The Hobbyist #19: An Interview with Skratch’s Gear Editor Ryan Barath

The golf sicko chats about life in Canada, tinkering, and testing clubs

Graphic Design by Thomas Euyang

Each week I’m convinced that said week’s Hobbyist star possesses my dream job. That’s kinda the fun thing about The Hobbyist. I have a lot of dream jobs, and since I can’t do all of them professionally, speaking with said professionals about them is the next best thing. At the end of each interview I say, ‘Man, it would be really fun to do that.’ Never have I said that louder (I might have even given a lil’ internal yell) than when I got off with Ryan Barath, the go-to gear obsessive in the golf industry. The only thing more fun than golfing is buying golf clubs, and Ryan’s job is to test new gear and decide what’s best. It is quite literally the most fun thing I could imagine doing.

The only scary things about being Ryan, I think, are that a) a lot of people listen to him and spend lots of money based on his opinions and b) he has limitless variability with what clubs to play. I am an impulsive buyer and very prone to tinker, and I think having access to limitless clubs would make it such that I never played any golf— instead swapping clubs in and out until my brain exploded. Perhaps it’s a good thing that I’m not a professional golf gear dude and instead just spoke with one.

Ryan has had an interesting career path to where he’s at now, the official gear editor for Skratch (an excellent website for which I also contribute!). Like everyone I speak to for The Hobbyist, he found his way to his current role by creating the job he wanted to have and pursuing it relentlessly, knowing there was an audience for his passion. He also had some really useful thoughts on professionalism, especially as a counterpoint to being a generally goofy person. I can relate! I thought this was an excellent conversation and I hope you do, too.

What was your introduction to golf?

Ryan Barath: I was around 10 or 11 years old. I think it was a year Tiger had won the Masters. Some of my friends that I played hockey with were like, ‘Do you want to go play golf?’ I asked my dad if we had any golf clubs and it turns out we had some out in the garage. I took ’em, went to the golf course, and thought it was kind of cool. I might've played a few more times. Later that summer, or the year after, I did a golf camp at my local muni and I was basically hooked.

There were two parts to it. I got to be outside and hang out with my friends. It was probably the cheapest, best babysitter my parents could have had. It was a safe, fun place to hang out with your buddies and you do chip offs for quarters and spend five bucks on a burger. We got dropped off in the morning and picked up at night. It’s the ideal way to spend 12 hours a day when you're 13, 14 years old.

Where in Canada did you grow up?

RB: I grew up in a small town on Lake Erie, called Port Dover. It’s a couple hours from Toronto.

You’re still in Canada, right?

RB: Yeah, I live in Hamilton, which is not far from where I grew up. It’s 35 or 40 minutes from downtown Toronto. We Hamiltonians like to say we're from Hamilton, but for people outside of the greater area, it’s just easier to say we’re from outside of Toronto.

When did you know that you wanted your career to involve golf?

RB: I never thought it would become this, and that’s the interesting thing about it. Being a writer was not something I expected to do. I hated writing. My parents used to have to pay me to write my book reports for school. I was so unmotivated to sit and write anything. It just came down to finding something that I enjoyed talking about.

I think about my kids now and whatever they might do might not even exist yet. Trying to keep that open mind is always the thing that's difficult. As soon as I was old enough to get a job, I started working at a golf course. I was cleaning carts, cleaning clubs. I just really liked being around the game. Then I learned about these tools that you can work on golf clubs with, and I wanted to get hands on with it. When the lawnmower broke I asked my dad if I could rip it apart. My dad loved it because it was three hours I wasn’t bugging anybody. It was three hours of peace for him, but it was me learning that you could use tools to take things apart and put them back together.

I was watching golf on TV and someone had mentioned that you can change golf club parts. My dad had shown me how to change grips, but I didn’t know you could change shafts and heads and do all these things. I was interested, but I also thought it could help my golf game. After school, my first employment opportunity was at a big box retail store, so I got to be around golf all the time.

Is that where you learned about club fitting?

RB: Yeah, I eventually took over a building position there as some type of assistant manager. Even then I didn’t know what I was going to do after that. I didn't foresee myself being a manager of a big box store. It just wasn't something that I really wanted to be involved in. I liked golf, so it was like, ‘How do I do this? How can I continue to evolve in this space?’ The modern media space wasn't something that I ever saw myself being in, but you put yourself out there, you create opportunity. Now I realize that the whole point of working at a big box store and eventually working at an equipment manufacturer was to give myself a bigger microphone. It was always, ‘How can I work with more golfers? How can I talk to more golfers?’

What did you do after working for a golf club manufacturer?

RB: I got very lucky. There was time and place and that’s half of it, too. There started being custom club building fitting studios, which were very high end and brand agnostic. It was all about using a launch monitor, working with a golfer and custom building clubs for that golfer. There was a facility opening up in Toronto. It was kind of the first of its kind in the greater Toronto area. I always liked building golf clubs and I was pretty good at it. Before them, it was either you go to the big box store or you just become someone who owns an independent shop. Those independent shops exist, but unless something really lucky happens, you're never going to make a huge business out of it. It's a very difficult business model.

One day, I literally ran into somebody wearing a shirt with a logo on it from one of the custom shops. He invited me to the shop and they needed a club builder. I went in, met everybody, and kept in very close contact with them knowing that they were in the process of opening up the whole facility. When they did, I was the very first hire that wasn't a partner or wasn't one of the founding members of the team. It was lucky timing, but it also coincided with the skillset that I'd already built .

I did that for a number of years, and then I was seeing this void in club building space websites. No one was really talking about club building the way that they should. No one was really educating people. I wanted to speak to a larger audience about how these things can really benefit the golfer. All that existed were forums, really.

So that led to working with GolfWRX?

RB: Yeah. I learned a lot from them. Then I worked at TXG with someone I'd worked with before, Ian Fraser, and helped them with the video side of things. I completely got away from writing and got into the media side of things—video production as well as being on camera for the first time. Golf.com came knocking and then I went over to Skratch, where I’m at today.

You have a whole little golf gear universe at home. How do you stop from just tinkering all the time?

RB: That's the fun thing. That's what I love about it. I am always tinkering. That’s what drives my curiosity to help answer golfers’ questions. It's very cool to take in what other people are thinking about. Any time I'm hanging out and the kids are in bed I'll go to my shop and tinker around. I'll literally just pull stuff apart. It might not always go in the golf bag right away, but I'll think about it and take it to the driving range. Or, I'll cut a grip off and build something new. I just keep myself busy.

How often do you get out to practice or play these days?

RB: During the winter, I try and go hit golf balls once a week. But I’m always picking up a golf club, getting a waggle going in the backyard or swinging around a weighted club, especially now as the season's kicking off. I'll usually play a couple times a week and maybe practice one more day if I'm lucky. Practice means maybe going to hit a few balls or chip and putt or something.

The weird thing is that it’s part of my job to test golf gear. I have to maintain a certain skill set to be able to communicate properly about new drivers or irons. There has to be a level of skill maintained to be able to communicate that. I don't feel like I need to hit a driver 400 yards, but I need to be able to hit the ball well enough to know what makes clubs different.

I’ve put myself in a position where I have the skillset to be able to do that, but also have mindfulness that I’m going to mishit shots. A lot of golfers are going to mishit shots. How do we bring those two things together and explain how to help a regular golfer? I also need to look at people who want to get technical. We can dive into those things and showcase how a piece of technology or an adjustable weight can help a golfer. I have to be skilled enough to be able to do all those things at the very least.

What's it like being in the golf space as it's gotten cooler and more popular? I imagine when you were first getting into this world, a lot of these cooler brands didn’t exist.

RB: When I was a teenager, we wanted to play golf for the same reason we played high school hockey: you got out of going to class. A nice day in the fall, who doesn't want to go out and play golf? Despite that, you’d still be looked at oddly walking to school on a Thursday with your clubs. It was like, ‘Oh, those are the golfer kids.’

Now, it's funny. I was hanging outside with my family the other day and one of our neighbors came up and asked, ‘Have you gotten out yet this year?’ They're holding their clubs. I get a lot of people who are newer to the game asking questions, people who are our friends. It's interesting to see the growth of the game from people who are either getting into it as an older person or getting into it as a young person, now that it’s mainstream and cooler.

I was 10 or 11 when Tiger won the Masters. That was a formative moment. We were so lucky. My perception changed so much on YouTube golf, being involved with Pro Shop and Skratch. I was at The Creator Classic when it was at TPC Sawgrass, and there are people and characters I don't necessarily follow all the time. I’m not their target audience. But being there and watching little kids ask Grant Horvat to sign a flag was so cool. These kids are sitting down and watching golf and consuming golf in a very different way than I traditionally consumed golf. It's hard for me to sit with my 7-year-old on a Saturday afternoon and watch golf, being bombarded with commercials and trying to explain what Blue Chew is to a 7-year-old. YouTube golf is an hour or 30 minutes. It’s a very different way to consume the sport. Seeing The Creator Classic and seeing these kids who love golf and love golfing personalities and know that they want to go play golf—holy smokes, this it’s a completely different world.

Do you have any time for leisure activities outside of golf, or is it the one thing you do when you're not raising a family?

RB: I watch and play golf all the time. I'm a complete and utter sicko. I watch hockey when the playoffs are on. I watch playoff sports in general because playoff sports are just always fun to watch. But I just love watching golf and keeping up with golf and playing golf and doing all that kind of stuff. Now as the kids are getting older, I get to go out and skateboard with them.

There are people like Ray Mate’ and Stephen Malbon. Ten years ago, I didn't really understand how golf and skateboarding work together. Whatever was in a golf magazine was what I thought was cool. I didn't know any better. I didn't think about anything differently. Now, there are people bringing unique fashion senses to golf. There is this very interesting skateboard culture behind it because it's personal. It's okay to look different. It’s okay to have fun with your friends and hang out and be a little silly. Metalwood, for example, takes the game seriously, but it’s fun, too. This is something I feel very strongly about. I take what I do and my job extremely seriously. I do not take myself seriously.

There's a very clear separation of what I do for work and my own personality. I talk about my work in a serious manner because people are asking me questions and they want an answer. I take that person's time and that person's question very seriously because they're looking for knowledge or they're taking the time to read something of mine or watch something of mine. They're there to look for serious information. Yes, I can interject weird little jokes and all kinds of silly things into my writing, but at the end of the day, the information that's there is designed to be super helpful and be informative.

By that same token, at the end of the day, I'm a four handicap golfer who gets to talk and write about golf. I can be silly. I'm a silly person. You can be silly, but your personality and your job are two very separate things. I meld them together, but they are very separate because I think it's important to be able to take your job very seriously and take the people that you interact with extremely seriously and professionally. Deep down, you don't have to be that person all the time.

Do you know what your bag going into the 2025 season is looking like?

RB: I don't know. That's the fun thing. I'm a big fan of my Vokey wedges. I’ve been using 'em for a long time. Their team has always been really cool and helpful to me. I'm going to have a driver for sure. I'm going to have a mini driver from somebody for sure. The last two years I've always basically used Srixon irons. Great. I have a titanium Cobra fairway wood from last year. It's hard to beat that.

Once you have something you like, it’s hard to beat that, but if I got as much free stuff as you, I would be tinkering nonstop.

RB: If I have my normal Sunday game or play with some friends, I have a bag that's pretty set. But anytime I go to the golf course when I'm playing with my wife. It's a mixed set of everything because it's my job to test stuff. I've used long putters. I've used normal length putters. It's an ever evolving matrix of things just because of the nature of what I do.