The anticipation killed Chaz Bowker.
When the YouTube Golf influencer finished filming Barstool Sports’ Internet Invitational, he knew they had the goods. Only one question remained.
“After the event, I was like, this is something absolutely unbelievable,” Bowker told co-hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz on the latest episode of the Subpar Podcast. “This is going to be something in the books that everyone is going to remember. The waiting game hit. I was like, when’s it coming out? When’s it coming out? Then, once it came out, it just went whoosh. It was amazing.”
When the event finally dropped three months after filming, Bowker, aka Chazzy Golf, had just over 80,000 followers on Instagram. Now, he has 169,000. Bowker, who is 4-foot-4, competed in the Short Stature Division in three U.S. Adaptive Opens was one of the breakout stars of Barstool’s viral golf tournament.
In the third episode, after the Luke Kwon drama had died down, Bowker burst onto the scene with a blistering scrambling performance that saw him sink $24,000 worth of putts in a win over Frankie Borelli and Good Good’s Bubbie Broders.
Kwon became the villain of the Internet Invitational when he slept through his 9:30 a.m. tee time in the second episode and cost his team a full point. Kwon showed zero remorse and said it wasn’t that serious. All of which set the YouTube Golf internet ablaze.
On a previous episode of Subpar, Barstool Sports’ “Fore Play” podcast host Sam “Riggs” Bozoian, who captained the team opposite of Kwon’s, explained how the viral villain moment took even those at Barstool by surprise.
“It’s funny because when we were looking back, after we finished, we’re all happy. We all thought it went well,” Bozoian said. “We all thought the drama was crazy. And looking back, I didn’t even think about the Luke Kwon situation. That’s how many other things happened and like, how good it gets. It didn’t even occur to me.
“I was the captain of the opposing team, so I was already happy that he slept in and I already said thank you to him, but I would go up to him again and be like, the best thing that happened was you sleeping in,” he continued. “It took over the internet. It sucks for him. And, like kind of a crazy amount of piling on for someone that just slept in. So I honestly feel bad for Luke Kwon to a degree, and he could have handled it better afterwards.
“We all could handle sh– better in our whole lives, so whatever. But for him to then go to like, this super villain because he just like slept in and then wasn’t overly apologetic, it’s like probably not worth how much sh– he’s gotten.”
(If you’re confused by any of this, GOLF’s Dylan Dethier has an excellent breakdown of the entire Kwon situation here.)
To hear more from Bowker, check out the entire episode below: