Jon Rahm’s LIV Golf departure got here as a shock. So did the account, Flushing It, who broke it.
Photo Illustration: Emma Devine; Image: LIV Golf
He had by no means imagined himself concerned in a narrative that may change skilled sports activities, however Tom Hobbs didn’t want a journalism diploma to know he was holding a stick of dynamite. He’d spent days chasing the story, and now, on the final night of November 2023, he had it confirmed.
Hobbs drafted the put up and stared at the display, reviewing for the first time the report that may ignite the golf world. Then he lit the fuse.
A number of seconds later, Hobbs’ phrases flashed again at him, now live on X for his 45,000 followers — and shortly, thousands and thousands extra — to see.
“Multiple sources on the players (sic) side have confirmed,” Hobbs wrote beneath his social media pseudonym, Flushing It Golf. “Jon Rahm is a DONE deal to the LIV Golf League.”
It was per week earlier than Hobbs’ scoop turned official. On Dec. 6, Rahm appeared on the 6 p.m. hour of Fox News in a black letterman jacket and confirmed the unthinkable: He had joined LIV. Back in southern England, Hobbs couldn’t assist a smile. After weathering days of second-guessing and name-calling from the web, together with from skilled journalists, the fan account Hobbs had began two years earlier “primarily to post stupid golf memes” had damaged the golf story of the 12 months.
“It wasn’t just loads of players who were following me [after the story broke], but lots of, like, respected journalists,” Hobbs tells me now. “I never thought those people would care about my opinion. No one knows who the hell I am, and suddenly I’m breaking the biggest news story in golf.”
As Hobbs remembers his Rahm scoop, he’s nonetheless incredulous. Even weeks later, he stays perplexed by the entire ordeal. How did a former club pro with a fan account beat out a legion of sports activities journalists (this writer included) for one of golf’s largest scoops?
What does it say about him? And what does it say about the bigger media panorama?
The story of Tom Hobbs, citizen newsbreaker, begins with an try at falling in love once more.
A decade in the past, Hobbs joined the educating employees at Stoneham Golf Club in Southampton, the place he was a stick and common match participant. Teaching earned Hobbs a casual introduction to the pro recreation — the place he cast friendships with a bunch of fringe pro golfers, together with fellow Stoneham member (and early LIV defector) Richard Bland. About a decade in the past, Hobbs left the sport to develop into an inside design specialist, and shortly he discovered that he had drifted away from golf. In 2021, he created Flushing It in the hope that it will assist him reconnect with the recreation after he discovered success with an identical “fan” account for his favourite soccer club, Southampton. He spent most of the account’s first 12 months in existence posting innocent memes to an viewers of a number of hundred followers, however then the calendar flipped to 2022.
When LIV arrived, Hobbs felt there was extra to the story than cash and public outrage. He’d performed alongside many of the professionals who can be benefiting from the new league and its funding in the Asian Tour, and he felt the Saudi cash was serving to them. In early 2022 he started posting usually in help of LIV, and shortly realized he’d struck a chord with a subsection of the golf viewers disillusioned with the golf “establishment” — notably these at conventional media retailers — for conduct these followers perceived as unfairly dismissive towards the new league. In what has develop into a dependable scheme in the social media playbook, the louder and angrier Hobbs tweeted about LIV, the extra consideration his posts obtained, and the bigger his viewers grew. Before lengthy, Flushing It had earned greater than 40,000 followers throughout two platforms, and its founder was invited to attend LIV’s first occasion, in June 2022, at the Centurion Club in London as a member of the credentialed press.
Flushing It calls itself “fan media,” a descriptor that proves impressively troublesome to outline. Yes, there are the oxymoronic qualities of the phrases “fan” and “media,” however Hobbs’ account undoubtedly contains traits of every. On one hand, Flushing It proudly stays one of the loudest pro-LIV voices on the golf web, eschewing conventional journalistic values of nonpartisanship and objectivity in favor of common help of the league. On the different, Flushing It participates in respectable “media” features pretty usually: aggregating tales, offering “live updates” and, in the case of Rahm’s defection, breaking actual news.
Matters of the English language because it pertains to an web character really feel particularly trivial, however right here they’re fairly vital. To Hobbs, it appears the distinction between journalism and “fan media” comes all the way down to gravity. Those who follow journalism ask essential questions and try to assail the fact, he says, whereas these who follow “fan media” shoot from the hip and supply their opinions.
“People don’t necessarily want to hear this straight-down-the-middle story all the time that’s got loads of quotes from various sources,” Hobbs says. “They just want to know this is what’s going on, this is my opinion on it. It’s a bit more fun, and a bit of entertainment as well, rather than just straight-down-the-middle reporting.”
In principle, the motives of each events are the identical — to border the dialogue round golf — however there are the reason why the “fan media” enjoys a wholesome dose of skepticism from the public: Its efforts at framing the dialogue are usually not all the time virtuous.
“There’s content and then there’s journalism,” says Aileen Gallagher, chair of news and on-line journalism at Syracuse University. “If you’re a content creator, I have no idea what the origins of the piece of content are — Who’s responsible for making it? Whose point of view am I looking at? What points of view are missing? It’s really hard for audiences to critically evaluate the content they’re looking at when they don’t know who the creator is.”
Critical analysis is even more durable when some members of the “fan media” actively serve to undermine the fact. When LIV got here on-line in 2022, the web flooded with LIV “fan” pages that had ties to fringe political groups and behaved suspiciously like bots. That’s to not say LIV is with out followers on social media. Just that since LIV’s inception, a loud subsection of accounts have peddled misinformation, stoked controversy and trolled joyously on behalf of the rival league, forming a brand new golf social-media establishment whose raison d’etre seems to be the insubstantial but no-less-contemptible parasitic bloodlust of a mosquito.
Beyond fueling media mistrust and stoking outrage, these accounts have unintentionally served to undermine the league itself. Credibility is constructed upon the existence of proof over time, and so despite the fact that Hobbs’ report unfold quickly on social media (and was appropriate!), his proximity to others in the “fan media” area meant that his tweet wasn’t credited as something greater than a rumor for greater than per week. On the day the story materialized, the Wall Street Journal was credited for “breaking” the news, not Hobbs. To see the hole in notion, one wanted to look solely at the metrics: Flushing It’s Nov. 30 Rahm scoop on X earned about 1,200 likes, whereas Bleacher Report’s repurposing on Dec. 6 earned greater than 10,000. (The extent to which the lavatory-adjacent nature of the “Flushing It” identify additionally contributed to public skepticism of Hobbs’ report is, the writer admits, unknowable.)
This grates Hobbs, who feels his account is markedly extra respected than different “fan media” accounts, regardless of their occasional similarities in tone, presentation and opinion. He unequivocally denies that he’s on the LIV payroll, as he and different LIV fan accounts are usually accused — and he doesn’t suppose he deserves to face these accusations so usually.
“I was labeled a ‘LIV bot’ last year because I was positive when no one else was … [pause] and I was a bit controversial … [longer pause] and contrarian,” Hobbs says. “I think it’s slowly progressing that a lot more people are starting to understand that I do have an inside line for a lot of people in the game.”
This checks out: Hobbs maintains friendships with a number of professionals and influential LIV figures and converses with a community of sources inside the league semi-regularly. He is tapped into the slipstream of LIV rumors and gossip greater than most in the media ranks.
Of course, some of the cause for this entry may very well be as a result of Hobbs is just not in the media ranks. There is little query that the anti-media sentiment amongst many of LIV’s followers has bled into the league’s higher echelons, notably the taking part in class, which has contributed to a gentle movement of delicate info between the league and a few inside the “fan media.” There’s nothing inherently fallacious with this: The democratization of info in the social media age means stakeholders are usually not beholden to the conventional press and are liberated to share info with whomever they please. But when info is shared devoid of mandatory context or nuance, the public dangers misunderstanding the greater image.
On the day he broke the Rahm story, Hobbs had accomplished his due diligence: leveraging sources for info and confirming that info with different sources, simply as conventional journalists do. His intel was proper, and it was first.
“I think that everybody knew [the Rahm signing] was happening,” he says. “But [the journalists] needed nailed-down proof, whereas I don’t have to quote sources and stuff. I could get proof from people without risking their — what’s the word? — anonymity.”
Sure, Hobbs might need been bending the guidelines of attribution — beneath which a supply is meant to take pleasure in the privilege of anonymity solely when it’s deemed completely mandatory — however that’s a slap-on-the-wrist offense on the subject of reporting info as delicate as Rahm’s signing with LIV on the eve of a negotiation deadline with the PGA Tour.
As we discuss for longer, although, it turns into clear that we have now a distinction of opinion. Hobbs pushes again onerous in opposition to my comparatively democratic use of the phrase “journalist” to explain his work, and he disagrees with my suggestion that the solely true barrier to good journalism is the thoughtfulness and accuracy of the individual delivering it, not their credentials.
“I don’t see myself as a journalist,” he says. “Some people have said that I am, but I don’t really see it as that. I see it as fan media.”
If not journalism, then what, precisely, would he take into account the Rahm scoop to be?
He pauses.
“There was never any intention to [break the news], but just like everything with Flushing It, it’s just sorta happened,” he says. “It’s all about being in the right place at the right time.”
This kind of information-sharing is hardly restricted to golf; it’s the actuality of life on the web, notably on X, the place anybody’s capability to purchase a blue checkmark upended the conventional hierarchy that sorted the notable and reliable voices from everybody else. That has democratized the means we purchase and perceive info. But it additionally has shifted the burden onto the viewers to sift via news vs. humor vs. hypothesis vs. parody vs. anything.
It is right here that Hobbs appears to outline his explicit model of “fan media” in the clearest means but: info with out stakes. Hobbs’ monetary attachment to Flushing It is minimal; he stated he turned down a suggestion final 12 months to show the account right into a full-time enterprise. That independence affords him vital freedom to share info with out worry of the personally ruinous downsides of being fallacious — freedom not possessed by journalists with reputations and households and mortgages. In the case of breaking news, that could be a appreciable benefit. But in the case of his perceived trustworthiness, it isn’t.
“I don’t see myself in a journalist type of role, because then it becomes very serious, and you kind of have to start using these players, who I just enjoy being friends with,” Hobbs tells me. “It becomes a whole different game.”
Hobbs is a gifted rhetorician, however his unwillingness to acknowledge the seriousness of the soar he’s taken from “fan media” to “news breaker” underscores why he’s annoyed by his public notion. If he gained’t name himself reliable, why ought to anybody else?
“It’s the rise of the culture of the fan,” says Gallagher, the Syracuse professor. “What’s dangerous about it is that if you’re a creator, you usually don’t have any obligation to your audience. Your obligation is to yourself, so you’re going to be making decisions that benefit yourself, and not your audience.”
Why spend a lot time harping on self-identity? After all, in the case of the Rahm news, Hobbs was reliable. Because what Hobbs calls himself — be it a journalist or “fan media” or a content material creator or a zebra — issues. It issues as a result of “the truth” usually is a matter of notion, and that relies upon upon the individual telling it. (Think about what number of instances you’ve seen a firing known as a “parting of ways,” or a politician resigning to “spend more time with his family.” Those are one model of the fact, however are they the absolute fact?)
Hobbs is appropriate in distinguishing his strategies from “real” journalism, however he’s fallacious to suppose himself incapable of making the soar. In some methods, he admits, he has began to do it already. He has deliberately “toned down” the rhetoric on Flushing It as the account has grown its profile, and he lately refocused his technique on serving as a “neutral voice for the fans.” After constructing a golf social-media monolith by taking intention at the institution, Flushing It is now making an attempt to keep away from stepping on landmines (with the exception, Hobbs admits, of his posts on a number of regrettable “really drunken nights”). He even lately criticized LIV, a primary on this writer’s accounting, for what he perceived as development failures in the league’s first two years.
“I feel there’s a responsibility now because it’s getting to be such a big audience,” he stated. “I have to treat it as though I’m a public figure now, really, because there are so many eyeballs on the account.”
Flushing It might by no means be a pillar of the Fourth Estate, however the message at the finish of Hobbs’ anti-establishment-to-establishment story is vital: It’s the folks who matter.
The “responsibility” of life in the public eye is as a lot a matter of journalistic integrity as it’s one of human nature. Most folks need to be well-liked and well-regarded — regardless of the worst inclinations of the insipid, shouting-into-the-void nature of social media — and at the easiest stage, being well-liked and well-regarded entails performing in a way deserving of it. That tact won’t produce as many followers, however how useful is an viewers in case you’ve skilled them to not consider you?
There is a world the place “fan media” can exist alongside conventional journalism; we’re residing in it. But the fact is that these two pillars — fan and media — have all the time existed alongside one another, two sides of the identical unusual coin.
That sounds messy, nevertheless it doesn’t need to be. As it seems, the tasks of this world won’t be all that totally different from the ones that got here earlier than it.
“It’s kind of scary,” Hobbs says. “But I have to accept that I now have a role where I am part of golf media, even though it’s not established golf media.”
“It’s a different kind of media … a new kind of media.”
The writer (cautiously) welcomes your ideas at james.colgan@golf.com
