BEETON, Ont. — Zane Matthews usually wears a black Nike hat when he plays golf — like his favourite, Tiger Woods. But on Sunday, Zane’s choice of headwear was different. His favourite team was about to start their season.
“Oh, he had to go Leafs today,” Fraser Matthews said with a big smile.
Zane, at three, uses cut-down clubs from his father, Fraser. As soon as he could walk, he carried a club. The Matthews father-and-son duo were at The Club at Bond Head for a golfing experience they — and arguably everyone else in attendance — had never seen before. Four hundred people were set to play in a scramble for one hole together, a collaboration between Canadian golf retailer Golf Town and Random Golf Club, the brainchild of content host / influencer / entrepreneur Erik Anders Lang of Austin, Tx.
Matthews said Zane has been a member of the Random Golf Club — an inclusive golfing community — since he was one. Father carried son around on his shoulders through the day and Zane’s shots were cheered on by total strangers.
“Having the kid out here was really special for us,” Fraser said.
Golf Town originally engaged Lang and his team in May and the event has been several months in the making. The Random Golf Club hosts meet-ups at golf courses around the United States, but this marked the first time Lang had come to play golf in Canada. The Random Golf Club events usually feature groups of 50-100 playing in a “Mad Scramble” format, where everyone hits a shot — not at the same time, but pretty close — and the whole big group goes to the best shot of the bunch and plays in from there to record the best score possible.
It’s wildly and beautifully chaotic.
“The whole ‘Random Golf Club’ sits around this idea that you can’t really ‘plan,’” Lang said. “Sometimes, if you hold onto the plan too hard, you lose out on this cosmic magic that can occur if you were to just let go.”
At The Club at Bond Head, about 35 minutes north of Toronto’s Pearson Airport, the “400some” event was an all-day affair with the objective of being as inclusive as possible.
The morning saw four groups of about 100 people play five holes in that mad-scramble format. People that had met for the first time about 10 minutes prior were now fist-bumping with each fairway found.
“It’s all about surrendering to the flow of life. You just need to create an incubation space for this randomness to occur,” Lang explained. “That’s why the mad scramble works. That’s why the 400some is so successful.”
Lang has been the host of Adventures in Golf — a golf and travel program with hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube via Skratch (now owned by Pro Shop, a new digital media company founded by Chad Mumm, the executive producer of Netflix’s Full Swing docuseries) — for eight seasons, along with his other golf and golf-adjacent ventures.
Lang doesn’t feel like he’s an agent for inclusivity or responsible to grow the game, although his event-hosting body of work may say otherwise.
With a laugh, Lang said he had been playing golf for five years and hosting Adventures in Golf for two (he never even wanted to be on camera, he admitted) when he had his biggest memory-making moment. And it came at a time when he was “kind of over” everything about the environment the show had.
Lang went to the PGA Show — an annual gathering of tens of thousands of golf professionals, entrepreneurs, media, and more — in January almost a decade ago and was approached by a fan for the first time who thanked him for inspiring him to chase his dream in golf.
“He said, ‘I was watching your show, and I realized while watching your show that I [expletive] hate my job. So, I quit. And now I’m at the PGA Show.’ So, he began working in golf and his dream came true,” Lang said.
Lang’s objective is just trying to get more people to have more fun when it comes to golf. What can you do to increase the number of potential foursomes? Maybe you’re at an airport and see someone wearing a golf hat and ask them where they play? He hopes people will have more open-mindedness about the game. The 400some was a great example of that togetherness — and complete randomness.
“More people,” Lang said, “means more fun.”
The 400some was, unofficially, a world record of people teeing off on the same hole to play in a scramble. There was an indescribable energy from the day because even though, conceptually, the effort from Lang’s team and the tee-to-green playing of golf was pretty much the same as every other event they do, this one just felt different.
The 400some group did great, too, as someone hit a drive about 300 yards off the tee and then, amongst a group of a dozen-or-so other hitters, a young man chipped in for an eagle from about 30 yards away.
Men and women. A multitude of ethnicities, skill-levels, and like Zane Matthews proved, ages.
They all came out to play.
“Golf is a game to be played,” Lang said. “The online impression numbers don’t really indicate the concept of life. The 400some is ironic because it’s a number — but it’s way more than that.”
