Traveling Golfer didn’t start as a television show. It started as words on a page.
Tony Leodora began telling these stories in newspaper and magazine columns, long before a camera was ever involved — golf courses, the people who ran them, the places worth traveling for. That writing found its voice on the air as Golf Talk Live Radio, and from there it kept evolving: from print, to radio, to video, to a full television show. By the time Traveling Golfer landed on NBC Sports, it had already spent years earning the instincts that make a golf travel story worth telling — instincts you don’t get from a marketing plan, you get from doing it for decades.
Traveling Golfer spent the next ten years on NBC Sports across the Northeastern U.S. — a run that turned a newspaper golf column’s television descendant into appointment viewing across an entire region, and turned Tony Leodora and Traveling Golfer into a trusted voice for golfers deciding where to play next.
A Changing of the Guard
When Tony announced he was ready to retire and sell the show, the decision was easy for Dustin and Jeff Gilder. Having been involved in the production of the show for the past few seasons already, the decision to buy just made sense — the future, that Tony saw years before, was full of opportunities to tell golf travel stories.
We agreed to a two-year transition to give Tony’s audience and show sponsors the runway to make the show’s next chapter feel like a continuation rather than a replacement.
The Day We Walked Off the Cliff
Traveling Golfer’s run on NBC Sports came to an end when (after 3 years of deliberation) we pulled the show effective December 31, 2025. Internally, it’s remembered as the day we walked off the cliff — the day the safety net of a national sports network disappeared, and the show had to answer a question it had never really had to ask before: what are we, if we’re not “a show on NBC Sports”?
The answer turned out to be bigger than the question. Freed from a single network slot, Traveling Golfer stepped up into a bigger distribution challenge than any single network could offer: a golf travel network — a flagship show, an owned digital home, a news and press arm, and distribution across every platform golfers actually spend time on, all working together. Leaving the network didn’t shrink the reach. It enabled an opportunity for a much wider and more diverse distribution.
What’s Stayed the Same
Through print, radio, television, a change in ownership, and a network exit, one relationship never moved: Yuengling has been a partner since the very beginning — sponsoring Tony’s Golf Talk Live Radio show before Traveling Golfer even existed, and staying on through every format change since. That’s a relationship that predates the show itself, and it says something no pitch deck can: Traveling Golfer relationships are built to last.
Cheers! Yuengling, the official beer of Traveling Golfer.
