Music, hoodies, and beer: Inside the battle tearing golf apart

David Schneider is all for people having fun on the golf course — to a point.

The 47-year-old reached said point recently on a rare three-generational outing with his father and son on a municipal course in San Diego.

They got stuck behind a foursome of 20-somethings who were downing Coors Lights, smoking cigars, and playing at what he describes as a “snail’s pace,” oblivious to the groups piling up behind them. “They really didn’t care about pace of play,” says Schneider, who runs a curated golf experience company in Southern California.

The situation reached a boiling point when the increasingly belligerent bros decided to tee off their finished beer cans.

They even started taking mulligans (golf-speak for second tries) when their empties didn’t clear the tee box. “All the while, my foursome watched their drunken incompetence from just a few feet away,” Schneider says.

While Schneider’s experience was an especially egregious scene, it’s emblematic of the culture clash taking place within golf.

The sport has surged in popularity in recent years: Nearly 50 million Americans hit a golf ball in 2025, up 41% from 2019.

It’s exploded on social media — even LeBron James has launched a golf YouTube channel.

But growing the game has come with major growing pains.

Golf’s old guard complains that novices aren’t tuned into the game’s rules and etiquette: they play too slowly, listen to music, and (gasp!) don’t tuck in their shirts.

It’s prompted a “Shrink the Game” backlash among some online traditionalists.

Newcomers, on the other hand, contend that many of the gripes are little more than elitist gatekeeping that has long defined the sport.

Fancy clubs have a tendency to get “bent out of shape over stuff that doesn’t matter at all,” Schneider says, like someone changing shoes in the parking lot.

This “Caddyshack” showdown for the YouTube era is triggering surprisingly heated emotions.

On Reddit, posts about wearing hats in the clubhouse and paying for drinks after a hole-in-one garner hundreds of comments.

When a colleague found out I was working on this story, he reached out to share his two cents: Everyone who “screams” about shrinking the game is an “effing loser,” he argues, who’s salty “because the person who just picked up clubs is already outdriving you.” The battle over Bluetooth speakers and big-letter hats is the result of a deeper paradox at the heart of the sport: The golf industry spent years hoping and praying for new, diverse players to come on board.

Now it’s reckoning with the culture they brought with them. “That’s a case of careful what you asked for,” says Josh Sens, a senior writer at Golf Magazine and the author of its cheeky “The Etiquetteist” advice column.

A confluence of events has gotten Americans off their couches and onto the golf course (or into other golf-related activities).

Golf emerged as a safe, socially-distanced outdoor activity during the pandemic.

Driving range/bar combos such as Topgolf and Drive Shack served as a gateway drug of sorts for the golf-curious.

YouTube golf channels like Good Good and Bob Does Sports began attracting more eyeballs than some PGA Tour broadcasts, bringing a looser, more accessible feel to the game.

According to the National Golf Foundation, 3 million beginners have hit a golf course annually since 2020, and golf reached some 136 million Americans in some way, shape, or form in 2025. “Welcome to a world where golf is actually fun, perceived as fun, by millions more people,” says Greg Nathan, the NGF’s president and CEO.

Of course, “fun” is in the eye of the beholder.

People who picked up golf at driving ranges, entertainment venues, and simulators may be accustomed to a hyper-casual vibe.

Even for newbies coming in without a party-first mentality, the game of golf has so many unwritten rules and eccentricities that they’re almost bound to run afoul somewhere.

Golfers are contending with increasingly crowded tee times and a fundamental clash over what behavior belongs on the course. “There’s a balance that needs to be reached between the fun police and consideration for fellow golfers who are occupying the same space,” Nathan says. “The rule really should be no a-holes.” The problem is, no one agrees who the a-hole is.

The cardinal sin in golf is playing slowly.

Americans in general tend to play at a more relaxed pace than, say, Scots or Brits, but not matching pace of play of your fellow golfers on the course is a big no-no — especially now that the courses are fuller.

Newer, less-experienced players don’t always get this.

They’ll take a lot of practice swings, waste time tracking down mishit balls deep in the woods, or line up and miss seven putts in a row.

They don’t realize that if they’re really biffing it on a hole, it’s better for everyone to just pick up and go.

Ankit Vij, a 31-year-old Brooklynite who recently got back into golf after playing briefly in high school, spent a little too much time looking for his balls when he first returned to the course.

He’s since implemented a 30-second search limit for himself. “Just keep a couple balls that you don’t really care about for this specific reason until you get a little bit more confident about not sending it into the woods,” he says.

Seasoned golfers also grumble about the physical collateral damage they’re finding on courses that they blame on newer crowds — unrepaired divots and pitch marks, golf carts driven where they’re not supposed to be, even trash.

In 2025, pro golfer Phil Mickelson took to Twitter to complain about players failing to rake bunkers, saying it had become a “huge problem at even the nicest of clubs” since COVID. (Mickelson’s own behavior has not always been unimpeachable — earlier this year, he was reportedly ousted from a San Diego golf club amid allegations of nonconsensual inappropriate contact with a female employee.

Mickelson has disputed the claims.) Chris, a veteran caddie who splits his time between high-end private clubs in Florida and Long Island, recalls one country club he works at having an issue this spring with people discarding Zyn nicotine pouches on the greens. (Business Insider agreed to withhold his last name to protect his job.) “A lot of old-school people want their beautiful little sanctuary golf course to be as pretty as it can be,” he says.

Management sent an email to members to remind them to pick up after themselves.

One of the most contentious flashpoints in modern golf is music.

Many players have taken to bringing small speakers with them on the fairway, and newer golf carts may have built-in sound systems.

Some golfers see it as a fine way to enjoy the day (as long as the tunes aren’t interrupting other groups’ games).

Others are not so understanding. “Why do you need music?

Is my company and the challenge of the game not enough for you?” Sens says.

Plus, he notes, a lot of the time the music is not so great — “bad country” and Hootie & the Blowfish. “Play some good music, maybe I’ll be into it,” he says.

Don Bostic, the executive director at the Friars Golf Club, a traveling golf society, tells me he leaves it up to members to decide what works for their individual groups, auditorily.

But making a blanket rule for the club?

No way. “It would be much more controversial than I’d want to deal with,” he says.

Reporting for this story, I spoke to two 50-something New Jersey guys, both named Tony, who both brought up music.

One Tony’s taken to playing some tunes during a round to pair with his bourbon-spiked “swing juice.” The other finds the practice “insane.” The pro at one of Chris the caddie’s regular clubs recently sent out an email reminding members to ask everyone in their group if music is kosher.

To the modern wave of golfers, the real “a-holes” aren’t the ones learning the ropes — they’re the exclusionary gatekeepers obsessed with arbitrary traditions and outdated hierarchies.

While legacy clubs continue to enforce strict rules around collared polos and tucked-in shirts, younger players often find themselves baffled by all the fuss.

It seems silly that attire that is more comfortable and casual — like hoodies, joggers, or sneakers — is seen as a faux pas, and that their attire for what’s, in theory, supposed to be an enjoyable game is so explicitly policed (or implicitly, with eye rolls).

Daniel Uusitalo, a 27-year-old venture capitalist based in the Netherlands, was nearly turned away from a private club in Spain over his outfit.

The club required collared shirts, but Uusitalo was wearing a running T-shirt.

He sees polo shirts as a “weird middle ground” of upper-body attire, but he wound up having to borrow a friend’s to be let in.

Adding to the farce: Uusitalo generally wears an extra-large, and his friend only had a medium, yet the club was perfectly fine with the comically snug fit. “The whole ordeal just felt completely ridiculous,” he says. “Especially in a sport where you’re trying to get young people to participate more.” He also notes that a lot of the guys waxing on about manners are the same ones getting hammered in the clubhouse after games, “picking and choosing” when to be formal.

It’s a sentiment shared by some seasoned golfers.

There’s a difference between behavior that negatively affects someone’s game and aesthetics that some people simply find unbecoming. “Rules that protect the round matter,” Schneider says. “Rules that just protect somebody’s ego don’t.” Different factions can and do coexist.

Jennifer Friday, 26, is in her fourth year as a beverage cart girl at the Revere Club Golf, about 20 minutes away from the Las Vegas Strip.

She has her weekday “grandpas” who ask about her family and her dog, and get in a round.

Then she has the younger, more laid-back golfers on the weekends — they definitely drink more, “but I feel like nobody gets insane where they’re disrespectful of the game,” she says.

The older players, however, are the better tippers. “The younger guys’ tabs are more, and they’re still tipping 20%, but the older crowd is making a relationship with us, so they’ll hand you a $5 even if they don’t get anything,” she says.

Golf and the private clubs that undergirded the game are notorious for not having been particularly welcoming to non-white, non-male, non-older, and non-protestant communities.

This meant that golf’s growth was long hamstrung by its own orthodoxy.

Now, some of those excluded groups are the ones flocking to the game.

Julien McCall, Taqee Bond, and Frank Caffey all found their way into golf as 30-something new dads in New York City.

McCall and Bond were first introduced to the sport as kids by their grandfathers, though neither kept at it.

Caffey’s dad wouldn’t let him play, lest it mess up his baseball swing.

The three have fallen in love with the game over the past few years and, over the summer, launched Kinfolk Social Club, an initiative they say is meant to bring “culture, access, and belonging” to traditionally underserved golfers through local events.

They don’t chafe at all golf customs — as Bond puts it, they’re not trying to be “obtuse.” “If you’re going to come and be in this space and love this space, you should know your history.

You should know how things are done so that when you do switch it up a little bit, you still have that respect,” he says.

They’re well aware of the vital importance of pace of play, too. “We’re from New York, so we can say this very callously: You will get jumped if your pace of play is not right,” McCall says.

With Kinfolk, the trio is trying to build community, bring people outside, and get them to try new things.

As Black men, they know it’s not all smooth sailing on the golf course — people often assume they don’t know what they’re doing and offer up unsolicited advice, even though those unwelcome consultants soon come to find out “that my golf game is actually better than yours,” McCall says. “If we truly want to grow the game, we can’t keep protecting traditions that were built around keeping people out,” Caffey says. “Tradition is one thing.

Exclusion is another.” Cayla Cousins, a 37-year-old tech founder, started golfing largely because there were so many courses near her home in Charlotte, North Carolina.

After paying $45 for some used clubs at an estate sale, she locked in and decided her newfound hobby was good early practice for retirement.

She now plays whenever possible and has massively improved her game, yet she frequently encounters subtle biases when she steps onto the tee box. “They see my little pink towel, and they’re like, ‘Oh Lord, here we go.’ And then I crush it and then shut them right up,” she says. “It bothers me when I see ‘shrink the game,’ because it’s a sport that, unfortunately, has already intentionally been shrunken.” All the attention to etiquette, unwritten rules, and egos can make it tempting for novices to throw in the towel.

Someone gets scolded for bringing their bag into the clubhouse or side-eyed over their shoes, and they decide it’s not worth it, especially given how difficult the game is. “It’s easy to be like, ‘You know what?

I think I’m good, there’s a lot going on, this is expensive as hell, and I’m not good,” says Bryce Tarrant, a 37-year-old sports marketer in New York who picked up a post-COVID golf habit. (He has not given up and compares golf to an “addiction.”) A sizable portion of the controversy exists online — old-school golfers resent the rise of influencers, #ShrinkTheGame tweets go viral, and people think the sentiment is more widespread than it is.

A handful of conventional golf viewers are bothered by Kevin Hart and Jason Kelce showing up at the Masters, while others think it’s cute or, more likely, don’t really notice.

Some of this schism is borne of the rivalry between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, the latter of which was developed as a louder, faster, flashier alternative to traditional professional golf.

Though LIV is now facing an uncertain future as its Saudi funding dries up, it was a catalyst for the PGA to accelerate some of its modernization.

Just look at the recent dustup over a bro-y Good Good-Callaway ad that opened with a man tackling a woman for touching his driver, which resulted in messy apologies, firings, and broken business deals.

Or, consider the PGA Tour having to revamp its fan code of conduct amid rowdy behavior during tournaments — including concerns that some people are disrupting shots to try to influence their sports bets.

Golf’s identity crisis is more of a rocky transition period than it is an irreversible civil war.

Sure, each side has grievances, but everyone is also benefiting from the sport’s newfound popularity.

The old guard may mourn the changes to their manicured haven, but they also get to enjoy the influx of money that’s helping to revamp courses and attract eyeballs.

The new guard gets to discover the sport’s idiosyncrasies and bring their own flair to the game, even if they run into some bumps along the way.

Nathan, from the NGF, says that while he generally thinks the culture conflict in golf is “overblown,” the sport’s orthodoxies and conservative elements have historically hampered its growth.

The silver lining is that there’s space for everyone, literally, on the thousands of courses across the US, all with varying levels of formality.

He compares it to the restaurant industry: patrons will act and dress differently in an exclusive three-Michelin-star eatery than in the neighborhood diner.

When a new-school golfer gets an invite to a storied enclave like Winged Foot, Pinehurst, or Shinnecock, they should expect to dress and act the part.

The friction comes when traditionalists try to force private-club rules on a municipal course where people are just trying to have a good time — or newcomers try to bring the tailgate party where it’s not welcome.

Some proportion of golfers will see the loud apparel or hear music across the course and think it’s symbolic of the “downfall of golf society,” Nathan says. “But the reality is, golf being more approachable and relatable and fun is fantastic for the game.” Golf has long had a snobs-vs.-slobs dynamic, though today’s slobs are quite put together, all in all.

And ultimately, they’re all going to have to learn to live with each other — the slobs can pick up the pace a bit, the snobs can get over seeing a collarless shirt every once in a while.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.