Welcome to Issue #12
"Golf, like measles, should be caught young”
P.G. Wodehouse
What’s on our mind this week
Rolapp making moves, Tiger’s party looked fun, golf season is back!, PGA show FOMO, Anthony Kim's comeback, Malbon adding Block, LIV ringing in the changes, some 2026 golf predictions are wild, PXG going all-in on Tour, my swing thoughts have hit double digits.
In the news
Why it matters: The traditional New Year's flood of player equipment signings has slowed to a trickle in 2026, with only a handful of deals announced as the Sony Open begins. That is a stark contrast to previous seasons.
Our Take: Equipment companies face a brutal calculation. Manufacturing costs have surged as tariffs and supply-chain friction continue to ripple through golf's global production base. Industry executives estimate component costs for metalwoods and shafts are up in the low double digits versus 2021 levels, driven largely by Asian manufacturing inputs and specialty materials. At the same time, marketing budgets have shifted towards social media and influencer partnerships that deliver measurable engagement and lower acquisition costs. The result is fewer long-term Tour pro contracts. A mid-tier player who once commanded six figures now competes directly with Instagram creators and YouTube instructors for the same budget line. That strategic shift creates an opening for non-golf brands. Companies like Vuori using golf as a lifestyle entry point, and LAB Golf securing its first Tour bag as a performance-led niche player, signal that the traditional equipment hierarchy is fracturing. When manufacturing economics force incumbents to retreat, outsiders do not just enter. They choose where incumbents can no longer afford to defend.
Why it matters: Augusta National spent 70 years controlling every camera angle, every commercial, every frame of the Masters. Then it handed the remote to Amazon and created a trial run for how golf's premier properties negotiate the 2030 rights cycle.
Our Take: Augusta believes it sold distribution rights. Amazon bought proximity to roughly 10 million affluent households watching golf in April. Not through ads, which the Masters still avoids, but through the platform layer beneath the broadcast. Viewing behaviour, device choice, Prime membership status, and commerce history now sit inside the same ecosystem. The Masters remains commercial-light, but Amazon does not need ad breaks when it owns the transaction infrastructure surrounding the viewing experience. When the PGA Tour renegotiates its rights in 2030, it will not just be competing with CBS or NBC. It will be competing with Thursday Night Football and original entertainment for algorithmic priority inside the same app. Distribution is no longer about airtime. It is about where golf ranks in a platform's decision-making stack.
Why it matters: The PGA Tour is selling insurance, and the premium is $5 million plus five years of equity, payable by February 2nd.
Our Take: Koepka's return is about optionality. LIV guaranteed him $100 million, but guarantees only matter if relevance endures. Saudi capital can sustain a league. That does not mean the league sustains competitive or commercial gravity. The PGA Tour has made uncertainty expensive, not emotional. Everyday Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau do not follow, they are pricing the risk that LIV remains strategically peripheral. Every day they hesitate; they signal that the future they bought into is not fully priced in. The genius of the deadline is not punishment. It is exposure. Indecision itself becomes the market signal. By February 3rd, we will not know whether LIV disappears. We will know whether players believe it truly changed the centre of gravity or merely offered a very expensive detour.
Pic from Getty Images
Worth your time
Read: Life Is Not a Game of Perfect Bob Rotella, best known for his work with golfers, takes the mental principles of elite performance and applies them to business, relationships, and personal growth.
Watch: Average Tour player driving distance changes since 1985 Brilliant visual explanation of the impact that equipment innovation has had on the game of golf over the years.
Listen: Start it or Scrap it Podcast This episode looks at the parallels between golf and entrepreneurship, and why mastering patience, focus, and adaptability on the course can translate directly to your business.
Tech: Particl this is a great tool for any e-comms brands. An AI-powered competitive intelligence and market research platform designed for DTC brands to optimise product development and pricing. Really interesting to see what top golf brands are selling.
Feature story
How TGL is rewriting golf entertainment
Pic from Forbes
When TGL announced WTGL on 6 January, barely a week into Season Two, it sent a clear message. After just one season of competition, TMRW Sports was ready to expand. Most sports properties wait years. TMRW expanded before its second season had properly begun.
That timing tells you almost everything about how Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and their partners view what they have built. This is not a golf league in the traditional sense. It is a platform play that happens to feature golf, with ambitions that extend well beyond Tuesday night entertainment in Palm Beach Gardens.
The announcement also sharpens a question already circulating among investors and operators. TMRW Sports was reportedly valued at around $500 million in mid-2024, before staging a single official match. Can TGL's business model work at scale, or is this celebrity capital chasing novelty?
TGL is a technology-enhanced indoor golf format featuring six teams of PGA Tour professionals competing in two-hour matches from a purpose-built arena in Florida. The format bridges the gap between digital and physical: players launch full shots into a 64x46- foot screen before transitioning to a 22,475-square-foot 'Short Game Complex' featuring three motorised synthetic greens that rotate to create unique topography for every hole. WTGL, announced in January 2026, will replicate this format for LPGA players.
Why the building matters
The SoFi Center is best understood not as a sports venue but as a piece of highly engineered real estate. The 250,000-square-foot facility operates more like a television studio with embedded sporting IP than a stadium. Men's TGL from December through March. Women's WTGL launching in winter 2026-27. The rest of the calendar open for corporate events, amateur competition, brand activations, and entertainment programming.
Traditional tournament golf uses its most valuable asset for one week a year. Even stadium sports endure long dark periods. TMRW has inverted that logic. The same physical infrastructure generates overlapping revenue streams rather than competing ones.
That efficiency shows up in the franchise model. Investor materials from 2023 projected approximately $2.4 million per team in year one revenue, scaling to $7.6 million by 2033, alongside league-wide revenue sharing. Team-specific income from sponsorship, merchandise, and licensing was forecast to grow from $4.4 million to $13.3 million over the same period.
Early secondary transactions suggest those numbers were conservative relative to early expectations. Detroit's Motor City Golf Club reportedly sold for more than $70 million in 2025 to the Ilitch family, whose portfolio includes the Detroit Red Wings and Tigers, signalling that multi-sport conglomerates increasingly view TGL franchises as legitimate professional assets rather than celebrity experiments. For a league that did not exist 18 months ago, that’s important.
Pic from TGL
Demographic arbitrage, not ratings theatre
TGL's Season Two opener on 28 December drew 646,000 viewers on ABC. That figure was down from Season One's 919,000 debut but exceeded comparable golf broadcasts over the same window. The Grant Thornton Invitational attracted roughly 450,000 viewers. The PNC Championship drew around 560,000. TGL beat both, despite NFL competition.
The headline number is less important than who was watching. Season One delivered one of the youngest audiences in major US sports. Median age 52, second only to the NBA. Forty-one percent of viewers fell into the 18-49 demographic. This demographic profile contrasts sharply with other recent golf broadcast experiments, including LIV Golf, which despite aggressive marketing and massive investment has failed to lower its median viewer age below the low 60s, roughly matching the traditional PGA Tour. More revealing still, nearly one-third of TGL viewers aged 18-34 did not regularly watch PGA Tour coverage. Ten percent of traditional golf viewers who sampled TGL subsequently increased their consumption of conventional broadcasts.
The PGA Tour dominates weekend afternoons, a time slot increasingly contested by family obligations and competing leisure. TGL owns Tuesday nights at 7pm. A window that previously featured no professional golf at all.
There are limits. The second match of Season Two on ESPN2 drew 354,000 viewers, a 45% drop from the opener. That figure broadly tracks Season One, when seven ESPN2 matches averaged just above 300,000 viewers.
The implication is straightforward. Distribution matters enormously. Premium network placement produces premium numbers. Secondary placement produces exactly what you would expect. Audience loyalty remains fragile. Fans watch when discovery is frictionless. They do not yet seek TGL out.
That is both risk and opportunity. Early-stage properties can build habit. But it requires consistency. TGL's shifting schedules and network homes make that harder than it needs to be.
Pic from Forbes
Why WTGL is more strategic than symbolic
Early discussions between TMRW Sports and the LPGA explored integrating women into the existing TGL structure. The decision to launch a separate league reflects strategic clarity rather than separation.
LPGA Commissioner Craig Kessler, who took office in July 2025, articulated four organisational pillars. Trust, visibility, fans, financials. WTGL directly addresses the latter three. The format foregrounds player personality. It reduces time commitment. It creates appointment viewing during a part of the calendar when women's professional golf is otherwise absent. The LPGA season concludes just before Thanksgiving, positioning WTGL perfectly for winter programming when golf traditionally goes dark.
The economics are compelling because the heavy lifting has already been done. The venue exists. The technology exists. The broadcast relationships exist. Adding WTGL does not require building new infrastructure. It leverages sunk costs whilst opening new inventory.
Women's sports valuations provide context. WNBA franchises now trade north of $200 million, with forecasts pushing toward $1 billion by the end of the decade. National Women's Soccer League teams such as Angel City FC have transacted at $250 million valuations. WTGL enters that market with proven production capability, operational learning from TGL's first two seasons, and a ready-made winter window.
Ownership conversations are already underway. Some franchises may share markets with men's teams, enabling cross-promotion and operational leverage. Los Angeles Golf Club co- founder Alexis Ohanian, an outspoken advocate for women's sports as undervalued assets rather than charitable projects, is likely a prototype owner. The strategy reflects portfolio thinking rather than speculative expansion.
What traditional golf should actually take from this
It is tempting for daily-fee operators and private clubs to dismiss TGL as irrelevant. Indoor simulators. Celebrity ownership. Broadcast studios. None of it appears transferable.
That is a mistake.
The innovation is not technology. High-end simulators existed long before TGL. The innovation is format. Two-hour matches. Predictable time windows. Guaranteed moments of jeopardy. A 15-hole structure, a 40 second shot clock, and the Hammer rule that forces late match decisions.
Traditional golf struggles to deliver those characteristics reliably.
Operators do not need to build arenas. They need to reduce friction. Nine-hole rounds. Compressed leagues. Short-form competitions. Corporate outings that respect time scarcity. TGL is an extreme expression of a broader trend already visible at forward-thinking facilities.
The team construct matters too. TGL franchises are not simply brands. They are community nodes. Boston Common Golf taps into Fenway Sports Group's ecosystem. Jupiter Links leverages Tiger Woods' geographic and cultural gravity. Traditional clubs possess deep communities but rarely activate them commercially. Hospitality has understood network value for decades. Golf largely has not.
The dependency risk
No analysis is complete without acknowledging the Tiger Woods dependency.
His Season One debut attracted more than one million viewers. Matches without him consistently underperformed. Woods is recovering from spinal surgery and will miss early Season Two competition. That exposes a dependency risk the league must mitigate through format strength and distributed star power.
There is also the novelty question. Alternative sports leagues often peak early. TGL's response appears to be geographic expansion. Detroit arrives in 2027. Trademark filings suggest Chicago and Texas franchises are planned. Regional rooting interests may prove more durable than celebrity alone.
The simulator model cuts both ways. It guarantees production quality and eliminates weather risk. It also caps authenticity. Purists will never fully buy in. That is acceptable if the objective is incremental audience rather than replacement.
The bigger pattern
TGL's significance lies less in its specific mechanics than in what it proves. Golf can work as prime-time entertainment when designed around viewer convenience rather than player tradition.
Announcing WTGL before Season Two had barely begun signals platform thinking, not tournament thinking.
For investors, executives, and operators, the relevant questions are not whether to replicate TGL. They are whether time barriers can be lowered, whether appointment experiences can be created, and whether communities can be activated beyond green fees and memberships.
TGL has answered those questions with technology, capital, and celebrity. The rest of the industry will need to answer them with whatever tools it has. The alternative is watching a generation choose two-hour entertainment over five-hour rounds, then wondering why participation data no longer translates into long-term engagement.
The platform competition is underway. TGL is not trying to replace golf. It is trying to reclaim the time golf once owned. That is a different business entirely, and one the industry can no longer afford to ignore.
One thing from history
The royal origins of the caddie
Pic from Scottish Golf History
Ever wonder where the term "caddie" comes from? Its roots are surprisingly royal. The word is a Scottish adaptation of the French word cadet, meaning a younger son or assistant. Popular folklore credits Mary, Queen of Scots, with introducing the term in the 1500s. Legend says that while she was being raised in France, she was assisted on the golf course by military cadets who carried her clubs. When she returned to Scotland, the custom, and the French pronunciation "ca-day", followed her, eventually evolving into the Scots "caddie".
While some historians debate the specifics of this royal origin, the practical roots of the role are well-documented. In the early days of golf, caddies were often general-purpose porters or errand boys hired to find expensive "featherie" balls in the rough. The first officially recorded caddie was Andrew Dickson, who carried for the Duke of York in 1681. From these humble beginnings as "ball-finders," caddies have evolved into the professional strategists we recognise today.
Next week
We look at why brands are investing big on golf sponsorships, and we reveal who the biggest spenders are.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David