(Video above features Chance Cozby before the 2019 WM Phoenix Open)
When your day job is running the most fun tournament on the PGA Tour, what do you do to relax? For Chance Cozby, the answer is to start one of the most fun cooking accounts on social media.
Cozby is the executive director of the Thunderbirds, who put on the WM Phoenix Open each year, and he’s become a celebrity away from the golf course with his 3piecesofpecan accounts on TikTok and Instagram.
The accounts feature videos of Cozby preparing quick and easy meals inspired from a lifetime of cooking. Cozby, whose brother Cary is the head pro at Southern Hills, grew up in Oklahoma watching his mom in the kitchen and his dad on the grill, so the videos show everything from his mother’s chicken marsala recipe to briskets cooked just right using only “three pieces of pecan” as a guide, as his dad taught him. Each video concludes with Cozby sampling the food and declaring it “damn good.”
“I do think what I do is unique. I would say for the most part it’s not very choreographed. We just started filming what we were going to eat for dinner,” said Cozby, who spent 20 years as vice president of sports development at Ping before taking over leadership of the Thunderbirds. “I’m just a father, a husband. I’ve got two kids. I’m very busy with work. I don’t really have a lot of time, but I love to cook, and I’d rather eat at home than go out.
“So now it’s evolved into where some of my best posts are, ‘Hey, here’s an easy Tuesday night dinner for your family that’s going to take you 30 minutes to make.’ ”
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The TikTok account started in January 2021 at the suggestion of Cozby’s son Catcher, who works the camera for the videos. Cozby has 827,500 followers on TikTok and 257,000 on Instagram. Those numbers – and the engagement Cozby gets from his videos – has received the attention of sponsors. In addition to one-off deals for products such as Fage Sour Cream, Cozby now has partnerships with Le Creuset and Peter Millar.
“I think what makes it so appealing is he makes just a lot of incredible recipes, recipes that people can identify with,” said Todd Martin, president of the golf division at Peter Millar. “But I also think that it’s the way that he’s filmed these and made it just very accessible and very approachable, which is really his personality. He’s just such an engaging, friendly person.
Cozby drew viewers to his accounts in the last year with weekly PGA Tour-related posts tying a recipe into that week’s tour stop, and he also gave a glimpse behind the curtain at last year’s WM Phoenix Open by sharing food videos from around the TPC Scottsdale course.
“Obviously that genre of Instagram, social media, TikTok cooking has kind of taken on a little bit of its own cult following, and he certainly is one of the more high-profile ones out there. Given his association with the game of golf and the WM Open and the Thunderbirds, we just thought it would be a natural fit.
“For brands today it’s all about eyeballs on content, and he certainly brought an audience that was very enthusiastic about his content, and we thought, Wow! It would be a natural association, because Chance has always been a great supporter of Peter Millar, and so we thought it would just be a nice avenue for us to partner with him on.”
Cozby drew viewers to his accounts in the last year with weekly PGA Tour-related posts tying a recipe into that week’s tour stop, and he also gave a glimpse behind the curtain at last year’s WM Phoenix Open by sharing food videos from around the TPC Scottsdale course.
“It was fun to do last year; people liked it,” Cozby said. “What’s player dining look like? What’s the media center look like?”
Cozby said he’ll probably share some similar things from this week’s tournament in his Instagram Stories, but he won’t be able to do too much because of the hectic pace of the week. Hectic, because if the Phoenix Open is wild on a normal tournament week (the last time they counted, the tournament drew 718,000 fans in 2018), just imagine how crazy it’s going to be with the Super Bowl in town at the same time as the golf tournament.
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“Demand is going to be incredibly high,” Cozby said of the event, which is the second of the PGA Tour’s “elevated purse” tournaments in 2023 and will see its total purse go from $8.2 million to $20 million. “We have a lot of dignitaries, we have a lot of NFL celebrities and athletes that are going to want to come to our tournament – the requests come in every single day – and they just want to go to the 16th hole to see it.”
The overwhelming interest in the stadium par-3 No. 16 has led to two changes there for this year. More than 15,000 square feet of hospitality space has been added with no additional tickets sold to give extra room for fans to move around, and a new three-level patio has been built in the northwest corner of the hole to give fans a fresh look at the island green of the reachable par-5 15th.
Fans also can expect an expanded Fan Zone between the clubhouse and the driving range, taking it from 1 acre to 2 acres of shopping, food and drinks; an upgraded Fairway House area at No. 12 with a 360-degree view of four holes; and a double-decker structure on the No. 18 tee for a great view down the 18th fairway.
“Every year we try to strategically look at the property and improve it,” Cozby said. “We’re not trying to have more people. We’re not interested in that. We don’t talk about attendance. The community really supports our event.”
Working to put on the best show possible for fans while also raising money for local charities ($10.2 million in 2022) and being a solid corporate citizen in Phoenix is a challenge all on its own. To add in a cooking side-hustle seems like a huge undertaking, but Cozby makes it all work.
“My focus is the Thunderbirds and the WM Phoenix Open; it’s not my cooking,” Cozby said. “I can put out one, two, three videos a week, and I can make those on a Saturday or a Sunday or a Tuesday night, and I’m like a lot of people in the world: I get up and I go to work.
“For me, I just really enjoy doing it. I love cooking, and I feel like it’s probably only done good things – in a small way – for the profile of our tournament. People know who I am for my cooking, and people know who I am with the WM Phoenix Open. It’s a cool solution of two things that I care deeply about.”
Cooking, leading the Thunderbirds and running the WM Phoenix Open turns out to be a “damn good” synergy for Cozby and 3piecesofpecan.