Duff Foreman Takes a Seat in the New Mexico Open Booth

An AI persona named Duff Foreman will sit on camera with Notah Begay III and Ryan Burr for nine hours of New Mexico Open coverage from Sept. 14 to 16. Tournament organizers say no professional golf event has put a live, unscripted machine in the booth with human hosts. The 54-hole event at Turtleback Mountain Golf & Resort in Elephant Butte carries a record $137,000 purse.

Foreman will not take a network chair. He will take a named seat on a stream a state open can pay for, then talk as if he belongs there.

Duff Foreman Gets a Chair Next to Notah Begay

A Sept. 8 statement from the New Mexico Open billed Foreman as an autonomous, conversational AI broadcast personality. He is supposed to jump into live talk as play unfolds, covering strategy, swing looks, weather, turf, player habits, history, and the Rules of Golf. Organizers contrast that with the usual AI layer of stats, graphics, and canned voiceover.

Begay, a four-time PGA Tour winner and NBC Sports and Golf Channel analyst, will share the call with Burr, whose credits include NBC, Golf Channel, ESPN, and FOX. Begay will also play in the 140-player field. In August he received the PGA Tour’s 2026 Payne Stewart Award. In early September, Turtleback named him founding ambassador and strategic advisor. The Albuquerque native won this championship in 1998. The bot will talk about pressure. Begay still has to feel it.

THE OPEN IN FOUR FIGURES

• The window: Nine hours of live coverage across three days, three hours per round.
• The money: A $137,000 professional purse, with $30,000 to the winner.
• The field: 140 players, including three men with 10 PGA Tour wins among them.
• The gate: Free admission for spectators at Turtleback Mountain.

Streams run on Turtleback’s YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram channels, plus KRQE NOW in Albuquerque and KTSM+ in El Paso. Sept. 14 and 15 go from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Mountain time. The final round goes from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sept. 16. Cory Armstrong, executive director of Sun Country Golf House, which administers the event for the Sun Country Section of the PGA of America, lined the bot up with television and shot tracing. “AI now gives us an opportunity to explore another way of explaining the game,” Armstrong said. “We’re looking forward to seeing how viewers respond to Duff during the championship.”

Who Built the Bot in the Booth?

Massachusetts company Gopher Hole Productions built Foreman as an AI-powered personality, then parked him in golf entertainment before anyone offered him a live tournament. The persona hosts X-treme Golf on YouTube, a series of staged adventures that opens with a tee shot from the summit of Mt. Everest. That is fiction with a face. The New Mexico Open is putting the same face next to two working broadcasters and calling it a first.

The product already talks like a colleague. In a television interview, Foreman praised Begay’s 59 on the old Nike Tour, his Presidents Cup record, and his New Mexico roots, then drew a clean split of labor. He brings “the measured layer,” the persona said. Begay brings what it feels like to stand on 18 with a one-shot lead.

Human ceiling meets machine floor. He’s felt it, I’ve measured it. And the viewer gets both.

Duff Foreman, AI broadcast persona, in a television interview

That line is the pitch. Office surveys keep finding that workers still trust their own judgment over AI tools, and this booth sells the same split as a feature. Begay is the ceiling. The bot is the floor. Viewers are told they get both, which is how a machine enters the room without asking anyone to fire the humans already in it.

The persona’s own account posted a teaser on Sept. 8, claiming golf had waited 600 years for a machine that “keep[s] score honestly.” Treat that as ad copy, not history.

Golf’s been waiting 600 years…

Took a machine to keep score honestly.

I’ll be doing exactly that at the 2026 New Mexico Open at Turtleback Mountain Golf & Resort.

Live Streaming September 14–16. ⛳ pic.twitter.com/kJQdBjgr3y

— Duff Foreman (@duffforemangolf) September 8, 2026

What the New Mexico Open Is Buying

The championship has been played annually since 1954. This is the 72nd playing, and Turtleback is in year two of a multi-year host deal through 2027. New Mexico True presents the event. Troon runs the golf operation. James Prendamano, founder and CEO of PreReal Investments and co-owner of the resort, said the stream is how people outside the region see the course, the mountains, and the water. The bot is part of that sales tape.

The purse tells the same story in dollars. Total prize money rose from $100,000 in 2025 to $137,000 this year. First place rose from $20,000 to $30,000, a 50% jump. Armstrong called it the largest purse in tournament history and maybe the strongest field. Kris Strauss, Troon’s executive vice president of global sales and marketing, said players follow good competition, good purses, and events that are run well.

THE PURSE BESIDE LAST YEAR

Three players in the field own 10 PGA Tour titles combined: Begay with four, Sean O’Hair with four, and Matt Every with two, including back-to-back Arnold Palmer Invitationals at Bay Hill in 2014 and 2015. O’Hair has more than 400 PGA Tour starts. Defending champion Aidan Thomas, a former New Mexico State golfer, won in 2025 in his first start as a pro and now holds conditional PGA Tour Americas status. The list also includes Travis Vick, Jin Jeong, Trevor Simsby, Shawn Stefani, and long-drive champion Maurice Allen, who won the 2018 World Long Drive Championship with a 393-yard smash. Details live on the Sun Country Section’s New Mexico Open championship page.

A $137,000 state open cannot buy a full network truck for four days. It can buy Begay, Burr, five digital pipes, and a persona that never files a per diem. Corporate AI pilots have spent the last two years adding AI beside existing jobs instead of rewriting the jobs. This booth is that habit with a headset on.

Golf Already Commentates Shots Without a Face

The new part is not analysis from a model. The new part is the name, the face, and the insistence that the model is a member of the team. The PGA Tour has already been feeding generative commentary through Tourcast, the shot-by-shot product that tries to cover players who never appear on the main feed. Scott Gutterman, then the tour’s senior vice president of digital and broadcast technologies, said the tour cannot hire enough people to cover every player on the course. The default, he said, is not to replace anyone. The priority is to get past the top 30 names the cameras already chase.

Ken Lovell, the tour’s senior vice president of golf technology, has said about 30% of shots in a typical PGA Tour event make the linear broadcast. At the 2026 Players Championship, the tour tested what it called Agentic Production on the par-3 3rd and 17th holes at TPC Sawgrass, using AI with ShotLink to capture every shot on those holes. The tour framed it as extra video for fans, media, and players, not a substitute for PGA Tour Live or the network show.

GOLF AI THAT NEVER GOT A NAME

• Tourcast talk: Generative commentary on every shot, built to scale past the players television can afford to follow.
• Agentic Production: Automated video of every shot on selected par 3s, tested at the Players Championship.
• Rules AI: A USGA tool trained on more than 25,000 real rules questions, with a hoped-for national rollout by spring 2027.
• Championship bots: A PGA of America chatbot drew joke questions during this year’s PGA Championship, then went dark; the PGA Championships app still ships a virtual assistant.

Craig Winter, the USGA’s senior director for the rules of golf, has said Rules AI is about answers as good as or better than staff experts. Anthony Santora, the USGA’s managing director for IT, has talked about a one-stop shop for golf questions. None of those tools has a childhood in Albuquerque. None of them sits next to Begay and calls him a pairing. Foreman does, and that is the product Gopher Hole is taking to a live sports audience.

The Sand Hills Revolt Against Placeless Golf

Golf architecture writer Garrett Morrison has argued that AI is not yet driving course design toward sameness, because most of the prominent architects still work by hand and by site. The dull stuff, in his telling, is older than chatbots. During the real estate boom of the 1980s and 1990s, large firms turned out repetitive, placeless courses lined by the same houses. Those layouts were not written by a model. They behaved like one anyway.

Bill Coore’s 1996 work at Sand Hills and Tom Doak’s Pacific Dunes in 2001 became the answer golfers actually wanted: site-specific, a little rough, built by people who would walk a dune before they drew a pond. Morrison has also pointed at Peter Flory, who helped rebuild the Lido in Wisconsin from LiDAR, as proof that the useful machine work is in drawings and data, not in the creative call. Consumer image models, Flory argued, make anyone a renderer. The output is often mid. Morrison has called renderings of Tom Fazio’s proposed East Potomac Golf Links redesign AI-tinged, slick, and stripped of surprise, the visual cousin of a chatbot essay on the green light in The Great Gatsby. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted a Fazio Design plan on May 14: a par-72, 7,660-yard 18-hole course, a short course, and a practice range. Whether those pictures came from a prompt or a human renderer, they look like the thing Morrison is warning about.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors chose slop as the 2025 Word of the Year, defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Morrison’s bet is that a slice of the audience will smell that aroma and pay more for the opposite. Golf already ran that experiment on dirt, not on GPUs. The question for Sept. 14 is whether a booth will do the same, or whether a friendly face short-circuits the revolt.

A Press Shop Will Book the Bot for Interviews

Golf writer Joseph LaMagna’s one-word reply to the booking was “shrink.” He wrote that giving a machine a face, a name, and a personality, then dropping it into a booth beside real people as if it were another teammate, feels off even when the stakes are a state open. Morrison reached for Jurassic Park: the scientists were so busy asking whether they could that they never asked whether they should. Begay, in the Sept. 8 release, treated the bot as a possible extra voice, not a stunt.

If Duff Foreman delivers what we’re expecting, he’ll become another voice in the broadcast, helping us explain strategy, analyze swings, consider changing conditions like weather and course setup, and answer questions in real time.

Notah Begay III, in the New Mexico Open announcement

The quieter line sat under a golf writer’s post about the livestream. Newsrooms, he noted, can interview Duff Foreman by calling the event’s public-relations firm. That is the second job. The first is banter on a YouTube stream. The second is teaching desks to book a persona the way they book a person. A parody account popped up under the name Ditch Duff Foreman, calling the bot a test pilot for replacing human announcers. Another golf writer asked, dryly, how many New Mexico GHIN dues had paid for the thing. Nobody from Gopher Hole or Sun Country has put a cost on the record.

Begay will try to beat that 140-player field for $30,000 while the persona explains the shots. Coverage starts at 9:30 a.m. Mountain on Sept. 14, on Turtleback’s feeds and on two regional apps, with a machine billed as one more member of the team.