Welcome to Issue #41
“If you’re not first, you’re last”
Lonnie Hawkins
What’s on my mind this week
Ryder Cowan forgetting his golf balls before the U.S. Amateur and proving that two is plenty. Charl Schwartzel losing a golf ball to a fish. We've finally seen everything. Asterisk Talley winning the U.S. Women's Amateur at 17, then missing an LPGA event because she had school. Michael Block trying to WD and somehow getting DQ'd instead. DP World Tour reminding LIV players that conditional really did mean conditional. I want to be Mike McCoy when I grow up.
In the news
Why it matters: The DP World Tour is set to end its 2026 conditional-release amnesty for LIV players in 2027, resuming full fines and suspensions. On the 13th of August, The Telegraph reported LIV insiders are "almost resigned" to Jon Rahm's departure at season's end, with a final decision expected in the coming weeks.
Our Take: The two developments describe a single commercial problem. The DP World Tour has effectively created a 2027 choice for LIV players who want to preserve their European Tour and Ryder Cup pathways, at the same moment LIV is trying to close BC Partners' conditional credit facility whose reported terms require retaining sufficient elite players. LIV's financing model and player-retention model have become interdependent, and the traditional tours are now making dual membership materially harder. Rahm is the illustrative case rather than the only case. If a two-time major champion and one of LIV's most commercially important European players chooses to prioritise DP World Tour and Ryder Cup access, the signal to BC Partners and to other LIV players is significant. The material question is whether LIV can retain enough elite players to satisfy the credit facility's conditions, or whether the retention challenge itself becomes the reason the deal does not close as structured.
Why it matters: The Guardian reported on the 11th of August that Apple has held preliminary discussions with the R&A about acquiring US rights to The Open Championship when NBC's agreement expires in 2028. The formal tender process begins in early 2027, with Amazon and Netflix also expected to bid.
Our Take: The R&A is about to discover what its tradition-first commercial philosophy is worth in an open streaming auction. The Open holds its purse discipline partly because the underlying championship is an extraordinarily scarce media property, and Apple, Amazon and Netflix competing with NBC and Versant puts a market price on that scarcity for the first time in a fully competitive streaming era. The R&A statement referenced "the R&A's rights" plural and mentioned The Open, the AIG Women's Open and other championships, raising the possibility that the next US media cycle could encompass a broader portfolio than The Open alone. The second-order consequence for Versant is material. It has just spent $530 million buying Full Swing and is building a golf ecosystem around Golf Channel, GolfNow and GolfPass. Losing The Open would remove one of its most valuable pieces of live golf inventory just months after acquiring the technology stack that powers TGL. The R&A's next media cycle will define what tradition-first commercial models are actually worth when premium content meets competitive streaming demand.
Why it matters: FedEx's agreement with the PGA Tour expires after 2027, and Front Office Sports reported on the 12th of August that many industry sources do not expect the FedExCup season-long naming relationship to continue in its current form. Memphis has already been left out of the 2028 Championship Series.
Our Take: The FedExCup was one of the defining commercial inventions of the Finchem era. It gave a sprawling individual-sport schedule a single season-long corporate identity and eventually a postseason carrying one of the richest bonus pools in professional golf. Rolapp is now redesigning the product so fundamentally that the Tour may no longer need one company to own the season narrative. FOS reports the PGA Tour may follow NASCAR's 2020 shift toward multiple premium partners rather than a single naming rights sponsor. Rolapp's own framing signalled the direction at the June restructuring announcement, when he spoke in front of a backdrop that did not include the FedExCup and told media the PGA Tour is "in an existing contract and we're going to honour that." That is the language of a partnership approaching its natural end. The Championship Series is quietly reopening a question the Tour answered two decades ago: whether one sponsor should own the season narrative, or whether the season narrative should own itself.
Pic from Reuters
Worth your time
Read: Old Tom Capital's deep dive into women's golf. The section on where discovery is outrunning infrastructure is particularly worth your time
Watch: Grapes & Greens podcast with Lyvera's Richard Payne. Golf, investment and a glass of something good. Hard to argue with that combination
Feature Story
What happens when an apparel brand realises its real asset is the community?
Buena Gente founder Jonathan Madera
Golf has spent decades trying to grow participation. Spend on awareness. Invest in accessibility. Build courses. Launch programs. The industry's fundamental assumption has been structural: participation must be built from the ground up.
Buena Gente Golf started somewhere different.
The company asked a question that inverted the entire premise: What if the customers already exist, but the businesses serving them don't?
Four and a half million Hispanic golfers is the figure Buena Gente uses to describe the market. Meanwhile, US Latino purchasing power has reached $4.1 trillion, according to the Latino Donor Collaborative's 2025 economic research produced with Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business. Yet when those golfers walk into a golf retail environment, relatively little of what they encounter has been designed specifically around their culture, from apparel and storytelling to the brands speaking to them.
That gap between a customer base that exists and the brands built to serve them is where Buena Gente was founded.
The starting point
Jonathan Madera came to golf as a researcher. He arrived with outsider eyes and saw something the industry had built around for decades without acknowledging: golf's representation problem was real.
He researched the market. He studied who was buying apparel. He looked at golf media. Then he looked at his own world: salsa-era New York. Generational style. Design references that predated contemporary golf by decades.
"US Latinos will buy anything they feel or see themselves represented in," Madera said, reflecting on what he found. "We're alone in this space."
He built Buena Gente around that insight. Guayabera polos with extended collars and longer button plackets, influenced by 70s and 80s New York salsa style. Grip snapbacks with a visual language closer to streetwear than traditional golf. Ball markers packaged like Goya seasoning packets. Banana leaf golf towels that extended beyond golf into the food traditions his customers recognised.
The details required lived experience. A designer could replicate the colour palette of 70s New York salsa culture. But the collar length of a guayabera? The confidence that a seasoning packet would resonate as meaningful rather than gimmicky? Those don't come from research. They come from having lived inside that culture.
Madera had no distribution strategy. No media plan. He built the products and posted a video. For two years, almost nobody noticed.
Then one organic video began to circulate. Thousands watched. Tens of thousands. Followers arrived because they saw something on screen that reflected back at them.
"People that see right through inauthenticity start latching onto something else," Madera observed. The video worked because it didn't persuade. It simply showed.
Community as the asset
Nearly four years into building Buena Gente, Madera brought in Anthony Yepez, a brand strategist from professional golf. Yepez arrived with a question that reframed the entire business.
In a recent conversation, he articulated how the company now sees itself: "Apparel is our foundation, but community and storytelling are the business we're actually building."
That sentence reframes the question. Buena Gente is testing whether cultural credibility earned through products can become the foundation for something much larger, not simply whether a Latino-founded apparel company can succeed.
The business model Yepez described has layers:
Apparel creates the entry point. It's the most tangible expression of the brand. Media and storytelling build and deepen the community. Partnerships, events, creator collaborations, and consulting opportunities become the extensions.
Yepez was explicit about the engine: "Content creates awareness. Stories build trust. Community creates loyalty. Media becomes the engine that naturally creates opportunities for apparel, brand partnerships, events, creator collaborations, and eventually consulting for organisations looking to engage Latino audiences."
That's different from how most apparel companies think about themselves. They see media as a channel. Buena Gente is testing whether media can be the mechanism that builds the asset, the community, that the apparel then monetises.
Why this moment matters
What's interesting about Buena Gente is that the apparel and the community reinforced each other. The product gave people something tangible to identify with. The community gave the apparel meaning beyond the garment itself.
Here's the distinction: A large incumbent can hire designers, commission research or collaborate with culturally authentic creators. What it cannot instantly manufacture is years of accumulated cultural understanding and trust. That's Buena Gente's advantage. Replication isn't impossible, but that understanding is native to the company rather than something it has had to engineer.
The question being tested
When Yepez and Madera talk about the long-term vision, the conversation quickly moves beyond apparel revenue or retail distribution. They talk about what comes next.
"Success isn't defined by becoming the biggest apparel company," Yepez said. "It's defined by building communities around the country and internationally that proudly identify with Buena Gente because they feel seen, represented, and connected."
The evidence so far is encouraging. An organic video generated ten thousand followers and sold-out inventory. Customer messages showed repeat purchasing and word-of-mouth. Most of the brand's early growth was organic; at the time of our interview, it had only recently begun running paid advertising. Those are meaningful signals that the proposition is resonating.
But those results represent early traction, not yet a scaled business model. The real question is whether the community formed around apparel can sustain itself through media, events, and partnerships.
The broader implication
Golf gave Buena Gente the entry point. A sport growing among Latino audiences where Madera believed authentic cultural representation remained remarkably limited. Millions of potential customers, but relatively few brands speaking directly to their culture. That's the proving ground.
The lesson extends beyond sports. Any industry that has overlooked a customer base creates the conditions for someone who understands that customer to build something authentic within it. The opportunity comes from showing overlooked customers that the business understands them well enough to build specifically for them.
Whether Buena Gente becomes a Latino lifestyle brand that scales across categories depends on what comes next. Can authenticity remain credible as the company grows? Can a community built around cultural recognition ultimately support businesses spanning media, experiences, partnerships and categories beyond golf?
Buena Gente has shown that cultural recognition can create community. Now it has to prove that community can become an asset bigger than the apparel business that created it.
One thing from history
The man who gave golf a postseason
Tim Finchem. Pic from Golf Digest
In the autumn of 2005, Tim Finchem had a problem that had been quietly troubling the PGA Tour for years. Every August, the final major finished, and American sporting attention began moving elsewhere. The NFL arrived. College football returned. The Tour continued into autumn without anything resembling a season finale.
Finchem decided golf needed one.
NASCAR had confronted a similar problem a year earlier, introducing the Chase for the Cup in 2004 to create a structured climax to its season. In November 2005, Finchem announced the FedExCup: a season-long points race culminating in a series of playoff events, with $10 million going to the champion.
The first edition in 2007 immediately exposed the difficulty of manufacturing jeopardy in golf. Tiger Woods entered the playoffs as the No. 1 seed, then skipped the opening event because he was exhausted. The Tour had invented a postseason partly to keep its biggest stars competing, and its biggest star decided he didn't need to play Week One.
Woods returned and won the FedExCup anyway. A year later, the flaw became harder to ignore. Vijay Singh won the first two playoff events and accumulated such a large points advantage that he effectively only had to complete the Tour Championship to collect the $10 million prize. He finished tied for 22nd and became the season champion.
The Tour changed the system. Then changed it again. And again. Nearly twenty years later, the original format is almost unrecognisable.
This week, the 2026 FedExCup Playoffs begin in Memphis. The PGA Tour is once again redesigning its competitive structure around essentially the same question Finchem was trying to answer in 2005: how do you make the end of a golf season matter?
Golf needed September. It still does.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David