The Rise, Fall and Rise of the Bryan Bros

The following conversation was recorded from the patio of Solina Golf Club outside of Columbia, South Carolina—the club where Wesley and George Bryan IV grew up, which they own and operate today. The Bryans were junior-golf phenoms, played collegiately at South Carolina and eventually made the PGA Tour. Along the way, they became pioneers of the YouTube golf movement, amassing hundreds of thousands of subscribers and hundreds of millions of views. But none of it happened in a straight line. From Wesley’s injuries derailing his career to George nearly going broke (twice) to a legal battle with the tour they so desperately wanted to be a part of, there has been plenty of drama behind the scenes. For the first time, the brothers sat down to explain their winding road from one career PGA Tour win between them to becoming two of the most recognizable golfers in the world. —The Golfer’s Journal

This conversation has been lightly edited for length. Watch the full interview in TGJ Podcast 198:

WESLEY BRYAN: I don’t remember it at all, but I’m sure we were an annoyance.

GEORGE BRYAN IV: Yeah, the first time we came out [to Solina], we were barely 5 years old.

WESLEY: Our pops was the first head pro out here.

GEORGE: I do remember watching movies and TV in a little room while Dad worked. This place really is home for us.

WESLEY: I don’t remember not having a golf club in my hands.

GEORGE: Exactly. And every time I had one in my hand, I was happy. I loved everything about golf—just going to the course, getting into the ball pit, picking up balls to then go to the range to hit. Never a bad time. And by [age] 6 or 7, I was playing. Think I played in my first tournament when I was 7.

WESLEY: I remember golf being another outlet for George and [me] to be competitive and bicker and fight and hug it out and cry it out and vent to Mom and Dad, but also to celebrate each other’s successes. Whether it was video games or pickup basketball or even the little Nerf basketball hoop in our room, we were going to be super competitive, and our pops dragged us to the golf course just about every day, and yeah, we fell in love. For me, I first fell in love with the competition aspect with George—and then it just happened to be that we got relatively good relatively quickly, which we carried on to junior golf, amateur golf, college golf and, ultimately, to professional golf. And then YouTube.

GEORGE: I was two years older [than Wesley] and always ahead—physically, I was a little more gifted than most. I was pretty long and hit the ball really nice. But when I was about 14 or 15, he started creeping up on me. And once I was a senior in high school, he was a sophomore, and it got tighter. I was still better, but the gap had closed.

WESLEY: It was a running joke for the longest time that it didn’t matter what I was doing: George would birdie the last hole every single time to beat me. And a lot of people who know us from the YouTube thing would probably say that now I’m more of a closer, and George is the one who melts.

GEORGE: Yep.

WESLEY: But back in middle school, high school, college and shortly thereafter, if I had a one-shot lead on the last against him, my best-case scenario—best case—is that we would have a tied match.

GEORGE: The only thing I loved at that point was golf. It was the only thing I could see myself doing for a job. I was either going to play on the PGA Tour or teach golf like my dad.

WESLEY: George was always by far the best player in his age group, from 10 through 18. And then he goes to college and is a three-time All-American. For me, I was just in the conversation in the age groups. But I knew by 16 or 17 that my good was really good. My bad was still really bad, but I knew when I got it rolling that I could make a career out of golf. I didn’t have a lot of success through college or even on the mini tours, but I still just had so much belief that I could eventually make it. So yeah, we had very different paths.

The day I turned pro, George was going through a slump. He had missed a lot of cuts on the mini tours and had basically been bled dry financially. And I tee it up in my first event and play great. George makes the cut and then surges up the leaderboard, and we end up in the next-to-last group. Both [of us] have a chance to win our first event. And I was like, “Man, I thought this was going to be my time. But all it takes is me turning pro, and George is suddenly back.” He played great that summer. 

GEORGE: Yeah, but then, around 2013, the game was never like it was in college. Instead of trying to get better, I was like, “Why am I not playing as well as I was then?” So you kind of start questioning things. And then I think I missed maybe seven or eight cuts in a row. At that point, I’m basically out of money. We’re starting to have those conversations like, “The bank account’s low, sponsorships are kind of done…”

WESLEY: And you still had Q-School coming up in fall—that was going to be another five to 10 grand.

GEORGE: Right. So I started thinking I could caddie here and there, and maybe I’ll give some lessons to help pay for it. It was a multitude of things that went wrong. I tried too hard to be a pro golfer instead of just playing. Show up to tournaments knowing how good you are, but shooting 71s and 72s and just not doing what you needed to do to get [to] that next level. Then you run out of funds and you’re like, “Well, shoot. What do we do?”

Meanwhile, Wesley was playing nice. I didn’t know how long it would actually take for him to get to the Tour, but you could see it was a brand of golf that was going to translate. Where mine at that time would only translate to a decent day. On my home course.

WESLEY: But you fast-forward a little bit, and George had missed Q-School for five or six straight years, and I’d also missed Q-School for three straight years. Now George is broke, I’m broke, and we’re trying to figure out how to somehow stay in golf. I had one deal that was paying me $2,500 a quarter; TaylorMade absolutely took a flier on me out of college. But that’s just one week of expenses.

GEORGE: We had no idea what to do. I had a good college career, but nobody was signing a failed mini-tour player. Then we saw these two kids on the internet. I still know exactly what the shot was.

WESLEY: Yep, it was two kids at a driving range.

GEORGE: It was the SportsCenter Top 10 No. 1 play. It was a guy chipping it and the other guy hitting it out midair. And it went crazy on the internet.

WESLEY: They looked like golfers, but you could tell it wasn’t that high of a skill level. We’d never done any kind of trick shots like that before, but I said, “I think we can do this—it doesn’t look that hard.” So we just decided to try, and we found that, for some reason, I had a talent to hit a ball out of midair. And George was like, “I think we’ve got something.”

GEORGE: We re-created that same shot and just posted it on my personal Instagram account. Suddenly, more people liked that video than all my other posts. Then I noticed it had more likes than I had friends. I had people coming up to me at church, saying, “That video was so cool.” So we decided to do another one where we did a handful of shots, and same thing: It goes kind of viral within the golf world. And now we’re watching Dude Perfect and Brodie Smith, content creators doing sports stuff. But there was no golfer doing just golf stuff.

WESLEY: So George decides to start a YouTube account, and we put our first video on it. We’ve got no subscribers, no nothing. And it gets, like, 50,000 views.

GEORGE: I have no money. I’m broke. I have the time to at least make the effort to see what this is, because who knows? I have nothing to lose. But Wesley was still pursuing pro golf, so I’d show up to where he needed to be to make sure he could practice and prepare, and I would handle all the video stuff. Three or four videos in, we got our first email saying, “Hey, we’ll pay you X amount to license your video.”

WESLEY: And we said, “Uh, really? Yeah, license our video. Go for it!”

GEORGE: Very shortly after, we did an actual brand deal for this company that wanted us to use its driver. I found the contract the other day—it was for $200.

WESLEY: We were like, “We made it!”

GEORGE: That really spurred us to keep doing it—keep putting out fun videos that people are enjoying, and maybe other brands will reach out. From there, it snowballed. We did a shoot with Golf Digest, then got hooked up with GoPro.

WESLEY: GoPro sent us cameras and said, “How y’all would normally shoot a video, just send us the footage and we’ll put it on our channel.” And at that time, shoot, GoPro was popping off 10-, 20-million-view videos. We knew this could be a huge break for us. 

Then we signed our Callaway deal, and for the first time, I felt financial freedom to be able to chase pro golf without worrying about missing a cut here or there. But there were a lot of obligations—it was a huge time commitment. At that point, we had to be serious about elevating our content to give Callaway some sort of value.

Meanwhile, my game had really improved. I didn’t make it through Q-School, but I wasn’t missing any cuts on the mini tours. Then it really turned a corner when the trick shots came. But now we’re getting pulled in a million different directions. I had no time to play in a lot of tournaments, yet when I did, I still played great. So I was caught in the middle between a viable path—this was the first tangible business we’d ever had—and my dream of playing on the PGA Tour.

Then we hit some real tipping points. We knew if we wanted to go all in on this business, it was going to be a very fruitful decision. Then I got through Q-School that fall. And I’m sitting there thinking to myself, “There is just no way I can play a full schedule, traveling 25, 30 weeks on [the Web.com Tour, now known as the Korn Ferry Tour], and maintain this trick-shot thing.”

And then I’ve got George over here, and he’s like, “I need you! You’re the one who hits the ball out of the air!”

GEORGE: I figured the only way to keep this thing going was to caddie for him. I could document his story—post on Instagram, Snapchat at the time, make YouTube videos, vloggy stuff. I essentially took a pay cut to do that, but I knew this was the way that we could stay relevant.

WESLEY: So we go down to Panama for my first event, and we almost win the golf tournament. From there, we go to Bogotá and miss the cut, but it’s fine because I already felt like I accomplished a dream. Then there is a huge break between the second and third events, so we go home and get back on doing trick-shot stuff and filming content because we have contracts that we are obligated to fulfill.

And in my third event, we find ourselves with a chance to win. I come to the last hole with a one-shot lead, hit a couple of amazing shots, make par and win it. That basically locks up my PGA Tour card. And I’ll never forget that we had a shoot scheduled that Monday in Dallas. 

GEORGE: So we immediately jump in the car and drive five hours to Dallas.

WESLEY: I’ll tell you what: We took a left out of the golf course, and there was a Taco Bell there on the right, and we hammered it.

GEORGE: He kept playing great after that, and I will stand firm that the trick shots are what got him to that level.

WESLEY: That’s right.

GEORGE: So he keeps playing great that year, wins again, No. 1 on the money list.

WESLEY: And George’s golf had progressed and got a lot better during the last few months too.

GEORGE: I’m booking my flight to Kansas for the last event of the year, and Wesley interrupts me and says, “You’re not caddying for me. I already found my caddie.”

WESLEY: Basically, “You’re fired.”

GEORGE: I was like, “You’re just going to dump me?”

WESLEY: I couldn’t rest my head on the pillow thinking that I could get in the way of George’s playing career. I thought, “If I’m out here doing this on this tour, there’s not a doubt in my mind that he could do the same thing.” And also, to be quite honest, George wasn’t an unbelievable caddie.

GEORGE: Oh, please. Anyway, he wins again in Kansas, and that’s where the weirdness starts again.

WESLEY: Now the trick-shot stuff is completely, 100% gone. I’m on the PGA Tour at this point and definitely cannot maintain it.

GEORGE: I knew that. I was trying to come to grips with it, but I didn’t want to. We had developed a very successful business, and now he wanted no part of it. But coming into [the 2016-17] season, Wesley was playing some of the best golf of anyone in the world. He has a bunch of top 10s, including Riviera, then he goes to Harbour Town and wins it.

That was the point, I think, in his mind [where he decided] he needed to be a PGA Tour–only player. He was a top-40 player in the world. He kind of turned more into trying to be like a Justin Thomas or a Jordan Spieth. Because they were his peers, and he was on that similar track.

WESLEY: I went from doing trick shots and never playing in a PGA Tour–sanctioned event to a top-50 player in the world in less than a year. But I would walk up and down the range and know that I didn’t have what some guys had. There is a huge talent deficiency between me and watching someone like Rory McIlroy. I knew there was nothing in my body that was ever going to produce something like that. So I knew I was living on borrowed time, and I wanted to maximize as much as I could out of it. 

GEORGE: One thing I will give myself credit for is that I knew that if I stopped posting, it would all go away. At that time, I was on [what is now the PGA Tour Americas, a level below the Korn Ferry Tour], so I would try to just document my journey through pro golf, basically posting these awful YouTube vlogs. I thought that if something ever happens [and pro golf goes away] and we come back to this, I want it to be at least somewhat relevant and consistent.

But I was stuck in this weird middle ground. Wesley clearly didn’t want anything to do with Bryan Bros, and I didn’t blame him. So, fast-forward, he gets some injuries, and his golf game goes away a little bit.

WESLEY: No, it just vanished.

GEORGE: So, around 2019, all the trick-shot money is now gone, and my pro-golf dream is hanging by a thread.

WESLEY: George is broke again.

GEORGE: Yep. Now it’s 2020, I’m married, want to have a family, and [I’m] thinking, “What am I going to do?” At this point, I’m caddying at Sage Valley, and some of the guys out there start telling me that people playing golf on YouTube is becoming a thing.

I decided not to do trick shots—just to film myself playing golf. I got a tripod, and my first video said, “Hey, guys, welcome back to the channel. This year is going to be my journey to Q-School.” And I just played nine holes. The first one did something like 8,000 views, but the comments were like, “I love this!” and “I want to see you chase it!” I thought, “We’ve got something again.”

For the second one, I noticed some of the other guys out there were doing challenge-type things. So I played nine holes with a 7-iron.

WESLEY: Around this time, I’m busted up, have had all these injuries, a thousand missed cuts. And I’m watching this stuff and realizing I’ve been cut out of the family business! Finally, I asked George, “At some point, are you going to ask me to come back on my channel?” 

GEORGE: I remember that phone call—something had flipped. Maybe it’s because he had kids.

WESLEY: Oh, George. I was always a softy.

GEORGE: I could hear the old Wesley. In my head, I was fist-pumping, thinking, “We’re back!”

Then COVID comes, and there is no PGA Tour golf. I told Wesley, “Let’s just me and you start a match series. I’m a pro golfer, but you’re a current PGA Tour player, and there’s none of them on the internet or TV right now. Maybe people will want to tune in?” And that first match went silly.

WESLEY: Hundreds of thousands of views. At some point, we knew that the trick-shot thing would run out. But me and George having fun playing against each other, with all the banter and highs and lows that golf brings? That felt sustainable. That was when I started to see that this is something that we could easily legitimize.

GEORGE: That, and also going behind the scenes on our journey. Let’s bring eyeballs on what a PGA Tour player does not only at events but on off-weeks as well. Also, my story—after the first few months of this, I had enough money to maybe do Q-School again. So it’s not only us goofing off, but also having people come with us [as] we try to make it.

Around 2023, I started playing some good golf, made second stage of Q-School. Our brand was growing, and Wesley was out on Tour. I thought maybe a tournament would give me a spot. I felt like my game was at least good enough to be in the conversation.

WESLEY: I had developed a good relationship with people over in Bermuda [via the PGA Tour’s Butterfield Bermuda Championship], and we started talking to them about a huge week of content from us and exemption for him. So it works out [with both of us playing in the 2023 event], and one of the coolest moments of my life was when I finished on Friday and came back to watch George make the cut in his first PGA Tour start. [Wesley also made the cut. —Ed.] It just felt like a life dream come true. He got his chance to play on the PGA Tour and then validated that his game is good enough to compete at the highest level.

GEORGE: I’ll never forget how nervous I was and how insane it felt on the first tee. We had built this brand from nothing to highlight our professional golf journey and now here we were, actually playing in a PGA Tour event.

WESLEY: Our audience is different from the mainstream PGA Tour audience. A subset of them truly understand PGA Tour–level golf, but not all of them do. So it was great for them to see George validate what I had been telling them. I knew he could compete; his game is built for bigger, longer, harder golf courses.

GEORGE: To make the cut was really special. Wesley got his, and for a while, I thought, “Well, it didn’t work out for me, but it’s fine. I have a family and this business now.” But that PGA Tour dream still never died, so it felt good to go out and do it.

The next year [at the 2024 Bermuda event], we got paired together again, and I’m still bitter about it. My game was just trash.

WESLEY: But it was still good! If you would have just had a pulse around the greens, you would have made the cut, no problem. [George missed the cut; Wesley made it. —Ed.]

GEORGE: So now I’ve made it into the second stage of Q-School the last two years. My game is trending to where if I make the final there, I’ll get a Korn Ferry Tour card. The dream is still not dead yet. 

WESLEY: And I know exactly what you’ll do if you make it: You’re gonna say, “I don’t care about where I finish on the money list. I just want to go play events when I want to play them, and create content around them because I’m still doing YouTube full time.”

GEORGE: Yep.

WESLEY: Everything has completely shifted now: All I want to do is create content. If you were to tell me I’d win 10 more times on the PGA Tour, I still wouldn’t give up the YouTube side of things. I’m completely at peace, even if I disagree with the decision the Tour made. [In April 2025, the PGA Tour suspended Wesley for playing in a LIV Golf–backed content-creator event. —Ed.]

To be honest, I felt like George and I were in the crosshairs of the PGA Tour well before the LIV stuff. We always wanted to tell the story of the PGA Tour, to be an asset—to say, “Hey, this is cool.” But we quickly saw it shift into, “I think these people are my friends, but everything they’re doing and saying shows they see us as competition. They wanna suppress what we’re doing, when what we want [is] to amplify what they’re doing.” [The PGA Tour has strict regulations on which types of video can be posted around its events. —Ed.] So there was definitely tension well before [2025].

GEORGE: No active PGA Tour player had an active YouTube account back then. So the Tour didn’t quite know what to do with him.

WESLEY: We had a lot of concepts. We were trying to innovate in our space and do the best job that we could do to provide the best product for people to watch. And it was just roadblock after roadblock after roadblock. And I thought, “I don’t think that [the PGA Tour] truly cares about what I’m doing on that side, when all I’m trying to do is promote the game we love.”

Today, I don’t care about playing on the PGA Tour like I once did. I still care about the PGA Tour and what it can do for the good of the game as a whole. I want to see the best players in the world on unbelievable golf courses, and a lot of my buddies are playing out there. I want to see the PGA Tour thrive.

But now I don’t care as much about competing there as I care about competing with George on YouTube. Sounds completely ridiculous, but that’s what I want to do. We know that our audience isn’t wrapped up in my PGA Tour performance.

GEORGE: Yeah, but it sure helps.

WESLEY: You’re right. But if I were never to play again on the PGA Tour, it’s not like the majority of our audience will say, “Oh, I’m done with that guy.”

GEORGE: You never know. Then you might make more videos.

WESLEY: True. At some point, I’m gonna turn people off.

GEORGE: I don’t really know what’s coming next, but I do know we’re going to keep telling our story and help usher in a new generation, because without golf, we’re not here. Dad showed us the game, and it’s given us everything—so we want to show how amazing the sport is and do our best to give something back.