LeBron James' golf obsession: the full timeline, his handicap, and guide to his YouTube channel
Who would have thought that LeBron James, of all people, would start a golf YouTube channel? In the summer of 2025, at the age of 40, LeBron declared himself addicted to the sport. In August 2026 he launched a YouTube channel about it, and the debut episode is him and five of his 2016 Cavaliers teammates playing a scramble in Scotland.
In LeBron's own words, his fondness for golf started with watching various golf YouTubers, like Bryan Bros, Grant Horvat, and Bob Does Sports. The only unusual part is the speed of what came next: fourteen months after the start of his obsession, the PGA Tour announced an event with his name on it.
In reality, LeBron's journey likely started with a combination of factors. His son Bronny has been playing some amount of golf since at least 2018, when he posted a swing video on Instagram. And in 2009, LeBron and Warren Buffett were photographed on a golf course in Sun Valley, Idaho. Buffett discussed their upcoming round of golf, but said that LeBron hadn't played the sport yet. It's unclear how much golf LeBron actually played that trip. Regardless, golf has been in LeBron's life in some capacity for quite some time, and it eventually rubbed off on him.
One heads-up before you go watch: from a language standpoint, plenty of the big golf channels keep it clean, but this one does not. Lots of curse words, early and often, especially from the main attraction himself.
LeBron's golf channel, at a glance
- Where: youtube.com/@LeBron, a personal account that sat dormant until launch day. It's his second channel, after the Mind the Game basketball podcast.
- Format: long-form, roughly ninety minutes, a full round with friends plus food, travel and a lot of talking. New episodes are published monthly, on Saturdays.
- Episode one: a 3-on-3 scramble at Castle Stuart Golf Links at Cabot Highlands in Scotland, filmed in June with six members of the 2016 Cavaliers, marking ten years since that title.
- How it went: 172,000 subscribers on day one, past 500,000 within three days, and millions of views on a single ninety minute video.
- His handicap: he told The Hollywood Reporter he plays to about a 22 handicap. On the evidence of episode one, that seems right. He's a beginner, like everyone featured in that video, save for J.R. Smith. If you're looking for great golfers going head-to-head, this isn't the channel for you (yet).
How LeBron got here: a timeline
What do we know about LeBron's golf odyssey? A list of events as we know them.
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July 2009
Warren Buffett plays golf with LeBron
The earliest hard reference I can find. At the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, CNBC's Julia Boorstin asks Buffett whether he and LeBron are going to play basketball together. Buffett's answer: "We're going to play golf, but not basketball." Asked whether LeBron is any good, Buffett says James told him he had never played. Buffett adds that Phil Knight had given LeBron a custom set of clubs.
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February 2010
A Sun Valley photo surfaces
LeBron James and Warren Buffett at Sun Valley, July 2009. Photo via Pop History Dig. A zoomed-in photo of Warren Buffett and LeBron is published. They're riding together in a golf cart. It doesn't reveal much, but does confirm James was on the course, getting exposed to the sport.
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October and December 2013
A Samsung ad, and Kevin Hart critiques his swing
LeBron James and Kevin Hart in the 2013 Galaxy Note 3 spot. Photo via iSpot.tv. The Galaxy Note 3 spot "Golf Lesson" pairs LeBron with Kevin Hart, who films LeBron's swing on the phone and uses its "Golf Mode" to pick apart his posture. The whole joke is that golf is the one thing LeBron cannot do. A shorter preview ran in October, so that is technically the first appearance. Golf forums at the time argued about whether the swing was genuinely that bad or acted that way on purpose.
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2018
Bronny's swing goes around
Bronny James, from the swing video that made the rounds in 2018. Photo via BronnyJr on Instagram. His son posts a golf swing to Instagram and it gets picked up by Golf Magazine and others. Golf was in the James house before it was LeBron's thing.
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October 2022
The Topgolf swing, and J.R. Smith's scouting report
Video of LeBron swinging at Topgolf circulates. On Golf Channel, J.R. Smith says he's not sure LeBron has the fluidity to move the ball around. That clip had legs: when LeBron posted swing videos three years later, PGA Tour winner Min Woo Lee replied that he had come a long way since Topgolf.
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July 4, 2025
"Day two of officially trying this"
LeBron James over the ball in July 2025, two days into playing golf. Photo via KingJames on Instagram. This is where the actual golf life starts. LeBron posts video and calls it his second day of officially trying golf. Steph Curry comments "Welcome. We've been waiting for you." LeBron's version is that at 40 he wanted to take up something he had never done and was terrible at.
He also says he had never played golf or followed the sport, which doesn't quite square with his 2009 hang with Warren Buffett, the 2013 commercial, and the 2022 Topgolf bay video. But I suspect he meant he never took it seriously before.
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August 3, 2025
Golf becomes a recurring thing
Video from a father-son outing, the two of them riding in a cart together. One month in, this is no longer a novelty.
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August 9, 2025
He declares himself addicted
LeBron James on the course in August 2025. Photo via @kingjames on Instagram. Five weeks after day two, LeBron says out loud that he's addicted to golf. Every golfer reading this recognizes the timeline.
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September 10, 2025
The family shows up on YouTube golf
Grant Horvat posts "Can I Break 60 with Bronny James?" The James name is now inside the YouTube golf ecosystem, a year before LeBron joins it himself.
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October 5, 2025
Golf tips during an NBA timeout
LeBron James gets golf swing advice during a Lakers timeout. Photo via @lcfresh on Instagram. Cameras catch LeBron getting swing advice from then-teammate Austin Reaves during a Lakers timeout. In an actual NBA game. This is the single best piece of evidence for how far gone he was by the fall of 2025.
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November 13, 2025
"I love watching YouTube golf videos!!"
He posts it unprompted, calls it random, and adds "SO COOL!" Nine months later he has a YouTube golf channel.
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April 2, 2026
The coming out party, with Bob Does Sports
LeBron James appears with the Bob Does Sports crew in April 2026. Image via Bob Does Sports on YouTube. LeBron makes his YouTube golf debut playing a nine-hole four-man scramble with Robby Berger and the Bob Does Sports crew. He says he has been playing about eight months, which lines up with the summer 2025 start. He describes getting the golf bug this way: "there's no getting out. it's like the mob, once you're in you're in."
He also lays out how he found the genre: Austin Reaves told him to watch Bryan Bros, then he found Grant Horvat, then Bob Does Sports. That is the pipeline, start to finish.
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August 15, 2026
The channel launches
LeBron posts: "Welcome to my YouTube channel! My life on and around the course." The debut is roughly ninety minutes of 3-on-3 scramble at Castle Stuart Golf Links at Cabot Highlands: LeBron, Richard Jefferson and Kevin Love against J.R. Smith, Channing Frye and Tristan Thompson. Rain cuts day one short, and only LeBron, Smith and Frye go back out the next morning to finish. It picks up 172,000 subscribers on day one.
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August 25, 2026
A PGA Tour event with his name on it
The PGA Tour and the LeBron James Family Foundation announce the LeBron James Family Foundation Invitational, set for July 6 and 7, 2027 at Firestone Country Club's South Course in Akron. It pairs competition with mentorship for kids from his I PROMISE program.
Fourteen months from "second day of officially trying this" to a Tour event bearing your name is, even by LeBron standards, a pace.
The LeBron James golf glossary
20 entries and counting- Austin Reaves
- LeBron's teammate while with the Lakers. LeBron was watching golf content, and Reaves pointed LeBron toward Bryan Bros golf, which led to Grant Horvat, which led to Bob Does Sports. Then, a golf channel of his own. Reaves was also caught on camera giving LeBron swing tips during a timeout in an October 2025 game.
- Bob Does Sports debut
- April 2, 2026. LeBron's first appearance on a YouTube golf channel, a nine-hole four-man scramble with Robby Berger and the crew. It is the moment the golf world understood this was not a phase. If you need a primer on that show's own language, I have one: the Bob Does Sports glossary.
- Bronny James
- LeBron's son, and the family's original golfer. Bronny's swing was making the rounds on Instagram and in Golf Magazine back in 2018, seven years before his father picked up a club, and he turned up in a Grant Horvat video in September 2025.
- Bryan Bros
- The Bryan Bros are two professional golfers and prominent social media content creators: Wesley Bryan and George Bryan. They grew up in South Carolina and both played golf for the South Carolina Gamecocks. LeBron mentioned that their YouTube channel was recommended by Austin Reaves. It seems to have been a formative stage of LeBron's golf journey.
- Channing Frye
- Member of the 2016 champions and the chief antagonist of episode one. Co-hosts the Road Trippin' podcast with Richard Jefferson & Kendrick Perkins.
- "Cleveland, this is for you!"
- LeBron's words after the 2016 title. In episode one, Channing Frye taunts LeBron with the phrase, but also botches it in the process, and gets corrected.
- Cutaways during golf shots
- The payoff in any YouTube golf video is watching golf shots and following the tracers.
For some reason in the first video, many golf shots are aborted immediately, so they can focus the view on the golfer's reaction.
I found this to be really annoying. Just follow the formula from every other YouTube channel, and focus on the golf shots.
They inexplicably did this for both good and bad golf shots.
Some examples: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
- "Disgustingly sorry"
- His own description of how bad he was when he started. The full framing, from the Bob Does Sports episode: at 40 he wanted to pick up something uncomfortable that he was disgustingly sorry at, and he found it.
- Firestone
- Firestone Country Club in Akron, host site of the LeBron James Family Foundation Invitational scheduled for July 6 and 7, 2027, on the South Course. A Tour venue with real history, twenty minutes from where he grew up.
- Grant Horvat
- A golf influencer and content creator. He's one of the most prominent figures in the YouTube golf community. He started with the Good Good crew, but forged his own path in 2022. LeBron mentioned that Grant's channel was a favorite of his. Grant also posted a video with Bronny in September 2025 titled "Can I Break 60 with Bronny James?"
- Handicap
- A golf handicap is a way of measuring one's ability on the golf course. The lower the handicap, the better the player. LeBron told The Hollywood Reporter he plays to about a 22 handicap. For a man roughly a year into the game, that is respectable. Expect this number to drop over time.
- "It's like the mob"
- His answer, on Bob Does Sports, to what getting the golf bug is like: there is no getting out, it is like the mob, once you are in you are in. Many a golfer can relate.
- J.R. Smith
- LeBron's Cleveland Cavaliers teammate, two-time NBA champion, and the best golfer in episode one. Interestingly, Smith played college golf at North Carolina A&T after his NBA career ended; check out his college profile. A talented golfer, sure, but he also took his studies seriously, being named North Carolina A&T's Academic Athlete of the Year.
- Kevin Love
- On LeBron's side of the scramble in episode one, and in roughly the same place with the game: new enough to be visibly furious with himself, invested enough to keep grinding. The recent-convert energy is a lot of what makes the video work.
- Kyrie
- Kyrie Irving, absent from the 2016 reunion episode despite being central to the 2016 title. His absence was noticed immediately and discussed at length in the comments.
- Mind the Game
- His basketball podcast, and the reason the golf channel is technically his second YouTube venture rather than his first.
- "My life on and around the course"
- From his launch post, and as close to a mission statement as the channel has. It explains the format: the golf is the frame, but the food, the travel and the vibes are paramount.
- Richard Jefferson
- Won the 2016 title in his sixteenth NBA season, now a broadcaster and podcaster. In the middle of episode one, he and J.R. Smith talk about not having made peace with walking away from basketball and losing the identity that came with it. It's a stretch people kept bringing up afterward, and it is barely about golf.
- Topgolf clip
- October 2022 video of LeBron swinging at Topgolf that circulated widely and drew skeptical reviews. Three years later it became the benchmark people measured his improvement against.
- Tristan Thompson
- Thompson arrived in Scotland having essentially never played, and the episode gets a lot of mileage out of it. Somehow he actually managed to hit a tee shot backwards, something I thought was against the laws of physics. The universal experience of bringing a total beginner to a links course, except filmed in 4K.
This glossary will grow with the channel. If you catch a running bit I have missed, or you know the story behind something in these videos, let me know.
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