'Full Swing' is back for another wrenching, exhilarating look at golf

There’s a moment in the new season of “Full Swing,” the golf-focused docuseries from Netflix, that’s as raw and wrenching as anything you’ll ever see in any sports documentary. Keegan Bradley, the 2012 PGA champion and PGA Tour fixture, has spent literal years trying to play himself onto the 2023 Ryder Cup. He’s won, and he’s politicked, and he’s put himself into position to get the call from captain Zach Johnson to join the team.

Bradley’s Ryder Cup hopes, a decade in the making, all come down to one phone call from Johnson, bearing either good news or bad news. The Netflix cameras are rolling on Bradley when that call comes. What happens next is some of the most real, unfiltered emotion you’ll ever see out of an athlete — or anyone, for that matter.

“To watch that scene play out, having spent a year with Keegan and knowing how much it meant to him … it’s so visceral and real, it’s the most real scene we’ve ever captured,” “Full Swing” executive producer Chad Mumm told Yahoo Sports. “There’s just something so human about the way he handled himself in that situation.”

There’s a balancing act every reality show must pull off: turning real, complex, flawed, contradictory human beings into easily identifiable characters with whom the audience can connect, sympathize or loathe. For the desperately seeking fame shows, this is easy enough: Paint someone with a big ol’ primary-colors brush, regardless of consequences.

But for something like “Full Swing,” where the “characters” might want to have an actual existence outside of, and after, the show, it’s a bit trickier. No player wants to be rendered as a reality-show butt of jokes, and even the most aggressive I-don’t-care-what-anybody-thinks LIV Golf types actually very much care what everybody thinks.

At this point, though, everybody has watched reality TV, and going from being a viewer to a character can be a little strange. “My wife and I basically only watch reality shows,” Bradley told Yahoo Sports. “We grew up watching ‘Jersey Shore.’ … She still watches every Bravo show known to man. So it’s definitely a little strange.”

“You definitely get used to being around people and used to having the cameras around you,” says Wyndham Clark, whose U.S. Open win is one of the season’s highlights. “It honestly helps you live the life you want to live. It almost is checks and balances, if you will. It makes you make sure you’re not one thing on camera, and one thing off camera.”

Bradley understands the purpose behind “Full Swing,” in large part because he was already on board with Netflix’s documentary aims. “When I watched ‘Drive to Survive,’ I didn’t know anything about F1, didn’t know one driver’s name,” Bradley says. “After I watched it, I got obsessed with the sport. I knew the drivers. I followed them on Instagram and social media. And I thought, ‘What an incredible opportunity for someone like me to show who I really am.’ I have such a hard time doing that at tournaments.”

Season 2 of “Full Swing” achieves its goal of showing all sides of golf by using the parallel tracks of 2023 — the existing schedule and the LIV-PGA Tour rivalry — as guardrails to tell the stories of half a dozen players. The formula is simple, straightforward and rock-solid: Identify a player who embodies a key moment in the season, frame his story in classic terms of conflict and opportunity, and see how the putts roll.

That’s how you get arcs like Joel Dahmen struggling to regain his form after becoming a breakout superstar last year as a result of “Full Swing” Season 1, Clark dealing with life-changing success without his mother by his side, and Tom Kim growing up in public after a phenomenal run of on-course success.

Plus, there’s the entire fabric of golf itself, the ongoing will-they-or-won’t-they battle-slash-courtship between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf. Cameras caught players in the moments after the surprise agreement between the two was announced in June, and the players were every bit as stunned and shocked as the rest of us — without much more of a sense of where the sport goes from here.

And then there’s Bradley, whose burning need to play on the Ryder Cup team dovetails precisely with the season’s overall sweep — the four majors and the PGA Tour season leading to the once-every-two-years seismic Ryder Cup. Few events in all of sports can compare with the Ryder’s spectacle, and “Full Swing” captures the full scope of the event in all its glory.

Even if you know exactly how the season unfolded, you haven’t seen it from this particular angle. The series focuses on characters rather than schedules, so the documentary revisits several significant tournaments multiple times to view them through different angles and different perspectives. Whether you’re a devoted golf fan or a newcomer to this maddening, exhilarating sport, you’ll find some new players here to cheer for in the 2024 season.

“Full Swing” hits Netflix on March 6, with all eight episodes dropping at once. It’s a fine way to relive one of golf’s most consequential seasons