Live disc golf is quickly taking market share — and the Pro Tour holds the cards.

September 22, 2022 by Matt Thompson in Opinion with comments

The 2022 edition of the World Championships was ripe for disappointment. Expectations were too high. The courses were too dull. The follow up to last year’s masterpiece was surely destined for a letdown, with DGN’s decision to release the Holy Shot documentary alongside this year’s event just a salve for the incoming wound.

Largely, that is not what happened. FPO crowned only its second European champion in history in Kristin Tattar, and MPO went to a playoff for a second straight year, with Paul McBeth winning his sixth world title in dramatic fashion over the Cinderella story Aaron Gossage.

Chalk up another win for live disc golf coverage.

It is tempting to focus on how the week in Emporia proves the model of live coverage, with tens of thousands of people taking hours out of their day on a holiday weekend to watch disc golf, but let’s go back a little further.

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The story of disc golf media is a story of two world championships nearly a decade apart. The first is the Charlotte World Championships in 2012, the second the 2021 edition from Ogden, Utah. The former marks the first instance of Jonathan Gomez uploading disc golf coverage to YouTube after taking his camera to film the final round battle between Paul McBeth and Ricky Wysocki, the story now the stuff of Jomez legend. The latter is James Conrad’s “Holy Shot” from last year’s final hole in regulation. Both moments rewrote the disc golf media landscape.

Gomez was not the first person to film a disc golf tournament. Long-time aficionados will remember McFlySoHigh, Central Coast Disc Golf, and, of course, the ever-present Terry Miller posting content from the course as far back as 2010. What Gomez did that was revolutionary was turn disc golf coverage into a successful business and prove the market was there and hungry for more. The amount of post-produced disc golf coverage has proliferated in the years since, with providers like GK Pro, Gatekeeper Media, Ace Run Productions, and others becoming household names among fans.

In 2012, the Disc Golf Pro Tour was just a twinkle in Steve Dodge’s eye and the Disc Golf Network was unimaginable. For fans of disc golf, just seeing the final nine holes of Worlds on camera was a…