In this age of gee-whiz gadgets and swipe-and-scroll gizmos, the simple pleasure of, say, reading an actual newspaper is about as archaic a process as polishing a musket.
Even the traditional golf writers are now viewed as dusty antiquities who should be plonked in the same corner of the museum that houses the Caxton printing press.
These days, of course, it’s all about ‘digital content’. Some of you may be au fait with social media platforms like Instagram, X and TikTok. Others may think that YouTube is just a guffawing insult you’d hear in the pub. As for things going viral? The mind boggles.
For the former touring golfer James Byrne, all this content has provided, well, career contentment.
After six increasingly futile years chipping away on the Asian Tour, the Banchory man stepped away from the professional game and is now enjoying a very different working life as an assistant producer with Original and Branded, the content arm of European Tour Productions.
Instead of counting the number of hits he took to negotiate 72-holes, the 34-year-old is now more concerned with generating online hits.
The DP World Tour’s award-winning social media output has always been well-received, whether it’s comedy capers involving Colin Montgomerie and his pythons – yes, it was a thing - madcap golfing challenges or more reflective, thought-provoking productions such as the Roots series, which charts the career highs and lows of a variety of players.
“The important thing is that we get a lot of buy-in from the players themselves,” said Byrne of the valued cooperation of some of the tour’s most well-kent faces who are game for a laugh.
“That’s huge. Without them, we couldn’t do it. Rory, Tommy Fleetwood, Shane Lowry, Tyrrell Hatton, Monty. They are all up for doing stuff. And hat’s off to them because it can take a lot of effort. They have to learn lines, they have to rehearse. They put a lot into it.
“Monty is brilliant. He’s got a great sense of humour and is very self-deprecating. He knows we take the mickey out of him, but he really gets into it.”
By his own admission, Byrne spends a lot of time, “sitting around tables and coming up with ideas.” For all the chuckles and chortles than can stem from these brainstorming sessions coming to fruition, however, there can be plenty of poignancy too.
“We made the video this summer at the Irish Open with the young boy who had a brain tumour and got to meet Rory McIlroy and play a hole with him,” recalled Byrne. “A lot of the time, we can be in hysterics with the things we produce but with the more hard-hitting stuff like that, there can be lots of tears shed.”
Had things worked out differently, Byrne could’ve been featuring alongside the other Scottish stars in some of this content carry on. He’d been tipped for a bright future when he made the leap into the pro game back in 2011 after signing off a successful amateur career by helping GB&I win the Walker Cup.
It didn’t quite work out, though. Byrne struggled to gain a foothold in Europe and opted to try his luck in the Far East. Despite a couple of wins on the Asian Tour’s second-tier, he couldn’t establish himself on the main circuit. Something had to give.
“I had to be realistic,” said Byrne, who now has his amateur status back and won the Banchory club championship this year. “I looked at my game over five or six years and was honest with myself. It would’ve been a very strange business decision to keep going and continue to throw money at it. It was as simple as that.
"There was a release when I made that decision to call it a day. Golf can be very stressful. When you are constantly worrying about money, and how you’ll afford to travel to events, you are less focused on enjoying the game. You very quickly get into a downward spiral.
“I was in my late 20s when I stopped. Some may say that’s too early but it’s not really. If you haven’t established yourself by then you are well behind the eight ball. Golf is so cut-throat.
“But I’m happy with where my career has landed. It’s very different to being a golfer but I get a huge sense of satisfaction out of what I do.”
What were we saying about content and contentment again?
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