Welcome to Issue #27
"You have to breathe. Then you have to believe in yourself. And then you say ‘you can do it, mommy!”
Michelle Wie West’s daughter
What’s on my mind this week
McIlroy’s unlikely cameo in The Devil Wear’s Prada 2, Thomas Pieters ‘ready to retire’ instead of playing on the PGA Tour, Gary Player and Bryson’s White House work-out, tough on-course start for McLaren, Rahm doesn’t see many ways out, European players mark Seve’s anniversary with a nice touch, my swing is seasonal – looks great in the garden, falls apart on the course. The home of golf has its first female captain, finally.
In the news
Why it matters: Callaway's Q1 results - revenue up 9%, adjusted EBITDA up 31%, full-year outlook raised, confirms that equipment demand remains resilient despite tariff headwinds and broader macroeconomic uncertainty.
Our Take: The numbers are important, but the context matters more. Callaway enters 2026 as a fundamentally different business to the one that existed eighteen months ago. The sale of Jack Wolfskin and a 60% stake in Topgolf in the second half of 2025 returned the company to a pure-play golf equipment position, eliminated more than $1 billion in debt, and left it in a net cash position by the end of Q1. CEO Chip Brewer's line "the golf industry and golf consumer remain healthy", is backed by $687.5 million in Q1 net sales against $18 million in incremental tariff costs, while maintaining profitability and expanding margins. The tariff exposure is real, and the full-year figure is expected to reach $40 million, but gross margins still expanded by 250 basis points. The trade-off is concentration. Callaway is now more directly exposed to the health of the golf consumer than at any point in the last decade. For investors and operators watching whether golf's participation boom translates into durable equipment spend, Callaway's Q1 is one of the clearest public indicators yet that it does.
Why it matters: Ryan Ruffels has returned to the PGA Tour via The Q, a creator-led qualifier at Myrtle Beach, becoming the most credible evidence yet that YouTube golf is generating genuine competitive pathways, not just content.
Our Take: The Tour has spent considerable energy trying to reach younger audiences through creator partnerships and digital content. The Q inverts that dynamic entirely. Rather than the Tour lending its platform to creators, a creator used his platform to earn his way back onto the Tour on merit, through a competitive qualifier, against seven of golf's biggest digital names. Ruffels is not a pure influencer: he was once the 13th-ranked amateur in the world, has 20 PGA Tour starts to his name, and competes regularly alongside Jason Day on their shared YouTube channel. What makes this commercially significant is the model it suggests. A Tour spot attached to a self-built audience of engaged fans is a different kind of sponsor exemption value proposition, one the title sponsor of the Myrtle Beach Classic understood when it backed The Q. Golf Digest asked the question directly: what if next year's reduced schedule gave one spot per event to someone who played their way in and brought a fanbase with them? The challenge now is balancing audience value with competitive legitimacy. That debate no longer feels theoretical.
Why it matters: Jon Rahm has resolved his dispute with the DP World Tour, restoring his eligibility for the 2027 Ryder Cup at Adare Manor and removing the most politically charged selection dilemma facing European captain Luke Donald.
Our Take: The sporting resolution is straightforward. The commercial one is considerably more complicated. Rahm signed one of LIV Golf's largest contracts and has said publicly he has several years remaining on it, that he sees few ways out, and that he did not take the one-time returning member programme the PGA Tour offered earlier this year. His Ryder Cup eligibility is now restored through the DP World Tour settlement, but his long-term position depends entirely on what happens to LIV between now and September 2027. If PIF's exit triggers a wind-down and Rahm's contract becomes unenforceable, the commercial calculus around him changes rapidly, his Ryder Cup participation, his sponsorship profile, and his broader market value all shift simultaneously. European golf has spent two years politically distancing itself from LIV while commercially relying on the star power LIV contracts helped consolidate. That tension has not been resolved by this week's settlement; it has simply been deferred. Rory McIlroy told Golf Channel this week that the team is better with Rahm on it. He is right. But for sponsors, broadcasters, and the European Tour Group building commercial packages around Adare Manor, Rahm's presence in that team is not yet a planning assumption. It is still a variable.
Pic from Forbes
Worth your time
Read: Old Tom Capital's 2026 industry report The most rigorous investment lens applied to golf's structural growth story. Eighteen pages worth your time
Follow: Chip Brewer, Callaway CEO who often shares interesting insights and updates on the Callaway Twitter/X account
Listen: "Alan Shipnuck: The book on Rory McIlroy” Golf Interview with Ann Liguori podcast
Founder’s Diary
Building Hanna Golf from a garage in Iowa
Founder's Diary is a series in which Jared Doerfler, founder of Hanna Golf, documents the building of a boutique putter brand in his own words.
In the first edition, Jared introduced the business, a small-batch, precision milling operation rooted in craft and intentional scarcity.
In the second, he took us inside the manufacturing process and the decisions that keep Hanna Golf deliberately small.
This month, with April marking the unofficial start of the US golf season, Jared turns to one of the brand's most distinctive commercial rituals: the limited drop. What follows is an unfiltered account of how a company that sells out in under two minutes thinks about demand, customer relationships and the discipline required to stay true to what you are, even when the data says you could do more.
April is the unofficial kick off of golf season in the United States.
To celebrate we did a couple of limited drops at Hanna Golf. Limited drops are always interesting for us. We do our best to execute on our strategy - and I will share that below.
We generally do limited drops in 12, 18, or 24. We do this because our mills run on batches of six. It’s an effective way to manufacture for us.
We typically plan our drops six weeks in advance. The main reason we do this is for head covers. We do a limited drop head cover and that lead time is four to six weeks. I prefer we use photos of the actual head cover for the drops.
A week before the drop, we usually send an email to our customer base letting them know the details. We also post on social media to try and generate some level of interest.
A few days after that we typically do a giveaway on social media. Again, to keep the momentum going. We also capture email addresses for this giveaway to help build our list. It has been an effective strategy for us in list building. We typically generate 300 - 400 new emails during the giveaway period.
Here is how we rank social media platforms for us in ways to generate email capture.
• Twitter/X
• Instagram
• Linkedin
• Facebook
Our email list is relatively healthy for how small of a company we are. But we are pretty terrible at email marketing. If we are lucky, we send one email per month to our email list.
We like launching our limited drops on Wednesday at 10:00 AM. We’ve had good luck with this date and time.
The product goes live on our website at 10:00 AM and an email goes out at the same time with the correct link. We’ve been incredibly fortunate to have sold out on all six of our drops in under two minutes.
What is unique with our limited drops compared to others is we dynamically number all the putters (1/24, 2/24, etc.) and mill the customers initials on each of them.
This takes quite a bit more time. If we were running static parts, we would have one setup program and could mill several at one time. But I truly believe this is the best way to do it, it allows us to provide more value to the customer, and build a relationship with the customer through emails and texts.
We could certainly offer more putters in our limited drops. By looking at the data, there is a good chance we could double to 48 and they would sell out within ten minutes.
At some point we will get there. But that isn’t who we are right now. Our capacity is limited and we need to stay true to who we are.
Limited drops are always so much fun to do. It’s fun to create a unique product that isn’t offered on our website and to connect with the golfers that get one of our putters. It is the most humbling part of our business, the fact that we sell out. We will never take it for granted.
Jared
Behind the business
Nelly Korda: the player, the brand, the moment
Nelly Korda won her third major at the Chevron Championship last month, then won again the following week. She is world number one and 27 years old. But the most commercially significant fact about Korda right now is not what she is doing on the course. It is what she has built off it. By most available measures, she is now worth more to brands than she is to leaderboards, and she is monetising like a tennis star, not a golfer.
Pic from Sky Sports
That distinction matters more than it might appear.
An 85/15 split in her favour
In 2025, Korda earned approximately $13 million in total tracked income. Around $11 million of that came from endorsements, with prize money accounting for the remainder. That is an 85/15 split in favour of off-course income, a ratio more commonly associated with Williams or Osaka than with anyone on the LPGA Tour. She ranked seventh among the world's highest-paid female athletes in 2025, the only non-tennis player in the top ten. That position was not built on tournament cheques.
The portfolio tells the real story
The portfolio itself explains why. It spans TaylorMade, Nike, Delta Air Lines, Goldman Sachs, Franklin Templeton, Ernst and Young, Cisco, T-Mobile, Richard Mille, BMW Group, Whoop, Tumi and Upper Deck. That is not a standard athlete endorsement list. Financial services firms of that calibre, Goldman Sachs, Franklin Templeton, Ernst and Young, do not sign athletes as vanity plays. They sign athletes who index well with high-net-worth, professionally employed audiences who are difficult and expensive to reach any other way. Korda has three of them. Richard Mille, one of the most selective luxury watch brands in sport, signed her in 2019. Upper Deck placed her alongside Tiger Woods and Collin Morikawa on their exclusive golf roster earlier this year. The collectibles market does not make that bet on athletes who only matter inside their sport.
Goldman Sachs doesn't buy logos
Goldman Sachs describes the partnership in terms of shared values around commitment and excellence; a values play as much as a visibility one. That language matters at that level of marketing spend. Brands paying Goldman Sachs rates do not buy logo placement. They buy sustained association with a set of attributes like composure, precision, excellence under pressure that Korda has demonstrated consistently enough to be trusted as a long-term carrier of those values.
Pic from Tumi
The LPGA has a one-door problem
The structural implication for the LPGA is worth sitting with. Brands are buying Korda specifically. Not the tour, not the ecosystem around her, not women's golf as a category, but her. That is both a testament to what she has built and a quiet commentary on the limits of the LPGA's own commercial positioning. The tour is growing, prize funds are rising, broadcast coverage is improving. But when Goldman Sachs and Richard Mille come to women's golf, they come through one door. That is a concentration risk for the sport, and an opportunity for Korda that her peers cannot currently access.
Building the legacy layer early
What makes the long-term picture more interesting is what she is beginning to build beyond the endorsement portfolio. The Nelly Invitational, her junior girls’ tournament in Bradenton now backed by Chevron as presenting sponsor, with the winner receiving a direct exemption into the Chevron Championship, points in a different direction. The most durable athlete brands like Curry, Serena, Woods, eventually became institutional rather than merely commercial. They built pipelines, academies, development infrastructure. They became part of the ecosystem rather than simply the most valuable person in it. Korda's junior event is an early signal she is thinking in the same direction. At 27, that is unusually early to be building that kind of legacy infrastructure. It is also unusually smart.
The trophy cabinet is impressive. The balance sheet is the real story. And the chapter that will matter most commercially may not have been written yet.
One thing from history
How a Phoenix clinic became a million-girl programme
Pic from Girls Golf
In 1989, Sandy LaBauve was an LPGA Teaching Professional in Phoenix, Arizona, and the mother of two daughters. She wanted them to learn golf, but the clinics available locally were almost entirely populated by boys. So she started her own.
LaBauve modelled it on what her mother, Sherry Lumpkin, had done a generation earlier. Lumpkin had run junior programmes in Georgia, hosted the state's first girls' tournament in 1976, and built a method around fun drills and games that prioritised enjoyment over technique. LaBauve used the same approach for her Phoenix group.
It worked. Girls turned up. They came back.
LaBauve wrote a manual so other LPGA professionals could replicate it. The programme became the LPGA Girls Golf Club, then LPGA*USGA Girls Golf when the USGA began funding it in 1991, then an initiative of the LPGA Foundation in 1994. It grew from ten sites to more than 550 worldwide. In 2023, it reached its one-millionth participant.
The framework runs on five principles: Empower, Enrich, Engage, Exercise, Energize.
The list of LPGA professionals who came through it includes Stacy Lewis, Brittany Lincicome, Morgan Pressel, Mariah Stackhouse, Vicky Hurst, Cheyenne Woods, and Lizette Salas.
Most of the infrastructure that matters in golf was built this way. Not by federations. By people who saw something missing and refused to wait.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David