Welcome to Issue #22
" Forget your opponents; always play against par.”
Sam Snead
What’s on my mind this week
That time of the year when brands bring out their ‘Azalea’ and ‘Magnolia’ limited editions, crop tops dividing opinions in ladies golf, Scottie withdrawing from Houston for the best reason possible, only 13 days to the Masters (with Tiger?).
In the news
Why it matters: Matt Fitzpatrick publicly called out his playing partner's pace at the Valspar Championship, NBC named a slow player on live broadcast, and an official warning was issued. The first time the issue has meaningfully entered the broadcast itself.
Our Take: The PGA Tour hasn't issued a stroke penalty for slow play in nine years, and for 2026 it cut bad-time fines from $50,000 to $10,000. That combination of limited enforcement and weakened deterrent explains why Fitzpatrick went to an official mid-round rather than trust the system. This isn't a rules failure, it's a prioritisation choice. The tour has consistently protected star players, avoided broadcast controversy, and managed internal relationships over enforcement. For sponsors and broadcasters paying premium rates, a 5.5-hour final round is a product quality issue. Slow play isn't a problem the tour can't solve and it's one that should be treated as commercially urgent.
Why it matters: Industry data suggests the golf course transaction market remains seller-favoured in 2026. At the same time, operators like Troon continue to expand, adding new management agreements as consolidation accelerates across the sector.
Our Take: Golf remains a seller's market on the surface, but the quality gap is widening underneath. Five years of demand growth lifted participation, pricing, and operator confidence while masking structural weaknesses, and courses that didn't invest in technology, loyalty systems, or member experience are now exposed as growth normalises. Those operators face a narrowing choice: invest heavily to stay competitive or sell into a market where buyers are growing more selective. Well-capitalised groups like Troon are positioned to capitalise, targeting underinvested operations where system integration and operational improvement can unlock value. For investors, headline valuations may still favour sellers, but quality-adjusted opportunities are improving. The real question isn't whether consolidation is coming. It's whether buyers move early enough to acquire assets that can still be upgraded, rather than inheriting problems that can't be.
Why it matters: Tiger Woods returned to TGL on 24 March for the Finals, his first appearance in over a year, as ESPN's founding rights deal expires at the end of this season and the league enters negotiations with CBS Sports, Amazon, and Golf Channel watching.
Our Take: TGL's viewership swings tell the real story: weeks with Tiger average around 640,000 viewers, weeks without him drop to the low-to-mid 300,000s. As one source close to the rights negotiations put it, buyers are essentially bidding on two different products. A media property whose value doubles or halves on one player's physical availability is less a league than a wager on a 50-year-old's health. ESPN holds the first negotiating window, with Golf Channel and Scripps Sports waiting behind them. The strategic question for whoever acquires the rights is whether they are pricing the Tiger-present TGL or the Tiger-absent one, and Tuesday's Finals appearance, a 9-2 loss for Jupiter Links, answered nothing. Woods played. His body remained unreadable. The rights decision cannot wait for clarity that may never come.
Pic from Getty Images
Worth your time
Listen: How Elon Thinks David Senra podcast. Love him or hate him, Elon is one fascinating business mind and this was a really interesting episode.
Read: The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods Former coach's account of working with the world's most scrutinised athlete offers rare insight into the business of managing genius.
Tech: Firecrawl This is a handy tool for web scraping. There is a free plan. Use it for research, competitor analysis or SEO planning.
Feature story
What the R&A's six-year Accenture deal reveals about golf's governance challenge
Pic from Accenture
When a global institution hires one of the world's largest management consultancies to help navigate its future, two things are usually true. There is a genuine transformation problem that internal capability cannot solve. And the leadership is self-aware enough to admit it.
On 16 March, The R&A and Accenture announced a new six-year partnership running until 2031, making Accenture the Official Business and Technology Consulting Partner of The R&A, as well as an Official Patron of The Open, the AIG Women's Open, and the ISPS HANDA Senior Open. The press release language was careful and optimistic, as these announcements tend to be. The strategic logic beneath it is more interesting than the headline.
The mandate for modernisation
Mark Darbon, Chief Executive of The R&A, described the partnership as a valuable opportunity to support the organisation's strategic priorities in golf and help shape the future of the sport. The operative word is modernise. Governing bodies do not hire Accenture, a firm with approximately 784,000 employees and deep relationships with the world's largest enterprises, to do things they already know how to do. They hire Accenture when the gap between current capability and where they need to be is too wide to close organically.
For The R&A, that gap is real. Golf's governing structures were built for an era when the sport's business complexity was manageable internally. Television deals were bilateral. Fan data was sparse. Digital infrastructure was someone else's problem. None of those things are true anymore. The Open Championship now competes for global attention in a fragmented media landscape. Fan experience expectations, shaped by Formula 1, the NBA, and the Premier League, have risen sharply. The R&A's mission to grow participation globally requires data capability, digital infrastructure, and operational sophistication that no traditional sport’s governing body developed naturally.
The stated ambition is to accelerate the use of technology in golf, enhancing insights, operations, and fan and player experiences, to help open the game to more people in more places around the world. That is a broad mandate. It covers everything from how The Open manages 290,000 spectators across a links site to how the R&A collects and uses participation data across 40 million golfers in over 100 countries. The specifics of what gets built and measured will matter far more than the announcement. But the direction is unambiguous.
Pic from Getty Images
A shift in institutional architecture
This is not a standard sponsorship arrangement. Most governing body partnerships of this kind involve a brand paying for visibility such as logo placement at majors, hospitality access, broadcast mentions. Accenture's role here combines Official Patron status across the major championships with an active consulting mandate across governance, operations, and technology.
That dual structure is significant. Accenture is not just buying association with The Open. It is embedded in the institutional decision-making of one of golf's two most powerful governing bodies. That creates a different kind of commercial relationship, one where Accenture's interest is aligned with The R&A's operational improvement rather than simply its brand visibility.
For Accenture, the positioning is equally deliberate. Golf is a sport disproportionately consumed by senior executives, entrepreneurs, and institutional decision-makers, precisely the audience Accenture needs relationships with. Being the organisation that helped modernise how The Open is governed and delivered is a meaningfully more defensible position than being the logo on the leaderboard.
The governance imperative
Operators and investors should pay close attention here, because the implications extend beyond this single partnership.
Golf's governing structures, The R&A, USGA, PGA Tour, DP World Tour, the Majors operating independently, were designed for a sport that moved slowly and changed rarely. The competitive pressures of the last five years have exposed the limits of that architecture. LIV Golf forced a reckoning with player contracts and commercial rights that the existing governance model was not built to handle. TGL demonstrated that a private operator could build a golf product that targeted younger demographics faster than any governing body. The streaming rights debate has fragmented what was once a predictable broadcast landscape.
The R&A bringing in Accenture is an acknowledgement that modernisation requires external expertise and external pressure. Governing bodies, like all large institutions, tend toward inertia. Internal reform is slow, politically complicated, and rarely carries the accountability that a contracted partner with performance expectations does. A six-year engagement with one of the world's leading consultancies creates structural pressure for change that a memo from the boardroom does not.
The question the wider golf industry should be asking is not what Accenture will deliver for The R&A. It is what this signals about the pace of change that golf's most established institutions now believe they need to match.
Pic from The R&A
What this means in practice
For operators, the practical implication is that the benchmark for fan experience at The Open is about to rise. If Accenture successfully modernises championship operations, data infrastructure, and digital delivery, the gap between the experience at a Major and the experience at a regional Tour event or a well-run private club grows wider. That is not necessarily bad news for operators. It raises the floor as well as the ceiling. But it does accelerate the pressure to invest in technology, data capability, and operational sophistication at every level of the game.
For investors and brands considering partnerships with governing bodies or major championships, the R&A-Accenture model offers a template. The days of logo placement as the primary value exchange are not over, but they are increasingly insufficient. The deals that will define the next decade of golf sponsorship are those that combine commercial visibility with operational contribution.
If the custodian of golf's oldest championship is calling in the consultants, the transformation imperative has moved well past the theoretical phase.
It is now a contractual obligation.
One thing from history
Sir Walter and the limousine
Pic from Deemples Golf
In 1920, Walter Hagen arrived at Royal Cinque Ports in Deal, Kent, for The Open Championship as a two-time US Open winner and one of the best golfers in the world. He was also a professional, which meant he was not permitted to use the clubhouse. Locker rooms, dining areas, and facilities were reserved for amateurs and members. Professionals entered through the back.
Hagen found another entrance.
He hired a Pierce-Arrow limousine and parked it prominently outside the clubhouse. He ate his meals inside the car, with proper service, in full view of members and guests. Then he changed into his golfing clothes and went to work.
This was not a one-off gesture. At the 1920 U.S. Open at Inverness Club, where professionals were treated with unusual respect, Hagen led the players in donating a grandfather clock to the club as a gesture of appreciation. The message was understated but clear: this is what happens when the relationship changes.
By the mid-1920s, Hagen was one of the highest-paid athletes in the world. He wore tailored suits, travelled with a chauffeur, and carried himself as someone who belonged in every room he entered.
Arnold Palmer said it best at a dinner honouring Hagen years later: "If not for you, Walter, this dinner tonight would be downstairs in the pro shop, not in the ballroom."
The doors did not open because Hagen demanded access. They opened because he made exclusion look outdated.
That is a different kind of leverage.
Have a good week. Taking a break next week for Easter so be back on Friday 10th April.
David