This chat show host has a better ball speed than every PGA Tour star

Roger Steele lost in a four-man playoff at the inaugural Creator Classic last August.

Tips from Tiger Woods, a bet with Jordan Spieth, and a 200mph ball speed – How Roger Steele went from civil engineering to PGA Tour stardom

When Roger Steele tees it up during the Creator Classic at TPC Sawgrass on Wednesday, there’s a good chance that every shot will be greeted with a quip. A laugh. And most definitely a ball speed that outstrips every player on the PGA Tour right now.

His game is almost as loud as his personality, which has made him one of golf’s great entertainers on social media. Since going viral in 2020, brands have been queuing up to work with him. He’s become the host of Callaway’s Range Talk series. And a member of the PGA Tour’s Creator Council. You’ve seen TGL, right? He’s the MC of that, too.  

Playing in the Creator Classic for the second time is the latest step on his road to mainstream recognition – and a chance to show that he’s got game, as well as a show-reel of celebrations straight out of the Tiger Woods playbook.

“Most of what I have to gain is upside, right?” Steele tells Today’s Golfer over an hour-long phone call from his home in Chicago. “Like worst case scenario, if I absolutely play horribly, nobody’s really going to feel any type of way about that. But if I play really well, there’s the opportunity for expanded notability and more privileges. So, I’m thinking that my upside is way better than my downside.  

“I’m planning for success. I’m practising my fist pump, I’m practising my club twirls. I’m going out there just expecting to play really well, and if I don’t, so be it, I’ll get them next time. But my goal is always to win. If I can hit it well off the tee, put it in the fairway and make a few birdies, then we can shock the world, you know.

If you haven’t realised by now, Steele doesn’t like to take himself too seriously. He is also a far better golfer than he sometimes lets on during conversations. On the Monday after the PGA Championship last year, he played off the tournament tees at Valhalla and shot a level-par 71. His ball speed with the new Callaway Elyte driver is tapping out at an incredible 200mph, so you better believe him when he says he can carry the ball over 330 yards. There’s room for improvement too.

Last week he spent four hours at Five Iron Golf in Atlanta, getting fitted for the set of Callaway clubs that have been in his bag since the start of the year. He left with new swing weights, longer shafts in his Elyte driver and fairway woods, and new grinds on his Opus wedges.  

“The whole concept of fitting, even as an adult, was lost on me,” admits Steele, who plays to a scratch handicap. “But now I just feel a lot smarter about what’s in my bag, which is a good feeling. We went through every combination of shaft, playing around with different head styles. It was so eye opening to go down that rabbit hole, exploring things that I knew weren’t going to work, just so I could understand why they wouldn’t work. It put my mind at ease.

“It’s still wintertime in Chicago, so I haven’t really been out to test everything to get it super dialled in, but from a ball speed perspective with the driver, my numbers are up more consistently, and the dispersion is way tighter. There are times where I’ve felt like I’ve snap-hooked a shot, and the ball is coming down on the left side of the fairway. Times like that, you feel like you’re cheating, you know, because that swing did not deserve that outcome. So… the hype is real.

“Normally when somebody sends me a club, I usually throw it in the bag and get on with it. But I would encourage everybody to take the time and go through the iterations of fitting because it makes a huge difference. If you never open yourself up to it, you could be leaving tens of yards and a bunch of strokes out there on the course. And I would hate to see that for golfers who are chasing the dream like I am.”

While he doesn’t like the term influencer, so much of what Steele does is about entertaining and educating. If that means uttering a few profanities or posting a video of himself wearing a ‘Golf is Dope’ t-shirt at a PGA Tour event, so be it. He’s well advanced on his mission to make “golf cool again” and knows the role he can play as an advocate for a sport that has become tied to historical – and often accurate – perceptions of a discriminatory and unwelcoming environment.

“I think that [relatability] is the largest value proposition that I have in the space, he says. “I want to be my true self and have real, worthwhile conversations that hopefully lead to dialog with people that I haven’t met before. And that was kind of the whole intention of social media, right? The thing was set up with the functionality so that we can all engage in dialog. And I tell everybody that I’m on social media to be social.

“I really enjoy talking to new people, meeting new people, and hearing new perspectives about things because I know I don’t know everything. There’s a relatability component to what I do on social media, but I’m really just advocating for more people to play golf. The world is a better place for me if people wake up and go and spend their free time at a golf course.”

The irony of Steele’s upbringing is that the sport he worked so hard to get out of is now the source of so much of his enjoyment and endeavours. Growing up on the west side of Chicago in the ’90s, he was more interested in trying to be like Michael Jordan rather than Tiger Woods. Golf was never even part of his thinking until his father, Roger Sr., a Chicago police officer, started taking him to the course to keep him off the streets and out of trouble.

For more than a decade he would reluctantly ride along in a cart at Columbus Park, a local municipal course, and tee it up alongside his father and his many colleagues. “These guys became like an extension of my family,” Steele says. “They were effectively my golf fathers and my golf uncles. They gave my dad a community and a safe place to raise me as a gentleman from an etiquette perspective.

“Being raised around golf helped me so much in the real world, because it encouraged emotional intelligence, communication, respect, self-control, discipline. All those things have served me well in later life.”

Though he recognises the merits now, there was a time when he used to try and hide the fact he played golf. He wasn’t even that bothered about getting his face and name in the paper alongside the then US Amateur champion.

“I had to be only five or six years old at the time, but he came to Chicago, and he was doing this clinic,” recalls Steele. “Now, I don’t remember much about this, but apparently he called me up to hit a shot and I blistered a drive. I remember a bunch of people clapping and this reporter coming over to me and being like, ‘What’s your name, kid?

“The next day, I remember the house phone kept ringing and people were telling my dad I was in the newspaper with Tiger Woods.” 

To his credit, Steele did go on to enjoy “mild success” as a junior, but that was as far as he ever got. With limited places to practice in inner city Chicago, he became disillusioned with the game and left his golf clubs at home when he enrolled at the University of Illinois to study civil engineering. It wasn’t until he was invited on a corporate golf day seven years later that he picked them up again.

“The company I was working for were having client outings on Monday and they said if there’s anybody in the office that plays golf, let us know and we’ll add your name to the list. I only really played to get out of the office, it wasn’t even about me being excited to play golf. 

“But I ended up playing with one of my project managers and I was just murdering the ball, hitting it so far. He was looking at me like I was the second coming of Tiger Woods. I was playing it down, like no big deal, but I literally think that nobody in the office thought I could play golf.

“Word got around and overnight I became the talk of the office. Everybody was hanging out at my desk, inviting me to play. After that, I invested in some lessons, I bought my first new set of clubs, and I bought a driving range membership. I started to do all these things that I didn’t do as a kid, which enhanced my relationship with the game. The relationships I was making with other people through playing golf were really just the icing on the cake.” 

Through his connections at work and on the golf course, Steele met an art director of a big advertising firm who, after a little persuasion, taught him how to use a camera for the first time. It brought out a creative side he didn’t know he had. 

“He would do these wild photoshoots, and a lot of it was very sport focused,” explains Steele. “He let me go on an assignment with him, I saw what he did and that made me realise that I really love storytelling. I started learning how to take pictures and shoot short videos and even though I wasn’t that good at it, I enjoyed the process of bringing a story to life.”

Though he didn’t know what to do with it at the time, speaking to other entrepreneurs gave him an itch he wanted to scratch. In 2016, he quit his job as a civil engineer and relocated to Orlando, Florida on a whim.“I do wish I’d done it more intelligently,” he says now.

“I blew through all of my savings trying to figure out what entrepreneurship would look like for me. That was a very rough time. My dad thought that I was losing my mind because I had a really good job, making good money.

“But I wanted to run my own business so that I could have more time to play golf. It had little to do with what the business actually was. I just wanted a business so that I could be like all these entrepreneurs that have these country club memberships and play golf all the time. I was just completely delusional in what my expectations were of entrepreneurship.” 

He set up a golf nutrition business but quickly realised that “golfers do not care about being in better shape.” A new apparel start-up fared little better, which is what forced him to pivot in yet another direction.

“What I realized was that I’m really good at painting the picture and telling the story of what the business is, but from an operations perspective, I was the golf equivalent of a 38 [handicap] index,” he laughs. “I had no skill set to execute to get anything across the line.  

“I would use my golf relationships to sit down with people who I thought would finance my ideas, but they were like, ‘The videos you’re making are good, but we don’t think that you can do the things that you’re saying you can do’. “I took offense at this at first, but in retrospect, they were 100% right. I would have wasted all of their money if they had given it to me.” 

Sure enough, Steele realized that he was better off being a storyteller on behalf of individuals and brands. With the help of former Korn Ferry Tour player Danny Wax, he set up his own agency called Hipe Media in March 2019 and started creating content and running social media pages for the likes of Adidas and Trap Golf.

“A lot of the people and brands that I was creating content for I was meeting through golf,” he says. “I never actually advertised my services. A round of golf would lead to an introduction, and that introduction would lead to a contract. I was able to organically drum up business, so it was the perfect marketing strategy for me. It also allowed me to play golf.”

Everything was going great until the pandemic struck, and the uncertainty wiped out his entire client base. “Within the space of two weeks, I went from making a decent living to having no income,” he recalls. “I had bought all of this camera equipment, and I was just sitting in my house in Chicago with nothing to do. That’s really when I was like, ‘Why don’t you just start making your own content and see what happens?’ I ended up becoming my best client.” 

His big break came as a result of the golf boom that happened post-COVID. So many of his friends wanted to get into the game, but didn’t necessarily know how or where to start. They all came to Steele looking for advice, which is what prompted him to get creative with his response.

“I felt like I kept having the same conversation over and over again, he says. “I was just, like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna make a video about what the expectations are for people getting started in golf, and I’m gonna send it to my friends whenever they ask me about playing golf’. This video was eight minutes long and it was me, sitting in my living room, rambling on about what people should expect from the game of golf. There was a lot of expletives in there, but I was just being open and honest and vulnerable.”

Steele posted the video in September 2020, not knowing what to expect or how it was going to be received. He needn’t have worried. The clip went viral, and he was praised for speaking out and for being his authentic self. Almost overnight, his followers on Instagram swelled from 2,000 to 10,000.

“I was all over the internet for a while, just from trying to give my friends some candid advice. That was the cool thing about it because I got traction and support for just being myself. People followed me because they enjoyed the way that I was expressing myself, and I think that’s one of the most liberating things about it.

“Being black, I didn’t feel like there were many people who had entered the golf space in a very authentic way. There’s this thing called code switching, where you completely change how you interact with a group of people, depending on who they are. And I always thought that, in golf, there wasn’t a lot of consistency. A lot of people would either tone back their true selves, or they would try to over emphasize things that were not necessarily authentic to them. 

“When I made that first video, I literally said, ‘I’m gonna speak to the camera like I’m talking to my friends, and I’m gonna be my true myself. I’m gonna say things I say in more intimate settings and I’m gonna let people see the real me. And at that time, it was very scary.  

“I had a lot of anxiety even posting that video. A lot of the people that were taking me out to play these nice courses, or people that I had as clients, they didn’t really know who I really was because I was never open and transparent about my perspectives and opinions. And I’ll be honest with you, I was afraid that I was going to lose a lot of relationships by posting that video.

“I was afraid that people would think less of me, but the response on the back end was just insane. The PGA Tour were one of the first brands that reached out to me, and it was just so fulfilling to be able to exist as myself in that moment. Everything from then on has just been a dream.”

Despite all of this, if you’re over a certain age, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard Steele. Until recently, his fame had been almost entirely contained on YouTube and social media, where he is approaching 205,000 followers on Instagram. He’s not quite reached the levels of Paige Spiranac or Good Good yet, but he’s part of a growing number of content creators who are bridging the gap between the digital world and more traditional forms of golf.

Today, he works with the likes of Callaway, the PGA Tour and Five Iron Golf to help promote and diversify the game. Most of what he does involves him interviewing or sharing his experiences – good and bad – with some of the biggest names and brands in sports and entertainment.

So far, he’s hit balls and engaged in candid conversations with the likes of Jon Rahm, Xander Schauffele, Annika Sorenstam, Steph Curry and Niall Noran on Range Talk, a chat show of sorts, produced by Callaway Golf. He’s even lost a nearest-the-pin competition to Jordan Spieth at Pebble Beach.

“The thing that I appreciate the most about the opportunities that I’ve been given is how there have been a lot of people that have believed in me,” Steele says. “I’ve just been so fortunate through the game of golf to meet people who were willing to take a swing and give me a chance. And I’ve benefitted greatly from that over the last three or four years.” 

It certainly helps that he is a natural in front of the camera. In one clip on his Instagram, he riffed about green reading being a ‘negotiation with God’, rather than a science. He’s a very funny guy, but he’s mindful about crossing over into the realms of silliness. There’s also a serious side that underpins a lot of his storytelling and experiences.

In his role as an ambassador for Youth on Course, Steele has twice played 100 holes in a day to raise money and awareness for the charity, which endeavours to give kids a chance to play more than 1,400 golf courses across America for just $5. He also makes a point of attending junior golf clinics in his hometown of Chicago to try to introduce as many underprivileged kids as possible in his community to the game.

Nothing about this is for show; he genuinely cares about leaving golf in a better place than he found it. Some might say he’s even growing the game. Being appointed to the PGA Tour’s Content Council is giving him a greater voice and a chance to engage in the kind of conversations that are needed to develop new and exciting strategies for the good of the game. 

The Creator Classic is just one piece of that puzzle; a three-part YouTube series that takes place the evening before the Players Championship and continues with separate events during the week of the Truist Championship in May and the season-ending Tour Championship in August.

Steele intends to play in all of them and see where life, or rather golf, takes him from there. He’s not the type to look too far into the future, though he’s still holding out hope that he’ll one day get the chance to sit down and speak with Tiger, if only to remind him of the time their paths crossed in Chicago all those years ago.

“That would be such a crazy full circle moment, wouldn’t it? It’s kind of insane that 30 years later our paths are kind of intersecting again [through TGL]. You know, my golf journey would be complete if one day I get Tiger to recreate that photo with me. That would be amazing.” 

And with the Creator Classic trophy in one hand, presumably?

“Exactly! ‘Moments influenced by Tiger’ – that’s the real influencer right there.”