Full Swing ( 2023) Netflix

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Star – Golf My Rating *** Genre – Documentary Run Time – 8x 50 Minutes. Certificate – PG13 Country – U.S.A = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Streaming services like Amazon love to do behind-the-scenes series on various sports and sports teams around the world as they push into sports. They are generally pretty tame PR exercises for the clubs and sports in question and a gentile watch but any behind the scenes stuff from the major A-Lists sports is so hard to find so any little glimpse of their lives becomes interesting, Jose Mourinho and Spurs the best of the football ones and ‘F1- Drive to Survive’ the most popular of the lot, season 5 dropping now. The latest sport to try this is golf and ‘Full Swing’, Netflix stretching their muscles here and ready to move into live sports one day. The series is a behind the scenes look at the 2022 USPGA men’s golf tour, spiced up with the arrival of the controversial LIV World Tour that same year, Greg Norman looking to poach the worlds best golfers from the said main American tour to join the Saudi funded Tour. And they have, previous World Number One Dustin Johnson joining that tour, which triggered some big names to follow him. The LIV tour has no history of course but has tons of cash and is proving more tempting than anyone expected, splitting the sport in half and some big fall outs. LIV is now expanding and the second world tour beginning this week. The controversy seemed to be around a country with bad poor human rights using established sports to launder their poor reputations. Unlike the USPGA and main golf tour events, LIV fields are much smaller with no cuts and everyone gets paid, some getting huge bucks just to sign up. The USPGA events have a cut after two rounds of the events and you go home unpaid if you don’t make the top 64. In the LIV tour the last place guy was getting paid very nicely, and you can understand why less successful players are leaving for it. Some lesser players will make more money this year than they have their whole USPGA careers. Any good? So the TV series is mostly about the players and events on the USPGA Tour, likable guys and painted as. American Brooks Koepka, one of the big names to leave the US tour, does come across as a bit of a d*ck but the rest pleasant enough people. The series clearly set out to show the tour and players in a good light and I doubt whether Netflix had the final edit, Rory Mcillroy coming out very favorably. They have lovely houses, pretty wives, adorable kids and a great life, Netflix clearly encouraging them to jump into private jets wherever possible to go to events to make it appear even more glam. I guess it followed far more players than featured in the show and deliberately included guys likely to jump ship to LIV, which they did during this series. Ian Poulter, the flamboyant Brit and Ryder Cup star, makes the point he’s 48, unlikely to win again in America, so why the hell wouldn’t he sign up for LIV? The real anxiety for the LIV guys is their legacies. Will they be allowed to play in the four majors around the world, what defines their legacy? The USPGA are a separate outfit to the 3 US Majors but a reciprocal arrangement of sorts, working together to block the LIV Tour. The Open Championship people in the UK also feel threatened by the new tour and reticent to let the LIV guys play. All that drama aside it’s disappointingly limited in the series and so we never really get to experience the tension, what I was really hoping to see here, why I am watching it. I have seen all 8 episodes and the lack of that aspect left me feeling rather flat about this easily forgettable show. There are some sweet and intimate moments here and some mildly angry ones but mostly that PR exercise for the sport. I you like golf you learn a bit more about the guys and we have footage of tournaments from the season, the notorious 16th hole at The Phoenix Open a real eye-opener . ===Trailer=== https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17050700/