Among the many understandable reasons to fear the rise of AI — security threats, wealth concentration, existential risk — the emergence of golf’s first autonomous tournament commentator probably should rank low on the list of concerns. Still, in pockets of the golf world, the introduction of just such a chatterbot has stirred up agita and scorn. A sampling of golf-observer commentary from the complaint box known as X:
The lamest broadcasters in golf can rest easy, AI slop has made their job is safe.
How about we f—ing send this straight into space with a one way ticket.
The question is simply, Why???
The teeth-gnashing and eye-rolling began last week when Troon Golf distributed a press release about the 2026 New Mexico Open, slated for Sept. 14-16 at Turtleback Mountain Golf & Resort in Elephant Butte, about two hours south of Albuquerque. The event, which is run by the Sun Country Section of the PGA of America, has three former PGA Tour winners in the field, Notah Begay III, Matt Every and Sean O’Hair, but drew buzz not for who would be on the course but in the booth: Ryan Burr, who you might know from Golf Channel, alongside Begay, who would be Ping-Ponging between playing and commentating, and — the real attention-grabber — a new-to-the-scene broadcaster named Duff Foreman.
If Duff Foreman sounds like he came out of nowhere, that’s because “he” did. “He” has never played professionally or, for that matter, hit a golf shot, period. “He” did not quietly transition into the golf booth from another sport. “He,” like Bob Costas, Mike Tirico and Marv Albert before him, did not sharpen his broadcasting skills at the Newhouse School of Public Communications. Duff is an AI agent conjured and built by a Westport, Mass.-based digital media company, Gopher Hole Productions. The bot is making its debut this week, analyzing the action in New Mexico, and an army of pitch-fork-wielding golf fans and media members have not been shy about airing their incredulity and general disapproval.
“My response to that is, when people were riding in horse and buggies, they didn’t ask for the car,” Paul Sidlo told me in a phone interview Tuesday following Duff’s second day on the job. “This is a car that can take you places that you couldn’t go with a horse and buggy.”
Sidlo is Gopher Hole’s chief executive officer and, for the last six or so months, one of Duff’s key architects. Sidlo is a 3-D graphics and animation whiz and digital strategist; he’s also not new to amplifying how sports are presented, having served as the creative director for five Olympic Games and 14 Super Bowls. But Duff Foreman is the first AI golf commentator on which Sidlo has worked, meaning he has been watching the bot’s maiden voyage in New Mexico with a mix of excitement and anxiousness.
“It’s like watching a child come to fruition,” Sidlo said. “It takes a village to raise a child, and there’s a lot of parts and pieces that all fit together to make it sing. So, yes, I’m thrilled that we are where we are.”
Where exactly they are is bit of a Rorschach test, the answer hingeing on your openness to and/or expectations for such technology. Some viewers might have come away from the tournament’s live stream in awe of a digital commentator’s ability to quickly process, say, a player’s win percentage or the potential impact of changing weather patterns on the field. Others might have been, if not bowled over by Duff’s golf acumen, then at least intrigued or amused by his human(ish) qualities; Scottish(ish) accent; and the unflinching conviction with which Duff delivers information. And then, yes, there are others still, the critics — aka the vocal majority in golf’s social sphere — many of whom see Duff as a stain not only on the game but also on society at large, the cringey embodiment of employing AI simply for the sake of employing AI.
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Here’s one thing we all can agree on: Duff will not be putting Trevor Immelman out of work anytime soon. And that, Sidlo will tell you, isn’t Duff’s intent, either. The agent isn’t designed to displace humans, Sidlo says, it’s meant to complement them, serving as a resource that can recall intel at a pace with which even the sharpest golf savants could never compete. “Duff has the sixth sense of memory,” Sidlo told me.
That much became clear early in the New Mexico Open’s first-round live stream when, in real time, Duff scanned its databases, crunched some numbers and told Burr and Begay that two-time Utah Open winner Blake Tomlinson had an 11% chance of winning this week. A few minutes later, Duff rejoined the broadcast and shared another instructive nugget: Given the course’s setting in the high desert, drives this week would carry 9 percent farther than they do at sea level. Duff’s hole breakdowns also were informative, if only at surface level.
But Duff also wasted little time showing its shortcomings, beyond just the off-putting three-second delays before all of its responses and, on at least a couple of occasions, talking over one of its booth mates. “The limited times Duff Foreman appears make it look like the MS-DOS version of AI,” media critic Matt Yoder wrote on Awful Announcing. “They all seem like pre-planned segments that are poorly executed and offer little substance.”
When, about 30 minutes into the first-round broadcast, Burr asked Duff how the course defends itself when the wind is down, Duff cited the firmness of the greens and how balls can “skip” past the hole, an observation that omitted one key detail.
“Duff certainly not aware that we did get some rain last night,” Begay said, calling out his partner’s oversight. “But under normal conditions, yes, Duff is right.”
There were always going to be glitches in Duff’s coming-out party — first, because AI is imperfect, and second, because, well, a machine has never called a live sports event. Among Duff’s other hiccups in the first two rounds: being unable to cite long-driver Maurice Allen’s average driving distance, a standard query Duff should have been able to answer with no trouble. Early in Round 2, Duff also stumbled when Burr teed him up with this lead-in:
“Now at 11, [Javier] Delgadillo, his second, so he’ll have 4 feet for par to save here at the very challenging par-3 11th — 222 yards today, Duff.”
Duff missed the prompt, leading to awkward dead air and the production crew cutting to a shot of the course’s mountainous backdrop.
“Well, the mountains here are spectacular,” Burr said. “Hey, Duff, why don’t you take a — that’s a lot of work for you. Take a minute here, get yourself hydrated, maybe get a granola bar or whatever it is you AI people eat, and we’ll see how this goes.”
To which Duff said: “I’ll take a quick break to recharge my circuits, Ryan. I’ll be right here and ready to roll the moment you need some fire back in the booth.”
Duff, like all AI agents, isn’t magically pulling information out of thin air. It’s leaning on reams of existing data on the web and computing in real time how best to package and present that data. “We tap into all the different sources on the internet about golf, but we’ve also built custom data,” Sidlo said. “[Duff] can rationally think through these things. He can analyze numbers on the fly. He can provide analytics about how to play a hole on the fly, and so he’s dynamic, and that’s what sports is. It’s a dynamic medium. He’s not reading a script.
“We look at a lot of different databases, like BlueGolf and others, Perplexity, Claude. We have Gemini. We have multiple links to multiple databases. We skim and scrape data from sources that provide information about — in this event from the PGA [of America] and their records, and from the USGA that provide a lot of things about the rules and about how to play courses, what the conditions of the courses are. We scrape data from the weather reports, and how that affects the grass and the speed of the grass and all those different things come into a compound answer that Duff can provide as a contextualization of that moment.”
Sidlo described at least some of Duff’s interactions with Burr as “banter,” which might rightly give you pause. Banter is a verbal volley, an impromptu back-and-forth, but Duff is programmed to speak only when prompted. This will be among the biggest challenges if AI is going to become a meaningful part of sports broadcasting: making its observations and insights feel authentic and genuinely additive. The agents can’t visit with players on the range before a round or hit putts on the greens to test their speeds or tell you what it feels like to stand over an 8-footer with a major title in the balance. Agents only can process, organize and deliver information that already has been gathered by other sources.
Sidlo ackowledges Duff’s limitations but still sees much upside. “It’s not exactly the same emotional-feeling-kind-of-guy like Notah,” he said. “But he provides the data and the analytics on the fly, and it can look at things and remember things that most people could never put together in a flash of a second in a rational context. That’s what’s unique about Duff.” Sidlo added: “It’s a democratization of information about very complex play that you can now learn from. I see that as a very value-added kind of experience to the golf customer.”
Duff’s applications could extend beyond the booth, which is in Gopher Hole Productions’ plans. Patrick Pharris, who is an investor in the company, told me that he and his partners envision Duff also having potential to serve everyday golfers as a virtual caddie or swing instructor, or integrating the tech into golf simulators.
Duff, its backers say, also will only improve with time, as it continues to train itself on the game’s nuances. That training will be especially useful in Duff’s ability to analyze swings, Sidlo said. “Every time we put a new one in, it adds to his ability to interpret,” he said. “Duff is an engine of this mass-compound combination that’s going to teach [golfers] how to drive a golf club better than any other person because he has all the knowledge.”
We shall see. Duff still has much work and convincing to do, and it won’t be easy driving converts in a game so tightly bound by tradition. Then again, the future is here, as dystopian as it may feel to some. AI’s foothold is only going to grow, and golf watchers may have no choice but to get on board.
“We believe that this is just the beginning,” Sidlo said. “We’re pretty excited about the developments and the speed that it can occur.”
