Not many people can say they’re actively working their dream job. But when Chad Mumm stands along the fairways of Augusta National, creating content with some of the best golfers in the world, he can safely declare that he is.
That’s not to say it was an easy find.
“I always wondered, ‘Am I ever going to get that breakthrough?’” Mumm says. “Career progression is a lot like climbing a staircase. You can try to skip steps, but you’ll just end up tripping yourself. Just try to step on every stair and enjoy the walk.”
In founding the golf media company Pro Shop, which produces video content for the PGA Tour and beyond, Mumm ABJ ’08 combines his two biggest passions: golf and multimedia production, something he cultivated at UGA.
“What we’re doing at Pro Shop is the culmination of all the things that I’ve learned in my career. I was always a creative person, and Grady has done an amazing job of training people to do what I do now,” he says.
When Mumm graduated, he had already started his professional career. His senior spring at UGA consisted of a daily commute to Atlanta for a full-time editing gig at Cartoon Network. So when the 2008 financial crisis hit right when he moved to New York, he already knew how to grind through tough times.
“It was hard to find work and to keep hustling my way through a bunch of little odd jobs. I always felt like I was behind everybody else,” he says. “I was looking at friends who had careers or families, and I was just doing little internet videos.”
It wasn’t until he was asked to produce AOL’s Engadget Show (like Inside the Actor’s Studio but for mid-2000s tech) that he got a big break. That Webby award-winning show launched him into the digital media world. He co-launched the technology news website The Verge, which led to the creation of Vox Media. There, after multiple roles, he became the company’s youngest vice president and eventual chief creative officer.
From iPhones to YouTube to Netflix, Mumm witnessed the rapid evolution of the technology landscape and how to adapt to it. Although he earned Emmys and the honor of being named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30, as a longtime fan of the sport that connected his family, a project focused on golf remained in the back of his mind.
Even though he was established in the media world, Mumm still had his fair share of ideas shut down. When he moved to Los Angeles in 2015, he was reminded he couldn’t always score a hole-in-one.
“Nobody was buying my ideas, and that was a big wake-up call for me because I had put all of our energy into one project, and this company probably had 100 things on their slate,” Mumm says, “But then I got Explained on Netflix. After that, my team I built in L.A. sold another four shows in the next six months, and we were off and running.”
Some of his other TV show concepts, however, were filmed multiple times by multiple networks and never aired.
So when Netflix greenlit a golf docuseries he had always dreamed of making, Mumm was brought full circle. Full Swing goes behind the scenes of the lives of notable PGA Tour golfers.
“I just kept at it and was willing to never give it up. The fact that the show turned into such a big hit was something that I don’t think anybody was expecting,” Mumm says.
Now a producer on more than 50 TV shows, as well as the sequel to the Adam Sandler golf classic Happy Gilmore, Mumm can’t imagine a more perfect combo for him than his favorite work and his favorite sport.
And for those young content creators who think their idea will never birdie, Mumm says there’s more to learn from golf than just sand traps and polos.
“I do think about it as a great microcosm of life,” he says. “Oftentimes, you’ll get handed bad breaks. Sometimes those bad breaks are the result of your poor decision making, but sometimes it’s just a bad bounce. It’s how you recover from those that define you.”
This story will appear in the Fall 2025 issue of Georgia Magazine.