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I'm not going to poo-poo the efforts happening here, but the DGPT actually succeeding is not a foregone conclusion. There is a long way to go.
But hey, it's better than the ADGT, right?
This is important conversation, and there are too many people latching onto Dodge just for what he says he wants to do, paying no attention to the merit of his method or accomplishments.
I relate everything that people want to happen to disc golf back to what happened in computer gaming the last 20+ years, aka "e-sports". If you didn't know, computer gaming as a profession is a very big thing and top players make
millions off it. Spectating is HUGE, hundreds of thousands of people watch major events online, and people fill arenas to watch live. It's very profitable for everyone involved, people running events and the sponsors who advertise, which is huge progress from where it came from.
Disc Golf in it's evolution seems to be about 10 years behind computer gaming. Both were/are very fringe and have no mainstream appeal to people who don't actively participate in the game(s) themselves. Both have user bases that are dispersed and need the Internet to tie them together to foster growth, but as that happens, something gets unlocked and they explode. Both the sport and the coverage are really relying on word of mouth to spread because of the isolation of it's community; you can't run ads on TV for either and pull in an audience.
I've yet to TD a disc golf tournament, but I did 'TD' a computer gaming LAN tournament 19 years ago, that was "huge" because it had over 100 people. It had a very small remote audience; the results were covered on gaming news websites and people around the world watched the demos after, which was the equivalent of what next day coverage is to disc golf. I've been through that experience of going around trying to find sponsors and asking for a prize or some cash in exchange for a modicum of exposure to this tiny ass little group of people. It's a very hard business proposition to make, but you need to be creative and you need to chip away at it and build. Patience is the biggest virtue.
The key with something that small at the time was the sponsors had to share your long term vision because they weren't getting value immediately; it's tricky but done right, you could build a relationship with them that was essentially "help us establish this now and you'll get preferential treatment later". That worked. Our earliest big sponsors sold computer hardware, made video cards, or were ISPs and that worked because they had a very direct connection to our players, and our success drove their success... so they were akin to your disc manufacturers in DG.
If I look back at the history of e-sports (I kind of hate calling it that, should be e-gaming, but that's the popular term), there are a few lessons I think DG promoters can borrow. Primarily, most of e-sports leaps forward between then and now came because of a combination of two things happening in parallel: (a) the participation base of computer games grew rapidly and (b) the viewing experience improved rapidly. (a) was the base of people you could potentially draw in, and (b) increased the percentage of those people who became spectators. You start with 1M people playing and 0.001% spectate pros, and 15 years later there's 100M people playing and 1% are watching. Numbers are made up that that's about how it went.
For disc golf, what I see happening is exactly the same , the participation (a) is growing rapidly and the PDGA is spearheading that. And the second crucial ingredient, viewing experience (b), we're seeing the rapid evolution of that with CCDG, Jomez, Smashbox and so on getting support and sponsorship from companies, and evolving coverage with more rapid turn around, increase cameras, better commentary, and live coverage increasing. THIS, above all else, is my bet for where to keep your eyes in order to grow the pro game, if that's the goal. We need the live coverage to merge with the quality of the edited coverage, with a crew in a truck throwing to multiple camera teams on multiple holes live. If I were in charge of a tour, this is where the investment is going.
Another lesson comes from what *did not* matter much in e-sports in hindsight, and I think people need to understand is over rated in disc golf too: prizes and prize money.
There always has been and always will be a best in the world, and upper echelon players, and there's no context around how good those best players are. Whether those guys toured and play full time, and/or are rich.... or they're the best of a community of entirely casual players who dedicate their spare time to the game. It doesn't matter; people always look up to them and want to watch them anyway. So long as they are close to each other, the competition is interesting. While the money does make the players better, it doesn't make the competition more or less entertaining. The point here is if Dodge goes out and is a sponsorship genius, and next year the top prize for every tour stop is 100K for the winner, those of us who already watch will perhaps watch with greater interest, but it will only marginally draw in more spectators. You won't have casual disc golfers suddenly watching a 4 hour long smashbox feed on Wednesday afternoon. We saw this in the early days of gaming, top prize went from prizes, to $2K, to $10K, to $50K and nothing changed, it was always the usual suspects at the tournaments regardless. And you'd watch the coverage and probably get to the end before you had any concept of what the prize was.
Anyway... /rant. I don't think Dodge is the savior of disc golf he thinks he is, there's no indication of that.
