-scenes filming and the inventive storytelling that can sometimes happen in editing rooms. Four-time F1 world champion Max Verstappen is not the only athlete to excuse themselves from the circus.

Chasing Sunday’s creation was made easier by its quiet camerawork and clever microphone tech, hidden away in the collars of players’ polo shirts. Riceman said these elements, along with prestige addition of NFL Films, helped get buy-in from the four players followed for the film.

“We’re not going to spend time with you on an off week. We’re not going to go to your house,” Riceman explains. “It’s all about what’s happening Wednesday through Sunday when you’re at the course. I think that players welcome that, knowing that it’s going to feel different. A lot of players were really interested but wanted to see the proof of concept, and we have a lot of hands going up wanting to do more of this.”

The PGA Tour’s expensive creative risk now has to pay off. Wandell says he has been in discussions with distributors for “a couple of months” over turning Chasing Sunday into a series that can make some money in 2027, but knew that bucking the trend required some initial risk and investment on the Tour’s part.

“For a broadcaster or streamer, or whoever our distribution partner is, to invest millions of dollars in a show like this, we wanted a couple things: I think we wanted to prove to ourselves, for one, that we’re on the right track, that we could actually do this. We wanted something real that we could make a sizzle reel from, we wanted fan feedback and we hoped we’d have new media partners coming out of the woodwork to say ‘hey, this looks awesome, can we have a conversation?’”

“We felt that at worst case, we’d have this awesome 40- or 50-minute video that could showcase our biggest event in a way that had never been done before. There was no downside winding up with a great little piece of content.”

A great little piece of content, it is.