Welcome to Issue #43
“It was a good run”
Bryson DeChambeau
What’s on my mind this week
Rory putting putter grips on his seven iron and lob wedge. Please don't try this at home, Bubba confronting a heckler and getting "I love you Bubba" in response. Hard to come back from that, Gary Woodland's dad seeing his 96-yard drive and worrying about their PNC scramble, Shaun Norris discovering kicking a divot can cost considerably more than kicking your golf bag, Nobody has ever hit a provisional as well as the ball they actually needed to hit, Matt Gogel finding out the hard way that "don't bet on golf" really does mean don't bet on golf, January golf season now starts in California. Hawaii finally losing its status as golf's most expensive commute.
In the news
Why it matters: The PGA Tour policy board ratified on the 25th of August a new postseason structure that will replace the current FedEx Cup Playoffs from 2028. The Tour Championship will run for two weeks at different venues, with a 32-player field playing a group stage followed by a 16-player bracket.
Our Take: The commercial implications sit outside the format itself. A two-week Tour Championship at two venues creates a genuinely new corporate hospitality, sponsorship and broadcast product. East Lake will no longer be the permanent home of the finale, which materially changes the economics for every existing partner tied to the current single-venue architecture. Two venue slots per year create competitive tension between host markets rather than relying on a single incumbent, while the two-week World Cup-style format creates significantly more competition inventory than the current 30-player stroke-play format. The Championship Series Finale as a 90-player stroke-play event running the week before adds a third distinct commercial property to the postseason. The Championship Series structure is essentially replacing one commercial asset with three, each with different sponsor economics, broadcast requirements and hospitality dynamics. For sponsors currently committed to the FedExCup architecture, the ratification confirms what the June announcement suggested. The 2028 restructure is not incremental. It rebuilds the postseason product from the ground up, and the commercial infrastructure will have to be rebuilt with it. (For a visual explanation on how the new Tour Championship works, check out our ‘worth your time’ section below).
Why it matters: LIV is scaling back its workforce and operations as PIF funding approaches its end, while replacement financing from BC Partners remains unfinished and CEO Scott O'Neil acknowledges the league is working on a "very compressed timeline."
Our Take: LIV is caught between the model it can no longer afford and the model it cannot yet execute. The financing remains unfinished, which forces operational compression before the deal closes. This week's workforce reductions and vendor exposure describe an organisation retrofitting sustainable operating discipline onto a business built for unconstrained sovereign capital. O'Neil's own language at Indianapolis (LIV was "a bit more free spending" under PIF, and management wrote a new business plan "in 10 days") confirms as much publicly. Michigan is cancelled. Contractor commitments are being rescheduled or unwound. LIV 2.0 will operate at roughly one-third of 2026 purse levels, and player buy-in from most of the roster is now explicitly part of the BC Partners deal. The Rahm question remains open, and the DP World Tour ending its 2026 amnesty in 2027 puts European players on notice that dual membership becomes materially harder. What is genuinely new this week is O'Neil's acknowledgment that the transition itself has commercial cost. LIV 2.0 will not be a smaller version of LIV 1.0. It will be a structurally different business, and the value of the equity being distributed to players depends on whether that business proves financially viable under conventional investment discipline.
Why it matters: Golf Channel postponed the Big Break x Good Good premiere on the 25th of August after Golf Galaxy (owned by Dick's Sporting Goods) requested its presenting-sponsor branding be removed from the series. The pullout followed the controversial Good Good and Callaway video promoting a Callaway driver that depicted a man shoving a woman to the ground.
Our Take: In July, Versant announced Big Break's revival with Good Good as a bet on bringing creators inside legacy broadcast. Callaway integrated Good Good into product marketing. The PGA Tour signed Good Good as title sponsor of a new event. Six weeks later, all three institutional relationships have unwound. The media and apparel company was set to pay the Tour at least $6 million annually in a multiyear deal before the controversy, a reminder of how much commercial weight had been placed on a single creator brand. Institutional partners exiting within days of each other says more than any single decision could: sponsors and rights-holders have very little tolerance for reputational risk once it crystallises, no matter how large the audience being courted. The strategic question the industry now has to sit with is whether it continues committing capital to creator partnerships when the same authenticity and independence that make creators valuable also make their output far harder for institutional partners to control or vet in advance. This episode won't settle that question, but it has moved it from theoretical to urgent.
Pic from Yahoo Sports
Worth your time
Read: The Wall Street Journal’s guide to playing terrible golf and having a surprisingly good time doing it
Listen: Paul McGinley on LIV, Rory, Rahm and golf’s changing landscape. Forty-six minutes with very little wasted
Watch: The simplest explanation you’ll find of the PGA Tour’s new 2028 finale. All it took was a Sharpie
Feature Story
Why Hally Leadbetter started BUNCHIES in the market she knew best
At the end of 2024, BUNCHIES was dead. Or at least Hally Leadbetter had decided it was.
She had spent years developing the product. She understood golf courses and golfers in a way most CPG founders wouldn't. She had relationships throughout the industry that a typical snack brand founder would spend a decade trying to build. But none of it was enough because she didn't know how to launch a CPG company.
"I realised I was very naive in terms of what it took to launch the CPG company," she said. "At the end of 2024, I had resolved to let the dream go."
She told her friend Amanda Balionis, a golf broadcaster, that she was abandoning it. Amanda asked her to have one conversation before killing the idea. That conversation was with Alex Thompson, founder of Lasagna Box, a food consulting group. Alex's response was simple: "This is what I do."
"Alex and his team at Lasagna Box are now my business partners and they were the missing piece that enabled BUNCHIES to come to fruition."
Now jump forward eighteen months.
It is July 2026. BUNCHIES is in every Golf Galaxy in the United States. Pebble Beach has been ordering it since March. American Express activated it during US Open week. The company has raised capital from investors including Chris Keiser of Dream Golf, Glen Walter, and Jared Solomon.
The gap she recognised
Hally recognised the gap in the market not through research but through lived experience. She was travelling to golf courses constantly. She was looking for a healthy snack. She couldn't find one.
"Going to so many golf courses for my day job, I was just always hoping and praying to come across a healthy snack," she said. "I just found myself repeatedly disappointed. Why doesn't this exist? Why isn't there a snack that's geared towards health-conscious golfers that's available widespread?"
That lived experience connected to something else she had built over 33 years in golf. She grew up inside the industry. Her father is one of golf's most prominent instructors. She has spent her entire career working within the sport as a broadcaster, producer, and businesswoman. She is not known primarily for having a large social media following. She is known because she has spent decades building relationships with people throughout golf.
"There's no one in the golf space that I don't know or I'm not at least like one degree separation away," she said. "It's a small industry and I feel like I have a shot at getting a hold of anybody."
Her 33 years in golf gave BUNCHIES a network to tap into, helped her spot a gap in the market and provided a platform to create instant awareness. When she approached people about the product, she wasn't making a cold pitch. She was talking to an industry where she had spent decades building relationships. When Chris Keiser at Bandon Dunes heard about the launch, he became an investor. At the PGA Show, club professionals brought their colleagues to the booth because they wanted to see what Hally was building. That credibility opened doors that a new founder in golf would struggle to open.
Yet that credibility was not enough to build the business.
What the network couldn't solve
Hally understood the customer. She understood the market. She had access throughout the industry. What she didn't have was the expertise to manufacture a CPG product at scale.
"I don't have the expertise in CPG or the bandwidth to take on the operational side of the business myself," she said.
That was an existential gap, not a minor one. She didn't understand shelf life. She didn't know how to work with food scientists or navigate supply chain or manage manufacturing at scale. She didn't know how to raise capital or model margins or get listed with food distributors.
"I had never done that. I didn't even know what a SAFE note was, or a seed round, pre-money, post-money."
That is where Alex Thompson became essential. Working with chef David, a food scientist, they began iterations. The first challenge was shelf life. BUNCHIES needed to sit on golf course shelves without refrigeration. That single constraint shaped everything about formulation.
"For us being able to hit that 12-month shelf life, non-refrigeration was such a game changer, especially for golf courses that are looking to put these on their shelves. A lot of places don't have extra refrigeration space."
They completed upwards of twenty iterations of just the vanilla almond flavour. Then they had to ensure that peanut butter, chocolate, and vanilla almond would all have the same texture despite different base ingredients. Chocolate tended to dry out over time, becoming hard.
"During the testing phase, we’d revisit the flavors after a couple weeks and the texture had changed. All of a sudden, you take a bite of the chocolate and it's now like the texture of an actual golf ball. So, then you go back to the food scientist and figure out how to solve it."
Once Chef David got it right in his kitchen, they had to replicate it in manufacturing. "We did another maybe seven or eight versions with them to try to replicate exactly what Chef David was able to get when he was just making twelve. Now we got to make a couple thousand at a time."
Being able to create a product that works is one thing, being able to produce it at scale is another.
When the market shaped the product
Once BUNCHIES launched, Hally's network also started influencing the product itself. At the PGA Show in January 2026, something unexpected happened.
"We were at the PGA show passing out individually wrapped BUNCHIES. We were hand stickering these things for hours every night before the next day at the show."
Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles came by the booth. They liked the sleeve design but asked a question: could they get them individually wrapped?
"That was nowhere in our business plan," Hally said. But they were handed out individually. The response was overwhelming.
"The individually wrapped option has been a huge game changer for clubs that want a grab and go solution," she said. "The sleeve is great if you've got the person riding around in the cart or a halfway house. But if you have a high-end club where everything is free and members just want to grab something and throw it in their bag, the individually wrapped is perfect."
More importantly, it opened up pricing flexibility. "We sell the individually wrapped product for a dollar. There was one particular resort that said no to us because they were like, every snack we sell has to be below this price point. So then I said, we do have these new individually wrapped that are a dollar each. And he's like, done."
But the real implication was larger. "There is no mention of golf on that individually wrapped product," Hally noted. Fitness facilities reached out. Tennis clubs inquired. Pickleball facilities came calling.
While her network was helping to open doors, it was also helping her to fine-tune the product. Ironically, a format created specifically for golf made BUNCHIES more appealing outside it.
Proof of demand
The PGA Show in January 2026 provided the first meaningful indication that the idea resonated beyond Hally herself. Club professionals tried the product and went to fetch their colleagues. "We need these at our course," they said.
Pebble Beach placed an order in March. American Express activated it during U.S. Open week. By late July, BUNCHIES was available at every Golf Galaxy location nationwide. In seven months, BUNCHIES had moved from its PGA Show launch to national golf retail distribution.
Can the advantage travel?
What will be interesting to see is whether that advantage can translate beyond golf for BUNCHIES. Golf was the right place to start. It is where Hally possessed knowledge, credibility and relationships that would take a new entrant years to build. But her ambition extends beyond the sport.
Hally has received approaches from outside golf. Fitness facilities want it. Run clubs have inquired. "We get a lot of people saying, do you want to do run clubs and gyms and stuff? And I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes. But not right now," she said. "There's only so much bandwidth that a company has. So we are very, very focused on golf."
She has deliberately chosen to remain focused. "The golf industry is a great launch pad for startup CPG brands, but we also made sure that BUNCHIES stands on its own for its taste, quality and nutritional makeup," she said. "It's solving a real need for me and other golfers, athletes and busy families who are looking for more health-conscious snacks, and that's why we're seeing such interest from other sports and industries."
The long-term vision is clear. She wants BUNCHIES to be a mainstream snack for active people. But the path to get there runs through golf.
Can BUNCHIES become a mainstream snack, or will it always be the golf product that Hally Leadbetter launched?
For now, Hally isn't in a rush to find out. The focus remains golf. Build credibility. Prove demand. Then expand.
Hally's experience and position within golf gave BUNCHIES an advantage from the start. The next chapter will determine just how far that advantage can travel.
One thing from history
The man who refused to give East Lake a second-rate golf tournament
Tom Cousins Pic from East Lake Foundation
In the early 1990s, there was interest in turning a deteriorating golf course on the east side of Atlanta into a junkyard. The course had been Bobby Jones's home club. By 1993, it sat at the centre of one of the city's most troubled neighbourhoods, its fairways overgrown, its future uncertain.
Tom Cousins bought it instead.
The Atlanta property developer had learned to play at East Lake as a child. But his ambition went beyond restoring a famous golf course. Cousins tied the club's revival to a much broader redevelopment of the surrounding community: mixed-income housing, a new school, a YMCA and a public golf course built on part of the former East Lake property. The golf club would become one of the economic anchors for what happened around it.
When the PGA Tour approached Cousins about hosting one of its events, he turned them down. His response became part of the club's folklore. "If we ever have a golf tournament," he said, "it ain't gonna be the second rank."
The Tour came back with the Tour Championship.
It arrived at East Lake in 1998.
Since then, the tournament has raised more than $71 million for the East Lake Foundation and other Atlanta community organisations. The model Cousins helped build eventually inspired Purpose Built Communities, created to apply lessons from East Lake in neighbourhoods across America.
Cousins died last year, aged 93. This week, the Tour Championship returns to East Lake just as the PGA Tour announces that its season finale will be completely rebuilt from 2028.
The golf course that might have become a junkyard became one of professional golf's most consequential venues.
A quick housekeeping note
Over the next few weeks, we'll be making some brand updates. In the meantime, if the next edition doesn't land in your inbox, check your spam or promotions folder and mark it as a trusted sender. That's the best way to make sure you don't miss anything during the transition.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David