Data Driven: How Max Homa and the PGA Tour Embrace Data to Up Their Game | WIRED Brand Lab

[Max] As a kid,

I had always dreamt of sitting at the same table

as all of the greats.

[ethereal electronic music]

My career has been very up and down.

I got to see the mountaintop,

and then was kicked to the bottom.

[ethereal electronic music]

I was determined to overcome

because I just think that's who I am.

I wouldn't stop at anything

to find out how far I could make it.

[ethereal electronic music]

The very nature of golf is data.

Scoring in the early days was run with volunteers

that were used to capture the data across the course.

It was very manually-driven.

While it was delivered fairly quickly,

it wasn't delivered as fast as we get it today.

And what we've managed to do

is create a really flexible architecture

that now allows us to deliver scoring to our fans

in 30 seconds or less.

[bouncy string music]

One of the challenges of a golf course

is that we don't have a single ball in play.

There are, on average,

on a given full field event on a Thursday or Friday,

14 balls moving at any given second.

[club strikes]

So the question becomes,

which ball do you want to look at?

The PGA Tour had a vision

for allowing fans to see every shot from every player.

We went to AWS and said,

This is what we wanna do.

They recommended to us,

Move all of the streams directly up into the cloud,

and then use AWS MediaConnect

to not only get that content off the course,

but then distribute it to our PGA Tour app.

Every Shot Live allows us, for the first time,

to give fans the ability to see all of the shots.

[Jim] Now they're able to dive in so much further

than they could before.

[Ken] They can feel the emotion of every single shot

and what it felt like to have the crowd behind them.

[crowd cheers]

The PGA Tour is always pushing the boundaries

of what can be done with data.

The data I use has helped me a ton with my game.

My main goal is just to keep getting better.

I'd like to compete to win a major.

There's probably not gonna be one major leap,

but you can just do so much

with little, little bits of progress.

I think that's where you see players like myself,

some people say, burst onto the scene,

but I think it's just from

doing the little things better a lot more often.

[crowd cheers]

My job is to scoop everything

that we possibly can off the golf course

and present it in ways so fans can direct themselves.

Never get tired of the dew.

So we are running the new system fully in production.

AWS essentially is the rails that we build this

and everything runs on,

and it is built around cameras and radar

that allow us to track the golf ball in three dimensions

and translate that

into a mathematical representation of reality.

It's designed to be able to track

not just where the ball goes,

but predict where it's going to go.

So this all moves directly into the cloud,

into a comprehensive picture

so we can build more things for fans to do.

We don't even know what we're gonna do

with all this data yet,

but we know there's more stuff

that we can build stories out of around that.

They capture hundreds of hours of raw footage

from every tournament

and bring that back

and leverage AWS capabilities

to deliver real-time data analytics,

AI-driven insights,

and enhanced video streaming.

As a caddy,

we're a trusted advisor

to some of the very best players in the world.

TOURCast is the single greatest innovation

on the PGA Tour.

Left and right miss,

up and down from the bunkers,

altitude on our shots,

our ability to get the ball stopped

when greens firm up due to a lack of rain.

[Max] I love to check my clubhead speed,

my ball speed, the spin.

There's no better feeling

than looking at what you aren't great at,

putting together a plan,

and then watching yourself become great at that thing.

[club strikes]

[Ken] One of the things you gotta remember about data,

data's a way to tell a story.

Golf is not about collecting bits and ones and zeros.

People care because it sparks an emotional reaction,

and you watch someone do something

that humans are not supposed

to be able to do,

and they do it well.

That's why we go to the sports.

[crowd cheers]

I've been very proud of the fact

that I didn't let the struggles keep me from pushing myself.

If it was just one person I inspired,

whether it was in golf or not,

to dust yourself off,

find a ladder and climb out of the hole.

If I were to leave some kind of legacy,

I would hope it would be something like that.

[soft piano music]

[Scott] Working for the PGA Tour is a dream.

I can put everything I love together,

technology, golf,

and really help bring that forward to our fans.

[crowd cheers]

It's a new frontier for the tournament and streaming.

And golf.

[soft piano music]